yah, but $30/mo literally puts it out of reach for 60+% of households, and that's on top of buying an apple tv and an apple watch for each user. that's just part of the narrowness of its appeal.

apple has historically targeted the mass premium customer segment, able to command a higher price and still entice the broader public to buy. fitness+ (and apple one) has the higher price but not the broader appeal. it's just not differentiated enough.

a personal anecdote: i've had apple tv+ for free for the past year and have watched it maybe a half dozen times. the shows are so overproduced to be tone-deaf. they're now trying to buy their way into the market via awards, so we'll see if that turns into any compelling content and moreover, more subscriptions.

What are the tone deaf shows you’re talking about? The Morning Show for sure is one. The other 3 shows I’ve watched have been good to great. Tone deaf is a very common attribute of media any way.

i honestly can't remember offhand, it was that unmemorable. maybe i should have said staid or sterile rather than tone-deaf.

apple tv+ is just not robust or differentiated enough from netflix, hbo, disney+, or anything else to be a thing. disney+ goes all-in on family, while hbo goes all-in on adult. netflix has the all-you-can-eat buffet model where you'll be comforted to find something, anything, to watch in a pinch. apple tv+ has nothing like that. there's no brand or identity to form a memorable market segment around.

Ah okay. I find Disney+, marvel, abc, cbs to be tone deaf. Sure that’s part of their identity. It’s still not good. I’d take Apple TV+ over CBS, ABC, Disney+ any day. Even if it never gets any more content.

Apple One lacks a compelling tentpole offering that most people would want. TV+ is what, the 4th place streaming subscription service? Apple music has 1/2 the market share of Spotify. Storage, maybe, but 2TB is quite a lot and I doubt most customers are buying that much.

I suspect most people see Apple One as Apple Music + <the other service they want> and they get the other 5 for free.

Yes. That is why apart from Apple Music+ ( and iCloud ), all the other services does not have a fix COGS to each user but large one off cost.

The storage goes from 200GB to 2 TB. 200 GB isn’t hard to use up in a family. Even 2 TB could be not enough for a family that uses iCloud to host most of their photos and videos. Apple’s storage pricing is super lame for a company that is so profitable. Really scraping at the edges with the silly pricing.

2TB would be a rare purchase if the next tier down weren't 1/10 the size.

While they're investing in marketing / engineering and they'll see user base grows, especially if products is free or almost free. But at some point of time question will come to revenue per user. And that will be completely different problem.

In this specific case, Fitness+ is relatively cheap to produce (all the content is theirs except for the music, but they already have a good relationship with music producers) and cheap to distribute. They make 1-3 new videos per instructor a week. I doubt it's costing them much per user to distribute the content. However, the Apple Watch is a nice profitable device for them and Fitness+ requires Apple Watch. So for anyone who already has the highest tier subscription (probably a decent chunk of multi-iDevice families out there) they will find themselves having Fitness+ but being unable to use it, which creates one extra motivator to buy an Apple Watch.

That's where they end up making money anyways, 75% or so of their revenue is from device sales (computers, phones, tablets, watches, etc.). The services help to keep people within that hardware ecosystem which gets people onto the upgrade cycle or to consider a second or third Apple device instead of just having one.