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With “Apple One”, a bundle of services like music, fitness or games, the world’s most valuable corporation in terms of market value wants to become less dependent on hardware, but individually few Apple services are so far convincing.
The biggest announcement Apple has this Tuesday takes just a few minutes. It is presented not by a senior manager, but by the director of the services business. Just the name of the new project, reminiscent of a space mission, suggests that something big is at stake for the world’s most valuable corporation.
Because strategically, “Apple One” is the most important product that Apple is introducing at its virtual event from its campus in Cupertino, California, probably the most important product since Apple Watch 2015. A subscription that costs 30 dollars and that Apple presented in the last years. – Service bundles: from Apple Music to Apple TV + and Apple’s Arcade gaming service to a new fitness service.
Lori Malm presents Apple One during a special event at the Apple Park corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California.
In Switzerland, neither Fitness + nor the Premier service will initially be available directly. But the reduced version with music, television and a subscription to mobile phone games, which should cost 18.50 francs for individuals and 25.50 francs for families.
For years, Apple has promised its investors that they will build their own successful subscription services as a more reliable mainstay alongside lucrative but fluctuating hardware sales. It works on paper: In the spring quarter of 2020, Apple had sales of more than $ 13 billion with services, a quarter of sales, also growing, of iPhones, AirPods and other products.
But sales from the App Store, where Apple claims as much as 30 percent of sales from third-party developers, also flow into the total. This source of income has not only come under heavy criticism recently. It also says nothing about whether Apple’s own services are particularly well received by iPhone or iPad owners. The balance is quite uneven: Apple Music is the largest music streaming service after Spotify with more than 60 million subscribers. Netflix competitor Apple TV + or premium news app News +, on the other hand, have been weak so far.
Neither service is likely to be profitable on its own.
But that’s not the point either: “By bundling many of its services together and providing them at an extremely low price, Apple is likely to strengthen the loyalty of its users and the attractiveness of its ecosystem,” says Thomas Husson, vice president and chief analyst at the researcher. market Forrester. .
To this end, Apple is even introducing a new fitness service, inspired by the success of Peloton, the provider of fitness bikes and the corresponding fields, which is seeing gigantic growth during the crown curfew. Like Peloton, Fitness +, which is said to cost $ 10 on its own, offers on-screen courses for ten different disciplines that should work on any networked exercise machine. Apple is yet to introduce an iBike or an iKettlebell.
But integration into Apple’s larger ecosystem is visible everywhere, like a puzzle picture that becomes more and more visible piece by piece. Not only is workout music from Apple Music built into Fitness +, Fitness + is an extension of the workout app on the Apple Watch.
Apple is increasingly expanding the watch to a health tracker, including through new features. In addition to the heartbeat and other bodily functions, the new Series 6 can also measure the concentration of oxygen in the blood, which could even be useful if Covid-19 is suspected. The Apple Watch dominates the smartwatch segment and generates more sales than the entire Swiss watch industry, but for the two trillion dollar group, wearables, which also include the successful Airpods, with about $ 6.5 billion in sales in the spring quarter. smaller selling item. But Apple boss Tim Cook wants to bring the watch to more wrists. It is not a coincidence that Apple is kicking off the event with the new watches and has dramatic videos telling people how tracking the watch body saved their lives.
As with iPhones, Apple is introducing a simplified SE version of the watch. Although it does not dominate the measurement of oxygen in blood, for example, it is around 100 euros cheaper than the usual 6 Series model for less than 300 euros.
Apple even loosens the tight docking of the Apple Watch to an iPhone a bit. Parents can connect their children’s watches to their own iPhone. Apple’s video for the product shows a mother smiling after her daughter leaves, but then immediately checks her iPhone to see if the girl is actually going to basketball practice. “The affordable Apple Watch SE coupled with the familiar feature is a smart way to attract new users and underscores that the watch is increasingly a standalone device,” says Forrester Husson analyst.
Apple is doing a lot these days. Even the iPad, whose sales figures have long disappointed, benefited from the laptop boom during the crown crisis. In just one quarter, iPad sales increased from $ 5 billion to $ 6.5 billion. Apple now wants to establish the iPad more firmly as a replacement for laptop and PC. Thanks to the new A14 bionic chip, even computationally intensive programs, like high-resolution games on the slim iPad Air, could run with better graphics performance than an equally expensive laptop, according to Apple.
With the new products (the 5G-capable iPhone 12 expected in October) and “Apple One”, Apple is gearing up for the Christmas business. However, the antitrust authorities that have targeted Apple in the EU and the US could spoil the festival.
A package deal with Windows and Internet Explorer was the criminal corpus in antitrust proceedings against Microsoft in the 1990s. Critics of Apple are already firing at the new offering: “Apple is again using its dominant position and unfair methods to favor their own services and thus worsen the situation for competitors and consumers, “wrote music streaming service Spotify in a statement.
