APRIL 2020 MACWORLD 45It’s always nice to be in good company, though.With Apple News+, Apple
finds itself struggling with
multiple publications in
various stages of the shift
from print to digital media.
It’s struggling to find the
best ways to pay sites and
to make them believe that
Apple News+ benefits
them, particularly when
those sites tend to have
vastly different means of generating their
own revenue. Apple also has no control
over the frequency or quality of the
content. This doesn’t matter much with the
free version of Apple News, but it’s a clear
problem with the premium content of
Apple News+. Maybe these issues
wouldn’t be so obnoxious if Apple at least
seemed interested in making an effort to
fix them (as it is with the notoriously buggy
iOS 13), but there’s little proof that it is.
Maybe, with so many aspects of Apple
News+ being out of the company’s control,
it just doesn’t know how.
Compare all this to how we see Apple
flexing its muscles with the paid services it
has more direct control over. Just this
week, we learned that Apple was pulling
planned theatrical screenings of the Apple
TV+ Samuel L. 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 [go.
macworld.com/hlrp]). 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 [go.macworld.com/mnsh]
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