Subscribe to Services
Apple used to mostly sell you things, whether it was hardware, software, or digital downloads. True, you could rent movies, but you could only subscribe to iCloud storage for quantities above the meager included amount that comes with every iCloud account.
But at the scale of Apple’s device sales, it’s hard to reap the same kind of growth over time. With the growth in hardware slowing as a percentage, Apple has increasingly turned to subscription offerings, the market for which seemed unbounded. Particularly as they knew their customers were happy to pay recurring fees to Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, and other firms for streaming video, on-demand music, security-camera storage, and lots of other stuff.
That led to Apple Music, Apple TV+ Apple Arcade, Apple News+, and Apple Fitness+. Tying those all together is Apple One, a bundled subscription offering that comes in three forms.
And iCloud’s paid tiers transformed into iCloud+, which combines storage, Private Relay for anonymized browsing, Hide My Email to create masked email addresses, a custom domain name, and HomeKit Secure Video for home security cameras.
Subscriptions may be priced only for individuals, whether or not they are part of a Family Sharing group; some cover everyone in a Family Sharing group at the same price as an individual subscription; and some have a higher price for Family Sharing subscriptions! Apple also discounts some services for up to four years for college and university students who verify enrollment.
Let’s look at the subscription offerings available and how they tie into your Apple ID and iCloud accounts.
Apple’s Many Subscription Offerings
It’s fair to say that outside of Apple Music, the company is still in its early stages of proving there’s a strong value to its other offerings, because they lack the depth of competing services. The big advantage is that they’re all integrated with Apple’s operating system, including the Apple TV and Apple Watch, making them an easy default choice.
Apple Music
The oldest of Apple’s subscription services, Apple Music compares to Spotify and Pandora. It offers a streaming library of over 100 million tracks you can access across all your devices linked to the same Apple ID. It also allows up 100,000 song downloads for offline playing, and live streams curated like radio stations. There are no advertisements.
Supported hardware is the broadest for any Apple service. It includes all Apple devices, including HomePod, Apple Watch, and Apple TV; Windows and Android; some models of streaming-service boxes, smart speakers, and smart TVs; via a web app. The company even offers a discounted “voice” subscription that only lets you ask Siri to play songs, albums, playlists, and so forth.
You can sign up for Apple Music via the Music app on any platform as well as at music.apple.com.
When you buy an Apple device, you can start a free six-month trial; otherwise, you get a one-month free trial. Subscriptions are $4.99 a month for voice-only access, $5.99 for students, $10.99 for an individual, and $16.99 a month for families. Student accounts also receive free access to Apple TV+.
Apple TV+
Apple has in just a few years become a serious television and movie studio, producing a steady number of significant shows like Ted Lasso and movies like CODA. Apple TV+ remains a fairly small set of mostly original programming compared to Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Hulu, and Netflix, among leading services, but the quality is high.
Apple produces TV and movies to sell more subscriptions and more hardware. Thus, the company makes free, often lengthy trials easy to get. As I write this, here’s the current rundown:
Purchase any Apple device (except an Apple Watch), and receive three months free if you or anyone in your Family Sharing group has never previously subscribed to Apple TV+. (Start your subscription within 90 days of activating the device. You can only get the three months free once per person or per Family Sharing group.)
Student Apple Music accounts include Apple TV+ free for the duration of the account.
T-Mobile subscribers at its Go5G Next and Go5G Plus unlimited tiers receive Apple TV+ free.
If you have to pay, the cost is $6.99 per month (after a 7-day trial). The yearly price is $69; go to the Apple TV website or the TV app on any device to view account information and change to yearly.
That $6.99 a month or $69 a year covers an entire Family Sharing group; the price is the same for an individual or family.
It’s included as part of an Apple One subscription and comes as part of a one-month trial of all services when you sign up for that plan.
You subscribe in the TV app in iOS, iPadOS, or macOS (Monterey or later), via an Apple TV, or through tv.apple.com.
