It's worth mentioning that Apple Music is available on Android, and there's no reason to doubt the TV offering will be as well. News+ and Arcade are perhaps less likely, but the fact that Music is available on Android at all suggests that Apple are looking to make money from their services rather than use them as a lock-in tool.

I disagree with those being sticky. I have a fleet of Apple devices and iMessage and FaceTime are absolutely sticky but they just don’t compare to what Apple introduced at the recent event, which I think was all pretty weak.

I was interested in News, because of the WSJ, but it’s not even the full Journal.

I’m still amazed Apple is not doing anything about robocalls. This is an area where software can improve the situation, and I do believe this is related to privacy.

And instead we get the latest iOS with...more Animoji.

>I was interested in News, because of the WSJ, but it’s not even the full Journal.

There was a lot of back and forth on this, but I think it is the full journal. Is there a section that’s supposed to be excluded? You can go to an article, hit share, and open it in apple news to test.

I didn’t mean these things will be as sticky as imessage and face time. Just that they are factors that expand the ecosystem for some users. Apple news has been very popular in the US, so news+ will probably be a no brainer for some people. If done well, games will be sticky for a ton of people, and so on.

The question isn’t “would I use that?” It’s whether others would.

Yep I’m definitely considering others, not only myself, as best as I can. But I don’t see these things being attractive to even non-technical users. Or not enough of reasons to keep them on the Apple ecosystem. It seems like basically up-sells to me to increase revenue off the existing customer base because they know they cannot keep increasing iPhone sales YoY.

I do think News is probably the best bet. It’s something I’ve wanted for a while because not many people are going to pay 5-10/month for numerous news sources that are often regurgitating the same news. But I doubt it would keep me on Apple. And isn’t this something that could eventually easily be replicated by others?

Regular apple news has been wildly popular though....even without the paid version it’s a sticking point for people whp use it frequently.

I’m not in the US, so I won’t have the card, but that got the most interest post event by far. As for games, if they’re good I think it will be huge with families. Parents will buy for their kids. And if some good games are exclusive it will be a sticking point for sure. I’m almost certainly signing up. I only game with a nintendo switch currently, but the Apple games look similar: fun, lightweight indie games I can play in spare time.

Agree. The only thing that could be very sticky for me would be Apple Card, I don't mind losing one or two percentage of rebate for the Financial Monitoring, ease of use, and my personal Data.

The next iPhone will be a wireless charging mat in of itself. Why release AirPower when you can rest your AirPods or watch or a friends phone on yours to get a charge.

Maybe other manufacturers will follow suit but none have AirPods or a watch like Apple does. Probably in a few years you’ll charge your Apple glasses wirelessly using your iPhone too.

For me this new feature is even stickier as it’s innovative even if they sorta copied Samsung’s Wireless PowerShare that’s in the S10.

>Regarding stickiness. Apple introduced the following:

I don't think any of those things are all that sticky. I think it's more about leveraging their client base to push into what are essentially commodity industries. Like the credit card. Apple's offering is more or less the same as everyone else's. They will still get some % of iPhone users because it's the most convenient option. Even a few % translates into millions of users and 10s-100s of millions of annual profit. Amazon is a few years ahead of Apple in doing the same thing.

They have a gigantic second mover advantage in any sort of app or online service. Whatever they make can be the default option and they have a built in 30/15% price advantage from the app store fees.

>I left off TV: I’m not sure how it adds to stickiness

I think this is the best example to illustrate my point. Video streaming is not really a commodity. It's a balkanized landscape of minor fiefdoms controlling content. There's a handful of big movie studios, a bunch of TV producers, all of the different sports league, and other live events. It's not like music where Apple can produce a Spotify competitor with relatively little effort. Competing with Netflix means producing originals and doing a better job of buying content. It's much much harder.

Yes, they’re also revenue plays for apple. But that doesn’t mean they don’t add to stickiness. That’s a big purpose of prime after all: prime generates revenue, but it keeps people on amazon. The credit card cuts amazon’s transaction fees, but it keeps people on prime and shopping on amazon.

No single point of apple’s offering is all that important for stickiness, but I think it will add nicely to their ecosystem effect.

>Apple already has a strong ecosystem effect, especially in the US

I don't believe it's as strong as Apple would have people believe. It may be that I fail to understand Apples US reach, but I don't see that owning an iPhone makes customers stay with in the Apple ecosystem. I would be surprised if even 25% of Apples iPhone customers have an existing subscription to an Apple service.

The new products/service also seems like a failure to plan for beyond the US marked. Neither of the four service seem like something that would be enticing to customers in other countries. To me it seems like Apple has come to the end of the road, there are no new device or service, to they attempt to make a little profit in four niche markets.

>It may be that I fail to understand Apples US reach, but I don't see that owning an iPhone makes customers stay with in the Apple ecosystem. I would be surprised if even 25% of Apples iPhone customers have an existing subscription to an Apple service.

Here’s a short list of some of the things that may keep someone on apple. Most people don’t use most of them. But even having 1-2 may keep someone.

