A Critical Look At Apple News+

Apple News+ is the new service from Apple where you can get the contents of about 300 magazines and other publications for $10 per month. But is Apple News+ worth it for you? A critical look finds it lacking in many areas: design, functions, and content. But there are some reasons you may still want to consider giving it a try.


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Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a critical look at Apple News+ and find out if it's worth the price.

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So Apple News+ is the news service from Apple where you can get about three hundred magazines and a few other news sources as part of a subscription service. So you're paying $10 a month. It's kind of like Netflix for magazines. So to access it you go into the News app in either your Mac, your iPhone, or your iPad. Then you look on the left for News+. You go in there and if you're not subscribed you're going to get a little Try For Free button. There's a thirty day free trial. You can also browse the catalog and see what magazines are included. So the way this works for the publishers is that your $10 fee is divided up depending upon what you've looked at. So if you spend half your time looking at Time magazine and the other half looking at Rolling Stone then half that money is going to go to that first publication and half to the second. Of course Apple is going to take its cut as well. It could mean that some of those big publications actually make less money per subscriber. Some of the smaller publications that may never get a penny from you may actually make actually make a little bit of money because you find an article or two that is interesting or perhaps you find the entire magazine interesting and you never would have tried it before.

So here I am now setup as a subscriber. I can see here My Magazines. It has the magazine I most recently looked into. It has got recent ones but already I see problems. There's no way to edit this list. I can't go and say these are the three magazines I really want and put them up here. I do get a listing here of interesting stories throughout. I've got kind of a browse feature. But searching seems impossible. If you search using the search bar here you're going to actually get results throughout Apple News not just in the magazines. There doesn't seem to be a way to say I want to search for this topic, in this magazine, or in the set of magazines that I'm interested in.

Linking is also difficult. If I go to a story, say this one in Wired, and I want to share it you can see I have a limited number of things I could do to Share. There's no real way to Copy. I can kind of create an email and then copy the link. But even if I do it's going to share an Apple News link. There's no real way for me to say share that story to somebody that subscribed in another way or just linked to regular article that's on the web. A lot of these articles are available on the web. In addition Linking In is very difficult. If somebody sends me a link to say a story at Rolling Stone it's not going to be an Apple News link. I'm going to have to actually go into Apple News+, go to Rolling Stone, look at the table of contents, and find that story.

There are no archives. For instance, if I search for Consumer Reports I do come up with the magazine and it's one of the ones inside of Apple News+. There's a bunch of different issues here. But the whole idea with something like Consumer Reports is to be able to search for a topic and that's what I would get if I actually subscribed to them directly. I'd be able to go way further back than this and I'd be able to find what I wanted quickly.

If I see a story like this that I like I can indicate that with this little love button and I suppose things suggested to me would be altered by loving this story or disliking it. But what I really want to do is to be able to save the story. I can through File, Save. If I looked at the bottom here I see Saved Stories. There I'll find ones that I've saved.

When Apple News+ came out some people said this could be the end of magazines. They were talking about the economic model. Right. Paying $10 a month and then dividing it up among magazines. But what I think could really be the death of magazines here is the fact that they look so boring when you're just looking at a list of headlines. Even when you go into the article it's not that exciting. I mean there are images and some text and that's about it. It doesn't look as good as in a regular magazine. It is nice to be able to do things like increase the font size. It does create a nicer reading experience especially if your eyes are getting older. Now some magazines are a little better than others. For instance National Geographic it's a little bit nicer of a page.

Now one thing you would expect from Apple News+ is the ability to download a magazine like I'm doing here. When you do it you'll get that magazine even if you're not connected to the internet. Another thing I like about it is the fact that you can try some magazines that you never normally would buy at the newsstand. Or if you just want to read one little article, say in a travel magazine, you can read that. Some revenue goes to that magazine and you get to read the article and you didn't have to buy an entire issue or subscribe.

So should you get Apple News+. Is it worth the money? Well, three things to consider. First is it's free for thirty days. So you can just give it a try and see if its worth it for you. Price wise it makes sense to get Apple News+ if there are at least two magazines that you read cover to cover and you're willing to give up the paper version of it. Another reason you may want to consider Apple News+ is if you like to read magazines while traveling. They don't take up any extra weight or space in your bag and it's really nice and convenient to be able to read them on your iPad.

Other than those three reasons I really can't recommend Apple News+ for most people. Maybe in the future if Apple adds more publications and more services and perhaps a few more newspapers it will become worth it.

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