Sadly, cancelled my Apple One subscription.
Sadly, cancelled my Apple One subscription.
I had an email yesterday telling me that the Apple One subscription was going up for the second time in twelve months.
It no longer represents good value for me and I can save nearly £100 a year by cancelling and subscribing to the important parts that I use most.
Apple are not alone in increasing prices (in a cost of living crisis) to the point they no longer represent fair value. What is it with companies that they lack basic business smarts?
lack business smarts
Nothing lacking at all. It’s business intelligence. Greedflation. A corporation has a fiduciary obligation to its shareholders to maximise profits by whatever means they can. It’s capitalism pure and simple. You can rest assured that people who get paid lots of money did complex forecasts to predict what the ramifications would be. In the end they decided it was worth it. And for them it probably is.
Err, I agree with the greed part. But the obligation to maximise profits is not true. A quick web search will bring up, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits and many other sources. Companies can do whatever they like, as long as it's within the law. The fact that most choose to maximise profits at the cost of other things is entirely on them.
I know what you’re saying but the world has moved on. Companies and regulators are talking about fair value as governments adopt ESG laws.
Companies that take an old fashioned “as much as we can get away with” approach are finding their customers drifting away. Nowadays if companies want to put up prices and be successful then they have to make the product (whatever it is) seem more valuable.
What is it with companies that they lack basic business smarts?
Short-sighted greed and appeasement of shareholders.
We're in a consolidation phase. The streaming market is now well established and the market shares are largely settled. In the past many services ran at a loss or without much profit to establish their market share. Now the market is in a phase where they try to figure out how much people are willing to pay for that service that they're used to.
They'll continue to raise prices as long as enough people remain to pay them. All of the services.
And use iNfLAyShYun as an excuse as we have seen in the last few years.
Certainly the price increase involves losing a very small but vocal percent of users, that is covered by the rest of users who swallow the new price.
To me, their pricing wasn’t competitive. The only good plan is Apple Music plus TV+ if you’re st udent.
Unfortunately a lot of these streaming platforms purposefully run at a loss to increase numbers, then start to raise prices as they think they can/need to. I'm deep enough into to ecosystem that I tried it out, but same conclusion.
I’m always amazed that people happily pay these prices.
Unpopular opinion but apple one is a very good value, and $30, even $40, a month feels really cheap for what my whole family is getting.
I run my own storage, mostly via NextCloud (as a docker on unRAID). But I still use a couple apps, and my old phone to take advantage of Google's old 'unlimited original uploads of photos' as a secondary, backup. I like this for publicly sharing photos vs giving people access/direct links to my stuff.
Nextcloud is also our dropbox/onedrive etc..
Important bits are backed up ultimately to Backblaze (my only cloud storage)
The biggest thing I worry about with this setup which is pretty low cost compared to paying Google, Apple, MS for cloud storage/features. is that if I get hit by a bus tomorrow. This stuff will likely eventually fade into oblivion. While I did finally get my wife onto a shared password manager I am not so sure she'd be able to recover stuff if she needed. Of course it would all work as it does right now for a while. But eventually unRAID will crash or have some hardware failure, then things get tricky. Again, my wife has access to accounts/passwords through the password manager, but there are still technical challenges. I guess I need to add to the 'in case of emergency' to pull off all important digital documents and start backing them up some other way.
I am in precisely the same situation (except I don't use Backblaze. I store my data offsite in a safe deposit box). My wife is also non-technical. Here's what I'm planning to make the "bus moment" less impactful:
- I've got a couple friends who are technical enough that she can call them for assistance. I'm running a VPN server that at least one of them knows how to access so they can walk her through what she needs.
- I plan on storing the RSA key for the password manager, along with digital documents explaining how to keep certain things running on a thumb drive that I'll drop in the safe deposit box mentioned earlier.
- I need to get my wife to log in to the NAS a few times and perform some basic maintenance to build a little muscle memory.
I've been trying to decide how to handle the critical documents backup. They're backed up on the NAS, but that's a complicated piece of equipment. I have them organized into a folder structure so that I can find them easily. I'm thinking of just dropping the whole folder structure onto the thumb drive, just in case. I can't think of a better solution, especially since my wife is going to be busy and distraught after I'm dead, so she won't be able to handle a super complicated retrieval process.
I have also considered the 'trusted friend' thing. And while that would certainly solve the 'hit by a bus' situation, they are my age and not any healthier than I am. I don't believe I have any/many technically capable younger friends I could rely on as that trusted person long term.
These things are stuff I've thought about on/off for a while. Not just my personal storage, but just in general as things move to cloud (especially company clouds) when those places fail what happens? As people die off and have their data locked online somewhere, when they stop paying, or company ceases to exist that stuff is just potentially lost. Meanwhile, I have a huge box of pictures my grandparents took. I've digitized a lot of them since it's much easier to share that way, but the box is still in my closet and will exist after I'm gone.
