I had an email yesterday telling me that the Apple One subscription was going up for the second time in twelve months.
It no longer represents good value for me and I can save nearly £100 a year by cancelling and subscribing to the important parts that I use most.
Apple are not alone in increasing prices (in a cost of living crisis) to the point they no longer represent fair value. What is it with companies that they lack basic business smarts?
What a ridiculous comment. Not everyone has your needs and half your gripes aren’t even based on factually correct information. It doesn’t even sound like you use Apple products, so why are you here? Just dropping in to show your ignorance?
Apple Music is pretty similar to Spotify. That’s an established business model and the price is pretty much the same between the two. Apple Arcade isn’t unlike other subscription game services, also an established business model. News+ is a new thing, but offers a lot of convenience with no paywalls and hours of long form articles in audio format. Worth it for that alone.
If all you want to pay for is iCloud+ and TV+ because you don’t value the other services, then you can do that for $20/month, not $38.
And, no you do not need to pay for Apple Fitness to use your Apple Watch and “get your metrics.”Fitness+ is video workout classes for people who want to use that. Otherwise, the watch works perfectly fine to “get your metrics.” Go for a run, jerk yourself off, it’ll measure your heart rate, “lifetime data for free.”
But, tell me more about how instead I should subscribe to Photoshop, which I don’t even use, and get 4TB of cloud storage, which is more than my entire family needs. If I did want 4TB, though, I could also get that for $20/month. So, why are you complaining again?
I don’t think you understand what Apple Fitness+ is? You don’t have to pay for access to any health data?
It’s a service with workout videos lead by instructors, like what Peloton offers with their app. It’s pretty good, I enjoy the yoga classes on my Apple TV.
Fitness+ costs less per month than a peloton subscription.
I also don’t know why you say music is a shit deal when it costs the same as all the other competing services. The 2TB cloud storage is also $10 a month which matches the competition too, just like you said you were paying. I will agree with news+ though, it’s garbage.
Anyone smart enough knows you should have both. You should be backing up local and offsite.
Off-site backups don’t need to be in the cloud - they can be on your own hardware or that of a friend, just elsewhere.
Why do people resort to insults when other people prioritize things differently? This always baffles me, and I’ve been seeing it a lot on Lemmy lately.
I don’t have a NAS. I don’t want a NAS. I have no need for a NAS. I have iCloud purely for my mother, and my time is way more valuable than the cost of iCloud. I also don’t want to deal with troubleshooting if something goes wrong. I fight enough fires at work when a release goes sour.
I’m not stupid because I value my time more than the cost of a subscription. I value the ease of use for my mother more than the cost of a subscription. I understand your values don’t align with mine. That’s okay! You’re not stupid for that. And I’m not stupid for my choices.
Try to see the human and realize that we all have individual lives, goals, and priorities. Insulting people for being different than you is something we should be moving away from, not continuing.
I have a synology nas. The cheapest 2 drive model. The nas plus a pair of 4tb drives set me back $380. The time period for roi is pretty significant.
I’m always amazed that people happily pay these prices.
Or the UI engages dark patterns and manipulative design to further corral you into submission/complacency
Or it’s just a good deal and you’re used to prices that include data mining
None of apples cloud services make sense to me. They are all overpriced for what they are.
If you want to say they’re greedy and pricing people out, that’s true. But don’t confuse this with a lack of business smarts.
When pricing products, there’s a balance between charging more to increase margins, and charging less so more people will buy.
Apple absolutely doesn’t play the latter side of the scale and never has. The problem with “charge less and sell to more people” is that it becomes a race to the bottom. With thin profit margins you need staggering volume to still make money, and that’s hard to do when everyone is undercutting each other.
In a nutshell, “charging less” is something anyone can do. But making products people will pay a premium for, that’s hard. And that’s what Apple does. Their products have minority market share, but their profits are massive. That’s what you’d call business smarts.
That’s an old fashioned view that business moved on from in the last ten years. It’s all about Environmental,Social and Corporate Governance (ESG investors are in control now at the big investors) with governments and regulators around the world setting rules. There’s a reason Apple is trumpeting its green credentials.
So if a company wants to attract money its needs a strong position. One aspect is the concept of fair value. It gets away from older concepts such as cheap and premium. A product should offer fair value. That means that what it offers is commensurate with the cost to the consumer. The consumer chooses whether the product or service offers fair value. Those companies that offer fair value will attract more investors and more customers.
That’s why I say they are lacking in modern business smarts.
I have Apple one. I will not be cancelling. I consider it an amazing value. I don’t need the iCloud but my mother takes way too many pictures of the kids. She gets value out of that. We all get Apple TV. I use Apple Music every day I’m at work.
Why do you get to choose what is fair value and I don’t? If the consumer gets to choose, than that means the average of all potential (because there is a large subset of consumers who will never use Apple products) customers’ willingness to pay the price must be taken into account.
I understand that it’s not a fair value to you. But it certainly is to me. Even just the hour a month I save not walking through with my mother determining which pictures to delete is worth it alone. In addition to time, I get services I use and value. I consider it a deal tbh.
Bro wrote 3 paragraphs to say he doesn’t like talking to his mother are you for real
So… ESG investors are in control now and they don’t want to see companies charging too much.
…
I realize maybe I should verify: which planet are we talking about? I’ve been talking about planet Earth.
If you are as well, you either have more business smarts than the most valued company in the world or… less.
I didn’t say they don’t want to see companies charge too much. Fair Value is not about the price but the value you get for that price.
I’m talking this planet. Just look for ESG funds and ESG compliant companies. They are valued at over 53 trillion dollars according to the UN.
ESG reporting is now mandatory and a part of accounting standards in the US, UK and the majority of countries.
Incidentally, try investor.apple.com/esg/default.aspx
You’ll find Apples reports back to 2021.
