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Apple now has more than 700 million paid subscriptions, which is up 150 million from last year, and is four times the number of subscriptions that Apple had fou
by r0fl 5y ago
Apple now has more than 700 million paid subscriptions, which is up 150 million from last year, and is four times the number of subscriptions that Apple had four years ago.
700,000,000 paid subscriptions is the craziest metric in tech. That’s an absolutely insane amount of people paying Apple one way or another as opposed to being free users and just seeing ads
- pavlov 5y agoMicrosoft has almost 300M paid subscribers for Office alone. The comparison is certainly apples to oranges; just throwing it out there that 700M across a range of consumer offerings isn’t that crazy when a single business product can reach 300M.
- spoonjim 5y agoBut Office is something businesses have been paying for for 30 years. These Apple services have launched in the last 10 years. It's meteoric growth.
- Spooky23 5y agoEveryone seems to miss that. Office was the original subscription for all intents and purposes, and with platform pricing in EAs, it was and is almost impossible to get rid of it.
- flowerlad 5y ago> a single business product There is no program called Office.exe. Microsoft Office is not a single business product; it is a suite of products.
- coldtea 5y agoWhich is not really relevant or interesting. A product is not necessarily a program (an executable). A suite can be a product too, and you can absolutely sell a suite as a single SKU. In fact that's exactly what MS does 90% of the time, and it even used to sell it in shrink-wrapped box form.
- flowerlad 5y agoAnd that's what Apple's subscription is selling too. So it doesn't make sense to say Microsoft's offering is a "single product" and Apple's is "a range of consumer offerings".
- coldtea 5y agoWell, Apple doesn't have a single subscription, they have several in totally unrelated areas (from Music to AppleCare, and from renewing your Iphone model every year leasing-style to Cloud backup). They do offer bundles for some, but not for others.
- salamandersauce 5y agoCan you even buy a standalone copy of Word or Excel anymore? You can't subscribe to them individually and you can't buy them individually so what does it matter if there is 5 *.exes or 1?
- i2infinity 5y ago300M is impressive, but we are missing the point here. Most of that count comes from involuntary herd signups by their enterprise customers. What Apple has done is impressive, (although they have equally questionable ways to retain customers). I am sure that at any point, a sizable chunk of Apple's 700M pie would be trial users, but still, it is a considerable number.
- lowbloodsugar 5y agoIndeed, "alone". What else do they have? Skype? Teams? Both part of Office 365. XBox GamePass? 23 Million.
- coldtea 5y agoThis "single business product" has been dominant enterprise and small bussiness tech for 30+ years. 300M isn't that impressive given this. And it's not something users seek and opt, it's something business demands and buy in bulk for them. Plus it's losing ground, replaced by other SaaS. Whereas Apple built their 700M from nowhere (near bankcrupt sub-2% market share in 1997, starting building their subscription offering past 2007, and more seriously, past 2012 or so).
- smt88 5y agoOffice isn't "cool" or anything, but people definitely seek it out. No competitor comes close to Excel, Word, or PowerPoint right now.
- coldtea 5y agoDon't they? For 99% of what people do, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and LibreOffice equivalents will do just fine. Heck, Google Docs will do just fine.
- smt88 5y agoFor PowerPoint and Excel, I strongly disagree. People do horrific things with Excel that I think are far beyond its intended usage, but they love it for that. You can't pry Excel away from people in finance and a lot of quantitative/non-programmer roles. Word is more debatable. Yes, if you use it just for taking notes or something, the alternatives are fine. But if you want to make a nice-looking document, Word is still just a lot better. I've never seen a fantastic Google Doc, for example, even that my company's designers have worked on. And LibreOffice is another, older generation of UI/UX that is far behind Office at this point.
- paxys 5y agoThe number is crazy for sure but then it includes stuff like the $0.99/mo iCloud storage subscription which is basically mandatory if you own an iPhone. Would be far more interesting to see the broken-out numbers for Apple Music, TV+, Apple One etc. if they ever share them.
- vimy 5y agoI don’t know why this comment is downvoted? My parents, in their late 60s and the opposite of tech savvy, have an iCloud storage subscription. The default 5 gigabyte is laughable small.
- tinus_hn 5y agoHow is it mandatory? You can backup to your own computer and then you don’t even have to worry about the snoops looking at your data.
- bretpiatt 5y agoEven if all 700 million subscribers are $0.99/month it is still an $8.3 billion per year business. That's enough to be #362 on 2021 Fortune 500. If you really drill into all the different numbers they release over time as investment / corporate strategy analyst you can get a pretty reasonable mix on revenue streams this size. I don't dig in on Apple as I'm a B2B focused person so speculating a bit here based on parallel experience.
