Just before the drama of Epic Games’ PR stunt and ensuing lawsuits and insanity, rumors started to roll that Apple was preparing to release multiple subscription bundles to add value to their current services business. You can find Mark Gurman’s original story at Bloomberg here. That sounds like a smart play for Apple, and one that has been widely predicted by myself and many other Apple fans and tech bloggers over the last three or four years.
A lot of Apple Watch fans wanted an always-on display and got their wish last year with the Series 5. Others want sleep tracking. Some want a slimmer design without losing any battery life. While I am good with all of the above, what I really want to see next is independence for the Apple Watch. In my opinion, de-coupling the Watch from the iPhone for setup and basic operation is the last major step in the platform’s evolution.
We’ve been here before. iCloud had its struggles all the way back to MobileMe before finally finding its footing recently. The Apple Maps app itself was fine from the beginning, but the stitched together maps and second-hand POIs were rough until Apple put in the work themselves. Apple Music’s content was good, but the interface was a flat-out mess when it was rolled out. Conversely, Apple News was just bad all the way through when it was released. Despite all the rough beginnings and growing pains, though, it’s good that Apple stuck with all of the above and made them all into strong services and apps in the long run.
I keep thinking Apple will learn from their previous false starts, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, as Apple News+ has taken the same path iCloud, Maps, Music and News before it. News+ has easily been the poorest received of all of Apple’s new paid service offerings and it culminated with the head of the service leaving the company this week.
Another year has ended and a new one has begun. In the time honored tradition of marking the beginning of a another trip around the sun, it’s time to make some New Year’s Resolutions. However, rather than make them for myself this year, I’m going to set my mind to thinking of some for Apple in 2020.
Developers and site owners have been able to use functionality from Apple to host features of Apple Music on the web for a little while now. I wrote about Musish few months ago as an example of this. Unfortunately, this isn’t quite the same thing as the real thing. As of today, knockoffs are no longer necessary, as Apple’s music streaming service now has a new home on the net. Just visit https://beta.music.apple.com to see what Apple Music looks like without an app.
According to both noted developer Steve Troughton-Smith and Guilherme Rambo of 9to5Mac, both of whom are known for spelunking through iOS and macOS betas for all kinds of goodies, iTunes is about to get busted up. Considering the mass market success of the iPod went hand-in-hand with the arrival of iTunes, this is pretty big news.
Apple doesn’t always respond immediately to situations where they are attacked or criticized. They don’t usually make pointed public responses, either. However, Tim Cook and company have made an exception in the case of Spotify, releasing a detailed and aggressively worded press release that not only answers each of their competitor’s complaints, but also takes shots for them for some of their own recent activities.
From mid morning until around 3 PM EST on Thursday, most of Apple’s iCloud services, including Mail, Calendar, and Find My iPhone were offline in some regions. Apple wasn’t the only company with cloud service outages this week, but yesterday’s major iCloud outage couldn’t have come at a worse time for the company.
Spotify has decided that running to the EU and crying in public on their blog (which I refuse to link here. If you want to see it, use Google) is the best course of action to protect themselves from the big, bad Apple. In case you can’t tell, I do not care for their arguments or any that currently relate to Apple and anti-trust laws as they stand today. As you can also probably tell, I won’t be voting for Elizabeth Warren in 2020, either. I’ll have more on her insanity in a future post.
As we close in on Apple’s next event, there are tons of stories bouncing around about the company’s future growth being in services. Right now, everything is centered around their coming subscription services in video and news, but a smaller story from earlier this week points to another service that could dwarf all others. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple and Goldman Sachs are getting ready to team up on a credit card.
It was big news last week when Amazon surprised everyone with an announcement that Apple Music is coming to their Echo products. A year ago this would have sounded unthinkable, but Apple and Amazon have been slowly drawing closer over that time. Prime Video showed up on Apple TV and then Amazon started selling new Apple devices after driving unlicensed refurbished sellers out of their Marketplace. And now this.