I didn't intend to make this so dark :)
Agree, generally Apple One is expensive as I don’t think most people use all the services (or that Apple provides all services in your country). It is still worth it for me with Family Sharing …
The family sharing is what makes it worth it. Everyone in the family can use a subset of the services that they prefer.
None of apples cloud services make sense to me. They are all overpriced for what they are.
Only issue is I have had my phone stolen once and dropped into a drain once by a drunk friend. So for me backup of photos is critical (with apple I have never lost photos even after this happened). My photo library is currently 205GB and the other phones in my family are 249gb of data.
So I have the 2tb icloud plan and the apple one plan so it is all shared (currently using 463gb/2.2TB) among my family. 4 people use these 2 subscriptions.
How am I supposed to get a service that auto backs up my photos daily for me, and for 3 other phones unless I use apples offering?
Genuine question. I have not been able to answer this question for over 3 years now. Other services I tried like amazon photo backup expected me to open the app to make photo backups. Makes the service pointless imho.
If you used Android you would have the freedom that makes it doable instead of paying extra money to have limitations artificially imposed on you (literally this is the entire apple business model). Syncthing automatically syncs to my home machine and it costs nothing except a little setup time and electricity
It's a limitation imposed by Apple, so you won't find anything that can sync as seamlessly as iCloud. Apps can only sync for up to 60s in the background when receiving a wake-up notification from the server.
If it’s family photos, we bought SmugMug basic $75/year, and set up the same account on our phones. Boom. All our photos are backed up and shared with each other. And there s no limit in sight.
“It's important to note that any HEIC images will be converted into JPGs when uploaded to SmugMug, and LivePhotos will be converted into still images. “
I can recommend Nextcloud. Its self-hosted, supports ios, android, windows, mac and linux and can auto upload photos in the background . It also allows you to syncronize any other files, like icloud.
This way youre not locked into only using apple devices and can freely choose your next phone.
It can also sync contacts, notes, calendars, and more. You can have as many accounts as you want and (optionally) use shared folders. The only limit is the size of the Disk in your server.
But you will need some technical knowledg
You need an old desktop pc (i have one with a 12 year old dual-core cpu and its works just fine), install a 2tb HDD and finally install Linux and Nextcloud. There are many good tutorials for all of these steps.
I like Nextcloud because its free (exept for the hardware and electricity your server needs) and you actually own your data meaning its acessible even without internet, or any external server.
Nextcloud gmbh (the company behind the open-source project) doesnt collect any data, so it is as private as can be.
You should of course do backups of the server disk from time to time, just incase the HDD fails or your house burns down or gets flooded.
I have been using it for my documents and photo backups for years and its great, but it requires some maintenace and is definitly less easy to use than icloud or google photos.
If you want to say they’re greedy and pricing people out, that’s true. But don’t confuse this with a lack of business smarts.
When pricing products, there’s a balance between charging more to increase margins, and charging less so more people will buy.
Apple absolutely doesn’t play the latter side of the scale and never has. The problem with “charge less and sell to more people” is that it becomes a race to the bottom. With thin profit margins you need staggering volume to still make money, and that’s hard to do when everyone is undercutting each other.
In a nutshell, “charging less” is something anyone can do. But making products people will pay a premium for, that’s hard. And that’s what Apple does. Their products have minority market share, but their profits are massive. That’s what you’d call business smarts.
That’s an old fashioned view that business moved on from in the last ten years. It’s all about Environmental,Social and Corporate Governance (ESG investors are in control now at the big investors) with governments and regulators around the world setting rules. There’s a reason Apple is trumpeting its green credentials.
So if a company wants to attract money its needs a strong position. One aspect is the concept of fair value. It gets away from older concepts such as cheap and premium. A product should offer fair value. That means that what it offers is commensurate with the cost to the consumer. The consumer chooses whether the product or service offers fair value. Those companies that offer fair value will attract more investors and more customers.
That’s why I say they are lacking in modern business smarts.
So… ESG investors are in control now and they don’t want to see companies charging too much.
…
I realize maybe I should verify: which planet are we talking about? I’ve been talking about planet Earth.
If you are as well, you either have more business smarts than the most valued company in the world or… less.
I have Apple one. I will not be cancelling. I consider it an amazing value. I don’t need the iCloud but my mother takes way too many pictures of the kids. She gets value out of that. We all get Apple TV. I use Apple Music every day I’m at work.
Why do you get to choose what is fair value and I don’t? If the consumer gets to choose, than that means the average of all potential (because there is a large subset of consumers who will never use Apple products) customers’ willingness to pay the price must be taken into account.
I understand that it’s not a fair value to you. But it certainly is to me. Even just the hour a month I save not walking through with my mother determining which pictures to delete is worth it alone. In addition to time, I get services I use and value. I consider it a deal tbh.
I posted about it last week too. It sucks. I’d cancel it too, but I got my whole family on there. Leeches!