Apple News+ was never going to work as a stand-alone subscription offering, M.G. Siegler writes for 500ish. What needs to happen is obvious: Apple needs to bundle Apple News+ into an “Apple Prime” offering.
Part of the problem is counterintuitive. If anything, News+ is too good of a deal. There is simply too much content to consume for too low of a price that it’s a weird value equation in most peoples’ heads. The game is actually zero sum. The game is life and the metric is time. None of us have enough of it. But in the era of streaming TV (not to mention music and games and apps and everything else), we really don’t have enough of it…
So, what to do? It’s so obvious that it’s already rumored. Make News+ a part of an Apple bundle. Yes, yes, “Apple Prime” as it were. Flip the script so that News+ isn’t yet another cognitive load on us. Something that may be a good deal but will I really have time for that? To: oh wow, this is included in what I already pay for? Awesome.
MacDailyNews Take: Yup.
We’d really like to see a way to pay for all of the Apple services we choose for one price. Give us a bunch of tick boxes and let us choose our combination of iCloud storage, Apple Music, iTunes Match, etc. and let us pay a single price for all of our choices. — MacDailyNews, October 17, 2016
As soon as Apple launches their original content video service, an “Apple Prime” will make even more sense. — MacDailyNews, August 29, 2018
Apple could make a more compelling “Prime” bundle than even Amazon can offer because their original content sounds like it will be better and Apple Music + Apple News/Texture are unmatched. If they rolled some iCloud storage deal into it, it’d be tough to resist for many, many people! — MacDailyNews, February 14, 2019
Hopefully, some sort of bundle option will also be available for us all to be able to the combine Apple services we want for a single fee, lower than the cost of subscribing to them à la carte. — MacDailyNews, March 25, 2019
As we wrote last September here and here:
$99 per month gets you an iPhone and every Apple service. Presented like that, it’d be insanely irresistible. And every “new to iPhone” customer will immediately and irrevocably be steeped in Apple’s Hotel California ecosystem… We bet if Apple offered iPhones along with services bundled into one monthly fee – offer tick boxes for Apple TV+, Apple News+, Apple Arcade, Apple Music, iCloud Storage, etc. – they’d have a winning sales strategy (Apple Prime) on their hands!