- themolecularman 5y agoHaha I just finally splurged on that $0.99/mo iCloud storage, after just not backing up my phone forever :/
- r00fus 5y ago"just seeing ads". Maybe removing that distraction, UX nightmare and malware vector is worth it to them? I wonder how Apple counts family subscriptions. I have several accounts, but only one subscription...
- ksec 5y agoI wonder How many of that are users from Apple TV+ which forgot to cancel their subscription? It could also be a huge increase in iCloud usage. No wonder why they are creating Apple One, they want to convert those 700M subscribers into higher paying account.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoIf your family has more than one iPhone, and is happy with Apple Music, the $30 per month is a no brainer.
- lowbloodsugar 5y agoI can't imagine anyone with an Apple TV+ subscription that doesn't also have an iCloud subscription of some kind. Perhaps Apple TV owners? But there's only 25 million of them.
- gordon_freeman 5y agoI think it would be great to know Avg revenue per subscription to make sense of this massive 700m subs number. FWIW, Apple has range of services from iCloud starter plan ($1/month) to Apple One bundle Premier plan ($30/month) and a lot of services in between.
- BuyMyBitcoins 5y agoApple One is a shockingly uninspired name from a company known for some really inventive branding.
- enos_feedler 5y agoIt’s also not even accurate because there are multiple flavors of Apple “One”
- interestica 5y agoEspecially because there's Google One (cloud storage) and Microsoft OneDrive (cloud storage).
- uncomputation 5y agoApple is known for effective branding. Not inventive branding. Look at their other names: Music, TV, Fitness, News. I think Apple’s priority here is simplicity and getting the idea immediately across rather than being “creative.”
- threeseed 5y ago- Apple Fitness is the only fitness at home service that integrates with the Apple Watch. - Apple Music is the only streaming service that has lossless, high sample rate music and international radio stations. - Apple News is the only service providing "all you can eat" magazine subscriptions. - Apple TV is the only service that has its unique style of content i.e. movie quality production values. They do have unique offerings that other companies aren't providing whether advertising supported or not.
- vimy 5y ago> Apple TV is the only service that has its unique style of content i.e. movie quality production values. Am I missing something? What about Disney+ and (some) Netflix shows? The Mandalorian and the Marvel shows have movie budgets.
- fluxem 5y ago"unique style of content" is a strange way to describe a lackluster library. It doesn't even seem to be improving. There is not a lot of new content compared to 6 month ago (when I first checked). Unless you're very into one of few shows, it's not worth it. And it's not me speaking. They offer 1 year free trial! Who does this? I have't tried other services, so I cannot comment. Although, Apple Music seems to be a disaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE8ZikfrpFU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE8ZikfrpFU
- BoorishBears 5y ago> Apple Fitness is the only fitness at home service that integrates with the Apple Watch. Not true. I've personally worked on the Gymkit integration another very well known at-home service uses and they're not alone. > Apple Music is the only streaming service that has lossless, high sample rate music and international radio stations. That's a strange specific qualification... Like saying it's the only red car with exactly 23.4034 gallons of fuel in it in the parking lot. By that logic Tidal is the only streaming service that has lossless, high sample rate music and supports MQA? > Apple News is the only service providing "all you can eat" magazine subscriptions Nope. https://www.magzter.com/magztergold https://www.magzter.com/magztergold https://us.readly.com/ https://us.readly.com/ > Apple TV is the only service that has its unique style of content i.e. movie quality production values. W... what? I don't even know how/why you'd quantify this, but Apple TV is not the only Apple TV. Or rather, Apple TV is not the only Netflix... - If anything what your comment is doing is exposing why Apple is so ridiculously dominant when they dip their toes in anything. Apple Music for example, had features no other app could have for years, like Siri integration (which didn't open up until Apple Music was well cemented) So it didn't matter if the selection sucked, they could shove it down people's throats until it had traction. Likewise, Gymkit is an absolute bear to integrate. It's not like integrating an SDK, Apple is practically entering a business agreement with you, and they have full power to stop your launch over icons not looking the way they want. - All that being said, I use an iPhone, I accept the Faustian bargain, but let's call a spade a spade. Nothing about Apple's subscriptions is unique, if anything they're all kind of second place to other services... until you sprinkle in the insanely tight integration they have with the OS.
- oh_hello 5y agoApple One really feels like a great deal. I was already paying $10 a month for 2 TB of data storage. Now I pay $30 for their full package of services. It's amazing to have access to all of these.
- paxys 5y agoApple Music is the only thing holding it back for me right now. It's still a long way behind Spotify at the same price point. I have tried to switch multiple times but keep coming back.
- zwily 5y agoIt’s a good deal even without Music.
- Tagbert 5y agoFor many of us, Apple Music is good enough. I just don’t care enough to bother with Spotify. If it matters to you that’s great. I’m just pointing out that a lot of us will go with the default if there is no compelling reason to add something else.