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It no longer represents good value for me and I can save nearly £100 a year by cancelling and subscribing to the important parts that I use most.
Apple are not alone in increasing prices (in a cost of living crisis) to the point they no longer represent fair value.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.
Greedflation
Adding this to my Internet vocabulary.
Its pretty annoying, this double whammy of shrinkflation+greedflation. Getting old real fast
Grinkflaception
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.
Finally someone who knows how businesses work. Thanks sir.
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 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 :)
It’s scaring me how similar your situation is to mine! I also just finished scanning in a bunch of photos that my grandmother took. I chose to host the photos in the Photos app, and considered for a long time whether I would let that sync up to iCloud. Sure, the photos would exist on Apple’s cloud. But if I die, they can only be accessed from my Apple devices. If someone can’t get into them for any reason, they’re as good as gone, because Apple – as good a company as it is when it comes to customer service – can’t be counted on to let anyone else into my account to retrieve data.
So I stored them in Photos, and will store copies of them on my NAS, in hopes that having them in multiple locations will increase the chances that someone else can access them. Same thing goes with my data – I ignore iCloud, but I store that data on my Macbook Pro, inside of its periodic backup, on my NAS, on the backup of the NAS, and potentially in the future, on a thumb drive. More locations means more chances of being able to get at the files in the event of a catastrophe.
I use Photoprism also as a docker on my NAS. It is Internet facing but I only really share kinks to friends and family since it is hitting my server. Its firewalled/port forwarded etc, but I’m not comfortable sharing that publicly.
Inside our house NAS shares are accessible, however read only unless I need to update/add to it.
Nextcloud runs in parallel to the NAS and contains it’s own data but it’s ease of use allows my wife to use it
One other paid storage I didn’t mention (for photos) is I also have a $40/yr zenfolio account where I do upload photos. Mostly stuff taken with my DSLR not phone pictures. (A lot of soccer pictures). My grandparents photos are there also so the family can access them.
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.
Bad assumption. I think they pay these prices grudgingly.
Or the UI engages dark patterns and manipulative design to further corral you into submission/complacency
Or it’s just a good deal and you’re used to prices that include data mining
I’d love to get the source that quantifies or even qualifies the notion that Apple does not datamine all that in their own way that may or may not be more respectful of privacy.
I wanna believe it but it seems questionable based on the privacy nutrition labels and their little popups that explain stuff.
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.
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.
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 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
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 didn’t say they don’t want to see companies charge too much. Fair Value is not about the price but the value you get for that price.
I’m talking this planet. Just look for ESG funds and ESG compliant companies. They are valued at over 53 trillion dollars according to the UN.
ESG reporting is now mandatory and a part of accounting standards in the US, UK and the majority of countries.
Incidentally, try investor.apple.com/esg/default.aspx
You’ll find Apples reports back to 2021.
Well I definitely think you’re overestimating this influence. And I think the other issue here is that you are conflating the price point that you personally are willing to pay with Fair Value. If you want to show some kind of analysis of what you think fair pricing should be, great, but this post is just “I cancelled my subscription” and you’re claiming that your decision has all the force of global investor trends behind it.
No, I was responding to your old fashioned views about pricing. Do you see the difference between fair pricing that you mention and fair value ?
The whole point with Fair Value is that the consumer has control. It’s not about fair pricing. It’s about what you get for that price being fair value.
Nowadays a company needs to define its target market and ensure that target market gets fair value. A product can have any price as long as its target market thinks it’s fair value.
We’ve seen some companies innovate and open up new markets that haven’t been served before. For example social tariffs that attract consumers who wouldn’t normally subscribe.
It’s not just me saying this. Many commentators and analysts have pointed out that some companies (not just Apple) are taking a rather basic approach and actually removing value. The whole idea with Apple one was to add value but now that seems to be changing. They are retreating to what they know, put up prices without using their business acumen to increase value.
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.
None of apples cloud services make sense to me. They are all overpriced for what they are.
I posted about it last week too. It sucks. I’d cancel it too, but I got my whole family on there. Leeches!
