Apple launches Apple News+, Apple Arcade and new Apple TV subscription services alongside a credit card to pay for them
Open wide: Apple plans new services to cash-in on its customers
Apple has revealed one of the year's worst-kept secrets: subscription services for news, TV and games that will be offered across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.
On top of that, Apple has also (as anticipated) launched its own affiliated credit card with investment bank Goldman Sachs. To provide the Mastercard credit card with the usual Apple twist, the card itself won't have a card number, expiration date, CVV security code or even require a signature, should the user decide to pay with plastic rather than Apple Pay.
The services were launched on Monday.
On the services side, the company launched Apple News+, which will initially only be available for readers in the US and Canada. For the price of $9.99 a month, it will offer all-you-can-eat access to newspapers and magazines such as National Geographic, Time and Vogue, as well as the Wall Street Journal and LA Times. Apple will reportedly trouser half the monthly subscription, while the media titles will receive a share of the remaining $5 in proportion to users' readership.
On top of that, the personalisation of the service will take place via iPhone or iPad, meaning that the content providers won't be able to track what users are reading.
Playing games
After years of eschewing games - not least by providing aged and underpowered GPUs with its desktop and laptop Mac, or relying on Intel's humdrum integrated GPUs - Apple has also decided to get into the subscription games service with Apple Arcade.
This mimicks the games subscription services already provided by Microsoft on the Xbox console, EA's Origin games portal and Sony PlayStation.
Apple's games subscription will work across iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV and provide more than 100 games - these will be paid-for titles rather than free titles with micro-transactions. Like the Apple News+ service, it is rumoured that developers will be paid in proportion to how much their games are played.
The games won't be streamed, but downloadable in their entirety to users' devices. The service will be rolled out worldwide in Autumn. Likewise, Apple says it will provide pricing and other details at a later date - indicating that the company is still finalising the details of the service itself.
Finally, Apple also unveiled its Apple TV+ service - a service that has been years in the making, if on-off rumours are any guide.
As with Apple Arcade, a lot of the details for Apple TV+ (such as price) weren't revealed yesterday, for a service that will also formally launch in Autumn.
It will work online and offline, with video content being downloadable. Apple TV+ will sit in an updated Apple TV app. The app will come with a suite of improvements, including ‘smart' recommendations and deeper video service interrogation, so that content can be downloaded and accessible from one place, rather bouncing users around between the Apple TV app and other video services.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Apple is also planning to push Apple TV onto other platforms, including smart TVs from Samsung, Sony and LG. It should also be available on Roku devices (but probably not Sky's Now TV platform, which is based on Roku technology) and Amazon's FireTV.