Talking outline
42 MACWORLD APRIL 2020
iOSCENTRAL
IMAGE: APPLE
A pple’s big push into services
this year was doomed for
disaster—at least if you
considered Apple News+
representative of what was to come. Many
of the problems I hated back then (go.
macworld.com/4thn) remain central to the
experience: the mishmash of PDFs with
digital content, the hassle of searching for
publications, and the lack of real reasons
to give up many direct subscriptions to
notable magazines. Seven months on, the
Apple News+ stumbled because it’s the service most outside Apple’s control Apple’s subscription-based news service is the company’s only real stumble in its services push—and that’s not entirely Apple’s fault.
BY MICHAEL SIMON
APRIL 2020 MACWORLD 43
best thing about it is that it’s a relatively
cheap way to read The Wall Street Journal
and The New Yorker. With services, Apple
News+ suggested last spring, Apple was
biting off more than the famous hardware
maker could chew.
Today, Apple’s trouble with its paid
news service looks like an anomaly. Apple
TV+ may not yet be as “sexy” as services
like HBO or the brand-new Disney+, but all
the same, it’d be a stretch to call any of its
launch-week shows (go.macworld.com/
duds) “duds.” (In fact, I’m surprised to find
myself looking slightly more forward to
new episodes of See (go.macworld.com/
seer) than to those for Disney+’s
phenomenal Star Wars epic The
Mandalorian [go.macworld.com/mand].)
Apple Arcade is an
unqualified
success, at least
judging from the
number of people
chatting about it on
social media. For
almost every
Friday since
launch, Apple has
cranked out one or
more fantastic
games that often
release alongside
console
counterparts and
play well on every screened device in the
Apple ecosystem. Aside from some
grumbling that Apple Arcade is only
available on Apple devices, I’ve seen
virtually no outright hate for the service.
And then, of course, we have years-old
Apple Music, which now boasts over 60
million subscribers and faces lawsuits from
rival Spotify aimed at keeping its rapid
expansion in check. Along with iTunes, it
served as early proof that Apple could
dominate in an arena that wasn’t strictly
related to hardware.
Without exception, Apple Music, Apple
TV+, and Apple Arcade are all now firmly
part of The Conversation. But Apple
News+? Hardly. Indeed, the most damning
thing about it is that no one seems
None of Apple TV+’s launch shows, including See, could be called duds.
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Apple Arcade is an unqualified success, at least judging from the number of people chatting about it on social media.
interested in talking about it at all—not
even in the form of random Apple-bashing
in the Android subreddit. When we do
hear about Apple News+, it’s usually in the
form of tepid statements like that from
Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch last week
(via Variety; go.macworld.com/jury), when
he said the “jury is still out” on the service.
CNBC (go.macworld.com/cnbc) also
dropped a report last week saying that
Apple has struggled to gain more than
200,000 subscribers in the months since
launch. For many, I imagine the main
impact of these reports was to remind
them Apple News+ exists at all.
It’s hard to determine Apple News+’s
success because Apple doesn’t discuss
the specifics about it in its earnings calls,
and it’s easy to get the feeling that Apple
wishes it would just go away. You don’t
see ads for it. You don’t see patch notes
detailing improvements, aside from a
weirdly enthusiastic press release (go.
macworld.com/enth) about a new button in
May. The best we’ve gotten recently is a
rumor from Bloomberg (go.macworld.com/
bmbg) claiming that Apple is thinking
about bundling it with services like Apple
TV+ and Apple Arcade in 2020—and while
I’ve long been a fan of the idea of an
Apple services bundle, this isn’t a good
look. It suggests Apple thinks the only way
more people will pay for Apple News+ is if
it tacks it on to something more popular.
WHAT WENT WRONG? Most of Apple’s seeming trouble with
Apple News+ may spring from the fact that
it’s the only one of Apple’s large paid
services that’s mainly out of its direct
control. And as the
company best associated
with the term “walled
garden,” Apple clearly loves
being in control. It
thrives on it. I’ll even go
so far as to say that with
the right conditions
and proper products,
this control is a good
thing.
But journalism is
messy, as I can easily
attest as a journalist.
APRIL 2020 MACWORLD 45
It’s always nice to be in good company, though.
With Apple News+, Apple
finds itself struggling with
multiple publications in
various stages of the shift
from print to digital media.
It’s struggling to find the
best ways to pay sites and
to make them believe that
Apple News+ benefits
them, particularly when
those sites tend to have
vastly different means of generating their
own revenue. Apple also has no control
over the frequency or quality of the
content. This doesn’t matter much with the
free version of Apple News, but it’s a clear
problem with the premium content of
Apple News+. Maybe these issues
wouldn’t be so obnoxious if Apple at least
seemed interested in making an effort to
fix them (as it is with the notoriously buggy
iOS 13), but there’s little proof that it is.
Maybe, with so many aspects of Apple
News+ being out of the company’s control,
it just doesn’t know how.
Compare all this to how we see Apple
flexing its muscles with the paid services it
has more direct control over. Just this
week, we learned that Apple was pulling
planned theatrical screenings of the Apple
TV+ Samuel L. Jackson flick The Banker
after allegations of sexual abuse were
directed at the real-life son of the movie’s
subject (via The Hollywood Reporter [go.
macworld.com/hlrp]). For that matter, Apple
approves and signs off on all the shows on
Apple TV+ (and I’m sorry, but all those
Apple product placements on The
Morning Show [go.macworld.com/mnsh]
can’t be coincidences). And so it goes
with Apple Arcade, a service in which
Apple partially funds games and decides
whether or not it’ll include them in its
carefully curated service. In all of these
cases, we’re seeing exactly what Apple
wants us to see.
Apple can do almost none of that with
Apple News+, a service that insists you
awkwardly look at PDFs on an iPhone
display. Apple News+’s shortcomings
result in an experience that feels
uncharacteristically “scattershot” and
“grab-baggy” for Apple. The iPhone maker
doesn’t even seem to know how to make
people care about the content, as you
don’t really get the kind of careful curation
you see on the App Store with Apple
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Apple News+’s shortcomings result in an experience that feels uncharacteristically “scattershot” for Apple.
News+ stories. Apple Music is probably
the service that most resembles Apple
News+ because of the diversity of its
content, but it doesn’t suffer from the same
problems because you access all the
content through the subscription and
everything shares the same file type. For
that matter, it’s usually pleasing to listen to
the music regardless of which device
you’re on. With Apple News+’s magazines,
though, you’re almost certainly going to
want to use an iPad or a Mac.
I’m not saying I want more control from
Apple in this space. If anything—
considering Apple’s increasingly
uncomfortable relationship with the U.S.
president and its close ties with the
censorship-happy
government of China—a
little less control from
the folks in Cupertino
would be preferable. I’ve
also long believed that
Apple gets too much of
the benefit of the
content from Apple
News+, while the actual
content makers get
comparatively little. If
Apple decided to let
Apple News+ go the
way of AirPower (go.
macworld.com/apow), I
might even be happy.
But it’s important to remember that—so
far—it looks as though Apple News+ is the
only true minus in Apple’s big metamorphosis
into a part-time services company. I believe
it’s safe to say that it was always considered
the least important of Apple’s new services
(there was plenty of head-scratching when
Apple bought Texture [go.macworld.com/txtr],
which Apple News+ is based on). Apple is a
services company now, and for the most part,
it’s a good one. It just needs to stick to
services where it has more control.
Maybe Apple News+ will get better:
Apple Music, which also had a slightly
rough start, proves that’s a possibility. But
for now, one half-baked new service out
of three ain’t bad. ■
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