You can watch Apple TV+ on, naturally, an Apple TV, but also on any Apple device via the TV app, through an Apple-provided app on many streaming boxes and smart TVs, and via a web app.
Apple News+
The news industry is in a mess, partly because it undervalued its product in the first 15 to 20 years of the internet revolution, and most publications gave everything they published away for free, hoping to make it up with volume and sell ads against it. Hey, that didn’t really work. That led to a fairly rapid switch in the late 2010s to paid subscriptions to access more than a smattering of news and news of social important (like pandemic and disaster stories and advice).
While the New York Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and some local newspapers and national magazines could prove a value high enough to get subscriptions on their own, Apple’s News+ was a way the company pitched publications to get more readers and revenue—Apple shares income from the service.
The Apple News app without a subscription includes a decent smattering of stories from many sources, including some items developed by largely unidentified Apple News writers and editors. The News+ service adds access to partial or full contents of nearly 350 publications at current count—you can see the list on Apple’s website. This includes the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, the Washington Post, Esquire, and many more. The New York Times has notably opted out of participating.
To us users, the draw is a single low monthly fee of $9.99 (same for individual and families, 30-day free trial), while packaging the results in a single app with control over readability and formatting. (News+ is a better bargain as part of the Apple One bundle described later.)
Some stories each week are made available as professionally read audio versions. You can download stories and some publications for offline reading. The app attempts to provide customized recommendations on what to read next, too.
News+ has a much more limited reach and limited options to use than any of Apple’s other services. You have to subscribe in the News app. You can only read News+ (and regular News) in one of those apps. The service remains available as of September 2023 in the same four countries as at its launch several years ago: Australia, Canada, the UK, and the United States.
Apple Arcade
A monthly fee of $4.99 after a one-month free trial provides access to an individual or Family Sharing group to over 200 games that are part of Apple Arcade. You can also start a three-month free trial as a first-time subscription within 90 days of buying an iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, or Mac. Subscriptions cover everyone in a Family Sharing group.
Games work on an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or Apple TV. They include modest games written for the service and so-called “AAA” games developed by top-end game studios that usually have a separate purchase or subscription price.
Subscriptions and play are all within the devices listed, but you can switch among them in the middle of gameplay, even.
Apple Fitness+
Fitness+ offers workouts from what Apple calls “top trainers” that are updated weekly and integrated directly into an Apple Watch, while pulling songs from Apple Music.
You can access Fitness+ workouts via an iPhone or iPad, an Apple Watch, or an Apple TV, with some features requiring an Apple TV 4K or HD.
Existing Apple Watch owners get one month free when they sign up; new Apple Watch buyers get three months free. It’s priced at $9.99 a month for an individual or Family Sharing group. Apple offers a yearly price: $79.99.
iCloud and iCloud+ Services
Apple chucks a lot of stuff from your devices into iCloud storage, and includes only a relatively absurd 5 GB allotment free when you create an iCloud account to use with your devices.
Apple rebranded the service in 2021 to make free and paid components a clearer distinction::
iCloud: The regular old iCloud’s free tier still includes 5 GB, email, syncing, and other services that were already in place.
iCloud+: Every paid tier of iCloud service is now under the name iCloud+. Beyond storage, Apple added iCloud Private Relay (currently in beta) and Hide My Email. iCloud+ also increased home security video allocations so you could use more cameras.
iCloud storage is linked to your devices via the Apple ID you use with iCloud. While this seems logical, it’s necessary to state it, since Apple isn’t only perfectly consistent about how accounts map, and sometimes offers flexibility. Here, storage and iCloud are locked together.
Apple offers five tiers of iCloud+: 50 GB, 200 GB, 2 TB, 6 TB, and 12 TB. In the United States, these levels cost $0.99, $2.99, $9.99, $29.99, and $59.99 per month; there are no yearly plans.
