Thoughts on Apple Apps

I've got a number of things I wanted to write about, but I'm not quite done reading or watching them all, so I thought instead I'd talk about something that's been on my mind a lot recently: Apple's various services.

If you have an iPhone, or are generally plugged into the Apple ecosystem, you've probably gotten alerts about free trials for certain services. They also do a pretty good job of tying these trials to specific devices that you've just acquired: when I got my Apple TV a couple of years ago, I also got a free 12-month trial of Apple TV Plus, which meant I could watch Ted Lasso like basically everyone else during the pandemic.

So for this post I'll summarize a few of these services and what I've discovered by using them. Some of it's good, some of it's bad, but it should all give a good idea of what Apple's focusing on these days, given that the phone/hardware market is probably not going to be enough to sustain it in the long term.

Apple TV Plus

As mentioned, I picked this up a couple of years ago when I got my Apple TV. I hadn't been desperate to sign up for Apple TV Plus, because its opening slate of shows didn't exactly light the world on fire. But then Ted Lasso became everyone's favorite show during the pandemic, and it became a favorite of mine too. 

I actually cancelled my subscription after finishing season 2 of Ted Lasso, but renewed it for season 3, and then kept it because I wanted to finish a couple of other shows. I liked the first season of Little America, and of course I love Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon, its creators, so that's on the list, along with Foundation and For All Mankind (which apparently got good). I'm also interested in Slow Horses, since I read one of the books in that series in 2021, but the main thing I'm watching right now is the Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman travel shows, starting with Long Way Round.

It does seem like Apple has some decent shows on there now, and it doesn't seem to be wielding the cancellation hammer like Netflix or Max, so that's nice. It's also interesting how the feed can pull in content from other apps, if you let it, though my experience was that it was super buggy with HBO Max (but then, that had so many bugs they could have called it Starship Troopers).

I don't know how long the trial period Apple offers is currently, but it's worth a look. It's also pretty cheap compared to all the other streamers, so that's another point in its favor.

Apple Fitness Plus

This was a bit of a misfire, in my opinion. I got a few months of it when I replaced my Apple Watch, and gave it a few tries, but ended up cancelling the trial early. There are some extremely clever aspects, like how it syncs your Apple TV to your Apple Watch, so that you can see your calories burned and your heart rate onscreen. It also has a bunch of different types of workouts, from yoga to HIIT to whatever, so you're not locked into one type of exercise.

That said, a lot of those workout types weren't very convenient for me, since I live on the top floor of a condo building and I don't have loads of space or equipment. I had to keep all my HIIT workouts to the low-impact versions (usually demonstrated on the side by a second trainer), so that I wouldn't annoy my neighbors or burst through their ceiling one quiet Sunday morning. Some workouts looked like they required a treadmill, which is cool, but I'm not taking my iPad to the gym, where it can get lost or stolen or broken. I'd like to have kept it, but I just couldn't use the damn thing to its full potential.

Apple Arcade

I got this one with my new iPhone a couple of years ago, and promptly loaded its constituent games on my iPad. I've also since signed up for it for a month or two at a time, to enjoy certain specific games (Kingdom Rush Frontiers and Kingdom Rush Vengeance, primarily). There are some fun exclusives, but the draw with those two Kingdom Rush games is that all the heroes and towers are unlocked, so you're not making in-app purchases.

Another game I spent a good amount of time on was the updated Oregon Trail. The Apple Arcade version looks great and its soundtrack sounds like a lost mid-2000s folk rock album, plus it has updated educational material about the Native tribes you'd have interacted with, as well as about race relations, gender relations and more. Maybe the only problem is that it's too addictive.

Now that I have a new iPad, with a little more horsepower, I want to check out Apple Arcade again sometime. It's also $5 a month, which feels like a ridiculously cheap price to get so many games.

Apple News

Not sure why I got offered a free trial to this one, but when I got the alert I decided to check it out, since it promises unlimited access to a bunch of news outlets that otherwise have paywalls or article limits.

It should be good, since I can check out the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal (on those rare occasions when I want to read it) and more. But it's really not. Of all the apps I'm writing about here, this is the worst, because of the lack of searchability and the fact that it doesn't integrate with other apps where you might find news.

To give you an example, I saw a New Yorker headline on my Facebook news feed. I tried to click on it, but I was at my article limit for the month or something. I went looking for it on Apple News, but News doesn't have a search function, so after sifting through a few issues' tables of contents, I realized I didn't know what issue it would have been in, so I had to search for it on Safari. When I found it there, I still couldn't read it because of the article limit. You'd think that two Apple apps could integrate, but you'd be wrong.

The original idea, of revenue-sharing with news outlets and aggregating news based on your interests, is good, but the execution is terrible. Avoid.

Apple Music and Apple Music Classical

From the worst to the best. I got a 6-month trial of Apple Music when I bought my Beats Fit Pro earbuds, and it immediately became my go-to music app, supplanting both Spotify and YouTube (for the most part). Unlike News, Music has a great search function, and unlike Spotify, it has pretty much every musical act I could want. I haven't spent a lot of time with its podcasts (nor did I listen to Spotify's), and its curated playlists are okay, so I can't speak to those, but I love the completeness of each artist's discography.

Another reason to get this app is that, if you like classical music, their Apple Music Classical companion app is included, though it's a separate app that you have to download, and it's designed for iPhone, so it looks weird on my iPad and doesn't exist on desktop. That said, it fixes the one glaring gap with the original Music app, which is that classical music discovery was pretty bad. This, on the other hand, lets you search by composer, genre, century, musician, etc. For the last few weeks I've been going through all the George Gershwin compositions, many of which are available in multiple recordings, and it's been fun to see how they all stack up against one another.

The other thing I like about Apple Music (the original) is that because it's natively on my laptop, tablet and phone, I can just listen to it whenever I want. That's particularly handy in the car, since I can connect my phone via bluetooth and play whatever I want when I'm driving, as long as I have signal. And unlike Spotify's free tier, Apple Music isn't ad-supported and it doesn't force you to listen to albums or playlists on randomly generated playlists. I've been a bit sad to leave behind my Spotify playlists, but I've had so much other music to listen to that I haven't had time to go back and recreate them in Apple Music.

This one is well worth the $10 a month, especially with its Classical companion. Which makes sense, since music was a key part of Apple's resurgence 20 years ago with the iPod and iTunes. They may not get all their services right, but it's good to see that this one is done so well.