For months leading up to today’s annual Apple event, rumours swirled that the Cupertino tech giant was gearing up to bundle its growing roster of services. Today, Apple confirmed it’s introducing a multi-tiered bundle called Apple One, which will group together some of its most popular services with additional cloud storage.
There are three primary subscription options: individual, family, and premier. The family and individual plans group together Apple TV+, Arcade, Music, and cloud storage. The individual plan will cost $19.95 per month, while the family plan will cost $25.95) per month.
Meanwhile, the premier plan — which will cost $39.95 per month — will bundle all four of these apps with Apple News+ and its newly announced and hotly anticipated Fitness+ app, which alone will cost $14.99 per month or $119.99 annually.
Apple’s leaned hard into its services offerings, launching a number of new streaming products at a breakneck clip. Apple TV+, Arcade, Apple News+, and even Apple’s recent foray into personal finance are all meant to compete directly with app behemoths in their respective spaces. But by offering everything from health tracking to music streaming natively on its devices, and by making these premium services competitive price-wise, it’s also able to lure Apple users further into its own ecosystem. Why, for example, would I pay for a non-native music streaming service when Apple Music has everything I need and can also be navigated hands-free while I’m driving using Siri commands?
Apple still has some kinks to iron out, though. It’s originals hub, Apple TV+, is still lite on content, a problem Apple is working to fix by offering exclusive bundles to its subscribers, as it recently did with services CBS All Access and Showtime. Apple Arcade has to compete with more popular mobile apps from long-established game makers. In many ways, Apple is playing catch-up. But by creating tiers that group outlier services together with its tentpole apps, Apple may just be able to hook some subscribers who’d otherwise take their business elsewhere.
Make no mistake, Apple knows exactly what it’s doing.