In the future, Apple users should expect more paid upgrades and subscription bundles just like what the company launched with Apple Creator Studio last month. As said by Mark Gurman in this week’s Power On newsletter, “I believe Apple is looking at all areas of its software and services” for further services monetization opportunities.
Obviously, the appeal of more subscription bundles depends on the particulars. For instance, Apple One has been very popular and seems relatively consumer friendly. But, while Creator Studio is a reasonable deal for hardcore users of Final Cut and Logic Pro, it also introduced exclusive paid features and upsell banners into Apple’s previously free-with-no-asterisks iWork suite of Pages, Keynote and Numbers.
The proliferation of ‘AI’ certainly gives Apple some credible motivation to launch more paid features. Creator Studio includes image and presentation generation capabilities powered by OpenAI’s backend, for instance. There’s also been long-running rumors of an AI-powered Apple Health+ service.
Top comment by PurpleGoggles
I only pay for iCloud and Apple Music and am currently in the process of putting together an offline music library so I can cancel Apple Music for good, while my next project is setting up a home server so I can cancel iCloud. Apple software has taken a long drive off a short cliff the past few years and they’ve proven time and again that the company has too many moving parts to manage effectively without letting major product categories go without updates.
Look at just one mismanaged app as an example. Pages. Now you can get access to ‘premium templates’ when previously Apple would update their templates for free. Now some very standard and basic templates are behind a paywall for no reason at all…And there’s two versions of the app because Apple can’t follow their own App Store guidance.
Let the enshitification begin!
Similar to the continued expansion of advertising inside the App Store, though, there’s a slippery slope where too much is too much. If all of Apple’s apps become overrun with paid extras, the premium feel of the software and hardware is diminished.
Right now, we are already in a reality where the system Image Playgrounds app is noticeably inferior to the features offered through the ‘Generate Image’ command in the Creator Studio versions of Pages and Keynote. Features like Magic Fill in Numbers also feel like things that would have previously just been promoted as free perks as being a member of the Apple ecosystem, rather than part of a premium package.
Paying for additional iCloud storage has already become a common occurrence for its customer base, with the 5 GB storage free tier still unchanged since iCloud launched back in 2011.
What’s next, and how much is too much? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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