April 2020 • Macworld 75with digital content, the hassle of searching for
publications, and the lack of real reasons to give up
many direct subscriptions to notable magazines.
One year on, the best thing about it is that it’s a
relatively cheap way to read The Wall Street Journal
and The New Yorker. With services, Apple News+
suggested last spring, Apple was biting off more
than the famous hardware maker could chew.
Today, Apple’s trouble with its paid news service
looks like an anomaly. Apple TV+ may not yet be
as ‘sexy’ as services like Netflix or the brand-new
Disney+, but all the same, it’d be a stretch to call
any of its launch-week shows ‘duds’. (In fact, I’m
surprised to find myself looking slightly more
forward to new episodes of See than to those
for Disney+’s phenomenal Star Wars epic The
Mandalorian.) Apple Arcade is an unqualified
success, at least judging from the number of people
chatting about it on social media. For almost every
Friday since launch, Apple has cranked out one or
more fantastic games that often release alongside
console counterparts and play well on every
screened device in the Apple ecosystem. Aside
from some grumbling that Apple Arcade is only
available on Apple devices, I’ve seen virtually no
outright hate for the service. And then, of course,
we have years-old Apple Music, which now boasts
over 60 million subscribers and faces lawsuits from
rival Spotify aimed at keeping its rapid expansion
in check. Along with iTunes, it served as early proof
that Apple could dominate in an arena that wasn’t
strictly related to hardware.