April 2020 • Macworld 79L. Jackson flick The Banker after allegations of
sexual abuse were directed at the real-life son of
the movie’s subject (via The Hollywood Reporter).
For that matter, Apple approves and signs off on all
the shows on Apple TV+ (and I’m sorry, but all those
Apple product placements on The Morning Show
can’t be coincidences). And so it goes with Apple
Arcade, a service in which Apple partially funds
games and decides whether or not it’ll include them
in its carefully curated service. In all of these cases,
we’re seeing exactly what Apple wants us to see.
Apple can do almost none of that with Apple
News+, a service that insists you awkwardly look
at PDFs on an iPhone display. Apple News+’s
shortcomings result in an experience that feels
uncharacteristically ‘scattershot’ and ‘grab-baggy’
for Apple. The iPhone maker doesn’t even seem to
know how to make people care about the content,
as you don’t really get the kind of careful curation
you see on the App Store with Apple News+
stories. Apple Music is probably the service that
most resembles Apple News+ because of the
diversity of its content, but it doesn’t suffer from
the same problems because you access all the
content through the subscription and everything
shares the same file type. For that matter, it’s
usually pleasing to listen to the music regardless
of which device you’re on. With Apple News+’s
magazines, though, you’re almost certainly going
to want to use an iPad or a Mac.
I’m not saying I want more control from Apple
in this space. If anything – considering Apple’s