The Apple ecosystem has expanded vastly in recent years, meaning you can now sign up for its game exclusives, music, movie and TV streaming services as well as news and health offerings. It’s all gotten a bit confusing but Apple has a cheaper solution: Apple One.
During Apple’s ‘special but not the iPhone 12 event‘, the company announced the Apple One — an all-in-one subscription service to help you pay the one fee for Apple’s goods and services.
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It means you’ll now pay a neat, single price once you choose one of the three tiers. Those options include a personal subscription, a basic family one that can be shared with five others and the big package that includes it all.
So, are you saving money if you sign up to it? The short answer is yes but only if you’re already subscribing to it all.
How much are you really saving with Apple One?
Let’s start with the first package Apple’s calling the ‘individual’. With that, you get access to Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade and 50GB of space with its iCloud service for $19.95 a month.
Separately, Music would cost $11.99 if you’re not still on any free or discounted student deals, TV+ and Arcade both cost $7.99 a month each and iCloud’s 50GB plan is $1.49.
So, in theory, you would be saving $9.51 a month but that’s if you’re already signed up to these services and you haven’t been getting any freeloader deals (of which, there are many).
What about the Family plan?
Let’s say you plan on sharing it with your friends or family and want to opt for the ‘Family’ plan. That one costs $25.95 a month, which is pretty nice if your account sharers plan on actually splitting it with you.
It gets you the same inclusions as the individual package but beefs up the iCloud storage to 200GB and lets you share with five others. It offers a saving of $12.51 a month. That’s pretty decent considering the convenience of wrapping it all up together.
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And Premier?
Finally, there’s the big one — the ‘Premier’ package. That one jacks up the price to $39.95 but adds in subscriptions to News+ and the upcoming Fitness+ subscription, due in Australia later this year.
If you were to subscribe to each of these separately it would cost you $78.94 a month. So you’re saving a pretty colossal $38.99 or nearly 50 per cent.
The bundles are great news for anyone obsessed with the Apple ecosystem but for many casual users, it just means adding another monthly payment to your round up. And if you’ve got a student account or scored yourself a sweet free TV+ deal (also you get three months of Fitness+ with any new Apple Watch purchase), it might not end up saving you much at all.
If you’ve got competitor subscriptions, such as Google Play Pass, Spotify or Netflix, you’ll have to budget carefully to see whether adding a bunch of Apple services is really worth the time and money.