* apple watch

* apple health data

* iCloud photo libraries (sharing with family etc)

* imessage

* certain apps only on ios/mac

* privacy

* apple music

* itunes music library

* now, apple news, apple arcade, apple card

* airdrop

* airpods

* integration between iphone, ipad, apple watch, mac, etc

Apple has about 50% us market share, so a lot of those involve social or family ties. Outside the us these are less important: most people in Europe use whatsapp for example, negating imessage.

But the point is, for each of those bullets, there’s somechunk of people who are deeply invested in it. It csn be a bit hard to imagine on the outside, because most non-apple services are cross platform. But imagine if you couldn’t use gmail, youtube, netflix etc when switching from android to iphone. It would make you think a lot harder about the choice. These aren’t great examples because they’re more important than the apple services, it’s just to illustrate the idea: if you leave the apple ecosystem, there will be things important to you that you can no longer do.

More prosaic android examples would be things such as homescreen customization, better notification management, etc. anyone switching from android has to give those up, and they help prevent switching from android to apple.

Apple Watch keeps me on iPhone big time but attraction to alternatives increases. IMesseage is essentially dead in Germany, the music app is a usability mess and apple maps unusable... I dont even want to start on siri, the appstore-app or apple tv Its hard to watch a renowned company like apple to fail on quality so badly...

Not that it negates your point but their share is 45% and projected to remain stable or decline over the next few years.

(http://fortune.com/2019/02/21/apple-iphone-sales-2018/ New phone sales are even weaker than overall share.)

It would probably be useful to think of the announcement as a start to these offerings, not their final form. Of course they’re tailored to the US, the US is the single largest market in the world and one Apple understands fundamentally.

Personally I'm very excited about News+. When News launched I was hoping it would become something like News+ eventually. I think this could be what saves good journalism, I like to get news from a spread of publications especially with different biases and the existing subscription contracts would make this impossibly expensive.

>I think this could be what saves good journalism,

What killed Good Journalism was the lack of revenue. And I don't see News+ would save it.

You’re joking, right? The whole point of News+ is to share the subscription revenue with publishers.

Apple takes 50% cut.

It’s not clear that’s a better deal for news sources than just monetizing their own paywalls.

NY Times and Washington Post certainly think they can do better on their own.

This. I don't have an answer to what could save quality Journalism. But $5 spread between hundreds of publication from Gossip Magazines to Fashion and Entertainments don't sounds too reassuring.

As a point of comparison, the music subscription services are spreading $7/month between thousands of different artists. That seems to be working extremely well. We’re something like ten years into music subscriptions, right? It seems possible to me that ten years of getting people used to paying for news subscriptions could leave journalism in a similar place as the music industry.

There is a long tail in Music where Music produced today will still get revenue 10 to 30 years down the road. Compared to News which requires constant updating. And most musician or artist have other source of income mainly from live performing and tours. There is also the return of Vinyl which I think will only continue to grow.

There are no such revenue stream from the News Subscription.

We should find out in a few years time.

Napkin math:

If 1 million people sign up to AN+ at $10 per month, that’s $10 million per month brought in, or $120 million per year. Apple takes $60 million of that, and 300 publishers divvy up the other $60 million, which if distributed equally would be $200K per year, per magaizine. Apple has stated that payment will correspond with performance, which Apple defines as “time spent,” which will probably heavily skew to the publications being featured on the front page of AN+. Publications that don’t use the enhanced format (which is roughly half of them, currently) will likely never appear on the front page, which means they’ll earn nada, and the revenue will be lopsided to the publications Apple promotes.

Everything hinges on how Apple defines “Time Spent” and how much that correlates with promotion on AN+’s front home screen.

I don’t have the time to go look at financial statements of music labels vs publishers, but my guess is that the written word is much cheaper to produce. After all, the talent is much cheaper. Are there magazine or newspaper writers making more than $250k/year? Probably not. But there are tons of musical acts with multi-million dollar deals. Also, while there are songs and albums that make money for a long time, the labels need fresh content in the same way that publishers need fresh content.

But, look, I’m not saying this is a home run. All I’m saying is that it’s not clear to me that this is doomed to failure. Might work, might not. We shall see.

So there's the solution, journalists need to start going on tour to perform their journalism live and sell merch.

What disappoints me about Apple News+ is the lack of good UI for long reads, which must surely be the point of including things like the New Yorker. You can save articles, but there's no good UI to queue up what to read and then read them later. I use Pocket for this sort of thing -- seems like a missed opportunity.

(Right now you can't even remove magazines after adding them. Really feels like a beta product.)

What does News+ provide you with, which News did not?

Full access to the nations leading magazines. New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, etc. I don’t care about those, personally, but they’re some of the best long form writing around.

All of these magazines are on the free version of Apple News, but I haven’t done a deep-dive into how much of their content is available, so I get it if the “full access” part is important to you. I do wonder how important this is to most people though.

I wonder too. The only reason I think this has any chance in hell of working is that I didn’t think anybody would ever use the non-plus version of News. But they do.