Apple had their big event and despite all the new services they announced only one is available today and that is Apple News+. The magazine feature of Apple News+ is not new actually Apple purchased a company named Texture back in March of 2018. By July of that year, Apple made Texture subscribers happy by announcing that they were cutting the price of its Premium tier from $14.99 to $9.99 per month which is the current price of Apple News+.

I started using Apple News way before the recent announcement of Apple News+. For one the App is on my MacBook Pro, iPad and iPhone by default and syncs up together. I would expect this from a typical Apple product. I got away from using good old Flipboard as I found the app and interface bloated and almost unusable after the last few recent updates. While I did like Flipboard I don’t find it as good as it used to be a few years ago.

While Apple made Apple News+ sound appealing and it is a great value for $9.99 a month the point of saying you get articles from both the Wall Street Journal and LA Times was a bit of a stretch.  While you do get select articles for free which would be behind the paywall normally on both those sites it’s a select few articles many others are still behind the paywall and to read them you need the subscription to that paper.

With Apple News, the + is basically the magazine part of the service but don’t sell that short because many of the magazines are top shelf magazines that would be between $10-$20 dollars a year like Wired, Popular Mechanics, Esquire, Linux Professional, and many others just to name a select few. If you are someone who subscribes to 5 or 6 of these magazines a year it may be a worthwhile idea to subscribe to Apple News+.

I will say while I think the value is there for $9.99 a month, I would like to see more news organizations jump on board like Wall Street Journal and LA Times. Many news organizations doing well in the digital age opted out of joining Apple News+ service like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Both companies want to grow subscribers on their own outside of the Apple ecosystem and want to prevent Apple from getting a cut of their profits.

While I think Apple News+ is worth the value I don’t see the News part being the reason you subscribe to the service it’s the magazines unless Apple can get more Newspapers on board the service will be dependent on getting magazine subscribers.

I would like to point out as well that the Texture app is shutting down on May 28 in wake of Apple News+ launch and is giving all texture app users a one-month free trial for the Apple News service. I wonder how many users Apple is going to lose as Texture was on the Android side as well and Apple News is currently not offered on Android.