Talking outline

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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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