The three Apple One bundles discussed next in Apple One—individual, family, and premier—include in their monthly cost the 50 GB, 200 GB, and 2 TB storage tiers, while also letting you swap upwards to higher tiers of storage at a non-discounted price.
You can purchase more, downgrade, and view filled storage nearly everywhere:
In iOS or iPadOS, go to Settings > Account Name > iCloud. It shows a summary of storage by category.
In macOS, open System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud (Monterey) or System Settings > Account Name > iCloud (Ventura or later) to show a summary (Figure 58).
Figure 58: The storage bar appears in roughly the same form everywhere, including colors used for media types (top). In macOS Ventura or later, hover over a color for a detailed popover (bottom). (Sonoma shown here.)
Tap or click Manage or Manage Storage to view more detail and change your storage plan (Figure 59).
Families can opt to share a pool of iCloud storage, as explained earlier in Family Members Take Actions.
Apple One
Apple One combines some of the company’s less-impressive and not-as-vital offerings with more popular ones in a way that makes financial sense.
Apple One comes in three packages:
Individual: This works with just a single Apple ID. At $16.95 per month, it includes Apple Music, TV+, Arcade, and 50 GB of iCloud storage. That saves about $7 per month, assuming you aren’t in a year-long free period for Apple TV+.
Family: At $22.95 for access to everyone in a Family Sharing group, it’s only a slightly better bargain. With the same services as the individual level but with 200 GB of iCloud storage, you’re saving about $9 a month.
Premier: This tier is available both to individuals and families, and adds News+ and Fitness+. It includes 2 TB of iCloud storage. At $32.95 a month, it’s a great bargain: priced separately, it would cost an individual about $20 more monthly and a family about $25 more each month.
Whatever storage is included with your Apple One plan, you should be able to add more on top. Any individual subscriber to Individual or Premier, or a member of a Family Sharing group subscribed to Family or Premier can add 50 GB, 200 GB, 2 TB, 6 TB, or 12 TB on top of the Apple One plan they’re in. So an Individual subscriber could max out at 12.05 TB or a Premier subscriber at 14 TB.
However—and it’s a big however—there’s a long-running bug with adding storage on top of storage. After I queried people on Mastodon as to what they saw as upgrade options within Family Sharing and with an Apple One plan, some people had the add storage option; others were prompted to “replace” storage, requiring paying the full iCloud+ tier fee (like $9.99 for 2 TB) with no discount or storage rolling over from their Apple One subscription (Figure 60)! Even weirder: editor Joe Kissell, with the same subscription and configuration, also sees 50 GB and 200 GB as potential add-on choices.
There’s no rhyme nor reason to it—some people have complained to Apple support and been told there’s nothing they can do. For me, I’ve never been prompted to add 2 TB of storage on top of 2 TB; now I’m still prompted to replace it with 2, 6, or 12 TB.
These packages make a lot of sense for people who already have or want two or more services plus an iCloud storage upgrade. As an Apple Music and TV+ subscriber with 2 TB of iCloud storage, you could use News+, Fitness+, or Arcade at no extra cost and feel it worth the deal.
Cancel Subscriptions
If you want to cancel any of your subscriptions across all these services, you can generally use a straightforward method that varies only by operating system.
To cancel any of these services in iOS/iPadOS, go to Settings > Account Name > Subscriptions. Tap the item. Tap the Cancel button and confirm.
In macOS, do the following:
Launch the App Store, the TV app, or the Music app.
In the App Store, click your account icon in the lower-left corner of the window and then click Account Settings in the upper-right corner; in the TV or Music app, choose Account > Account Settings.
Click Manage to the right of Subscriptions.
Next to a subscription, click Edit, click the Cancel or Cancel Subscription button, and click Confirm.
The options you see apply only to the Apple ID logged in with iCloud in iOS/iPadOS or with the particular app in macOS. If you use a different Apple ID with some services, you can manage them through the corresponding service’s macOS app, but not on iOS or iPadOS.