Apple One bundles six different Apple services up into a single package - Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, iCloud, Apple News Plus, and Apple Fitness Plus. This is quite a unique move from Apple as there really isn’t much else like this out there at the moment at first glance. Apple One comes with three pricing options depending on how much you’re looking to spend and what services you’re interested in. The three tiers are Individual, Family, and Premier. You can also get a month long free trial to Apple One, but only for the services that you haven’t already tried (so if you have an Apple Music account, you can’t get a free month of it). The Individual package costs $14.99 per month and comes with access to Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, and 50GB of iCloud storage for a single user. The Family package costs $20 per month and comes with access to Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, and 200GB of iCloud storage for up to five people. The Premier package is the most expensive option at $30 per month, but for that you get access to Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, Apple News Plus, Apple Fitness Plus (when it launches later this year) and 2TB of iCloud storage.
When does Apple One launch?
We don’t have an official date yet, but Apple has confirmed that Apple One will be launching later in 2020. There isn’t a whole lot of 2020 left (thankfully), so that means it will be releasing soon.
Apple One Perks
Apple One bundles together several of Apple’s standalone services into one package. You get access to Apple Music, which is a music streaming service with over 70 million songs on it. You can stream music, download it for offline listening and even get some live radio stations through it. It’s compatible with all major devices too, including Android smartphones and tablets, so you don’t need an Apple device to take advantage. Apple TV Plus is also included in your Apple One subscription. We’ve already reviewed Apple TV Plus (opens in new tab) as part of our best TV streaming services (opens in new tab) guide. Apple TV Plus lets you stream and watch Apple’s original programming including The Morning Show, See, and Greyhound. At the moment Apple TV is much more limited than other services like Netflix, as it only offers original content and doesn’t have a library of movies and TV shows from other networks to pad out the library. What is there is good though, and Apple has been throwing money around to bring in big stars like Tom Hanks, Reese Witherspoon, and Jennifer Aniston. For the gamers out there, Apple One also lets you use Apple Arcade. Think of this as a Netflix for mobile games - you get access to a library of over 100 games including Sonic Racing and Crossy Road Castle to play on your iPhone (opens in new tab), tablet, or other compatible devices. iCloud is an online cloud storage service that lets you store your valuable data (like photos, videos, and documents) online so you can access them from any device, anywhere. The amount of storage you get here depends on the tier you sign up for, but even the basic 50GB is quite generous. Apple News Plus is another feature of Apple One and once again it’s another standalone subscription service, but this one offers you access to hundreds of magazines and newspapers from around the world including vanity Fair, The New Yorker, TIME, and The Wall Street Journal. You can see the full list here. You get full access to these magazines and websites, and even get audio roundups of the week’s biggest news with audio stories. Finally, Apple One subscribers will be getting access to Apple Fitness Plus when it launches later this year. Apple Fitness Plus is a new fitness app that will work in conjunction with the Apple Watch, so to be making the most of this service you’ll need to grab an Apple Watch too if you don’t have one already. Apple Fitness Plus gives you access to workouts from expert trainers while also tracking and integrating your personal vitals and stats to give you a complete personal fitness setup. Gamers can take advantage of Primer Gaming, which gives out free PC games and loot but doesn’t offer a library of games like Apple Arcade does. If books are more your thing, then Prime reading offers access to thousands of books, comics, and magazines. This is focused more on fiction and non-fiction though, so don’t expect this to compete with Apple News. Apple One provides excellent value if you’re already a subscriber to one or two of the included services. Each of the individual services on offer - Apple News Plus, Apple TV Plus, Apple Music, etc - each costs $9.99 per month for a subscription. So if you’re going to be using them anyway, you might as well save money and get access to more services in the process - it’s a no brainer. Basically it comes down to this: are you already deep into the Apple ecosystem? Do you have an iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch? Are you already subscribed to Apple Music or Apple TV Plus? If so, Apple One is a fantastic package that gets you everything Apple has to offer at a discounted price.