Here’s what’s wrong with Apple News+: It may actually be too good of a deal. It offers so much for the price that subscribers find it difficult to find the time to consume even a small portion of what Apple News+ offers. It’s easier to simply cancel and stop paying the subscription fee for something you feel you’re wasting as there simply isn’t enough time in the day.
$10 a month seems too much to me to have access to a number of publications that I read only occasionally at best; I simply don’t have the time to read all those magazines. Back when I subscribed to more print publications, I ended up with stacks of them that I tried to “get through” every couple of months.
But Apple keeps trying to interest me in Apple News+, and I don’t blame them. But I do blame them for what they present to tempt me… At the top of the [For You in News+] section is an article about cameras, and this makes sense: I follow a couple of photography channels in the app. But below that, there are four other suggestions, none of which are “based on what I read.” I don’t watch birds, I don’t care much about houses and homes, I have no interest in advertising, and I don’t have diabetes. I don’t know why the algorithm is this broken, but it’s broken.
MacDailyNews Take: Beyond the very real problem of the recommendation algorithm not working well, what’s wrong with Apple News+ is that nobody wants to pay for what seems, in the end, like homework; yet another thing to keep up with. Apple News+ ends up guilting you. It’s like email. It just piles up and piles up, another thing constantly demanding to be dealt with. Nobody wants to pay for that. That’s why Apple should bundle it with other services (and fix the broken recommendation engine).