Apple One & Home

 

We've been long term Amazon Prime subscribers. Due to increasing cost and perceived decreased benefits (along with some other things), we've decided to discontinue our Amazon Prime subscription. The reason I'm bringing this up here is because of some downstream ramifications that come with discontinuing Prime. When I first started subscribing to a streaming music service several years ago, I went with Amazon Music Unlimited, partially because of a discount that was received if you were a Prime subscriber. I'm not sure if we still receive a discount for Music Unlimited, but the decision to drop Prime got me thinking about switching music services as well. Generally I've been happy with Music Unlimited. However, like everything else it seems, the price keeps going up for the service. Additionally, and I'll get into more details on a future post, I had issues with the Music Unlimited app(s). We're heavily involved in the Apple eco system, and so I started looking into Apple Music. This escalated quickly as I discovered Apple One, a bundle package that includes all of the apps shown in the picture above. There are already a handful of shows on Apple TV that I watch, and there is another handful of shows that I'm interested in watching. Additionally, with Formula 1 switching from ESPN to Apple TV, there was additional incentive to pick up Apple TV again. I was already familiar with TV, but I decided to do a trial of Apple Music to make sure it would work for us. Apple News is part of the bundle, and so I decided to pay attention to it again as a potential source of news. After doing about a month trial of Music and News, I decided that it was worth switching from Amazon Music Unlimited to the Apple One bundle. On the one hand, the per month cost would go up. On the other hand, I like the Apple Music app better than the Music Unlimited app, I will watch content on Apple TV, and I'll use the News app daily. This is what I mean when I say that things escalated quickly. None of this was on my radar until one Saturday morning Sarah suggested we get rid of Prime. This decision, plus being heavily involved in the Apple eco system and the overall quality of the apps in the One bundle made the decision make sense for us.

What I plan on doing is having subsequent posts where I talk about (at least some of) the apps individually. Like I said above, I've been doing trials over the past month with the apps and have subscribed to the One bundle now for a little over a week, and so I have enough experience with them to have opinions and thoughts moving forward. The other thing I wanted to mention in this post was Apple Home. We have some lighting automation in our home, some of which is electronic (as opposed to being dawn to dusk with solar sensors). The electronic workflows were a bit of a mess, because of a mix of software being used. Some of the lights were running on Alexa, some on Belkin Wemo, and some on Apple Home. In January, Belkin discontinued support for their Wemo smart plugs, which were running all of our lighting timers. I decided that moving forward I wanted to run all of our smart home workflows through Apple Home. The app is readily available to me on all of my Apple devices, it is a nice looking and easy to use app, and Apple TV can be used as a smart home hub to help control your smart devices. Since my original go around with smart home devices, a standardized protocol called "Matter" has been developed, allowing for interoperability between devices made by different companies. This is a great step forward. For me, ensuring that my devices work with Apple Home is how I am going to standardize where I go to control my home workflows. The app is really nice, and the ability to use Apple TV as a hub is a nice feature as well.