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I don’t think you understand what Apple Fitness+ is? You don’t have to pay for access to any health data?
It’s a service with workout videos lead by instructors, like what Peloton offers with their app. It’s pretty good, I enjoy the yoga classes on my Apple TV.
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Fitness+ costs less per month than a peloton subscription.
I also don’t know why you say music is a shit deal when it costs the same as all the other competing services. The 2TB cloud storage is also $10 a month which matches the competition too, just like you said you were paying. I will agree with news+ though, it’s garbage.
As a new junkie, I love News+. It’s got a lot of content with no paywalls. Also they have audio articles, so you can listen to long form stories like an audiobook. Great for the car.
Ultimately, I think the plan is worth it, especially with family members being able to use it too. Some use Fitness, some use TV+, some use News, all use iCloud+. Music is good to have, even though most of us use Spotify.
I do wish they offered some ala cart option so that I could opt out of the services no one uses and still save a little money with a discounted rate.
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The problem I have with News+ is this… if you thumbs down a source or even outright block it, News+ still shows it as a tapable tile. It just says “You’ve blocked this source” instead of showing the underlying material that would have been there. It’s an incredibly stupid UI design. If I’ve blocked a site it shouldn’t show up at all. Put a different story in its place.
The other thing Indont like is that even the paid tier of News+ still has ads. A premium price should have a premium experience.
Yeah, I find the placeholder a bit annoying too. I guess it’s probably intended to make you aware that you’re creating your own news bubble. That was a criticism of Facebook… that its algorithm was not even showing content/perspectives in one side of the political spectrum to people on the other side. And vice versa.
Also, News+ ads are easily blocked by a DNS-level ad blocker like Pihole or, the cloud-based one, NextDNS.
What a ridiculous comment. Not everyone has your needs and half your gripes aren’t even based on factually correct information. It doesn’t even sound like you use Apple products, so why are you here? Just dropping in to show your ignorance?
Apple Music is pretty similar to Spotify. That’s an established business model and the price is pretty much the same between the two. Apple Arcade isn’t unlike other subscription game services, also an established business model. News+ is a new thing, but offers a lot of convenience with no paywalls and hours of long form articles in audio format. Worth it for that alone.
If all you want to pay for is iCloud+ and TV+ because you don’t value the other services, then you can do that for $20/month, not $38.
And, no you do not need to pay for Apple Fitness to use your Apple Watch and “get your metrics.”Fitness+ is video workout classes for people who want to use that. Otherwise, the watch works perfectly fine to “get your metrics.” Go for a run, jerk yourself off, it’ll measure your heart rate, “lifetime data for free.”
But, tell me more about how instead I should subscribe to Photoshop, which I don’t even use, and get 4TB of cloud storage, which is more than my entire family needs. If I did want 4TB, though, I could also get that for $20/month. So, why are you complaining again?
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Anyone smart enough knows you should have both. You should be backing up local and offsite.
Off-site backups don’t need to be in the cloud - they can be on your own hardware or that of a friend, just elsewhere.
Of course but how many of us have a friend who is gonna let us set up a NAS at their house? Cloud is a much easier solution.
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I have iCloud for family and OneDrive. For local backups I use Time Machine.
I have a synology nas. The cheapest 2 drive model. The nas plus a pair of 4tb drives set me back $380. The time period for roi is pretty significant.
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Why do people resort to insults when other people prioritize things differently? This always baffles me, and I’ve been seeing it a lot on Lemmy lately.
I don’t have a NAS. I don’t want a NAS. I have no need for a NAS. I have iCloud purely for my mother, and my time is way more valuable than the cost of iCloud. I also don’t want to deal with troubleshooting if something goes wrong. I fight enough fires at work when a release goes sour.
I’m not stupid because I value my time more than the cost of a subscription. I value the ease of use for my mother more than the cost of a subscription. I understand your values don’t align with mine. That’s okay! You’re not stupid for that. And I’m not stupid for my choices.
Try to see the human and realize that we all have individual lives, goals, and priorities. Insulting people for being different than you is something we should be moving away from, not continuing.
