Apple News

 

Apple News was the big deciding factor on which tier of Apple One I would select. I was pretty certain that I would use Apple Music and TV enough to justify that bundle. I wasn't as sure about News because it is an app/service that I had never really used before. However, since Twitter has become X, it has also become a cesspool and I was interested in reducing my reliance on it for news. Additionally, the Indy Star is behind a paywall and by upgrading to the Apple One tier that includes News, I get access to the Indy Star for about the same price as if I paid for the Indy Star by itself, so I decided to pull the trigger on the app.

After using News for several months, I'm generally happy with it. You can set up channels based on sources or topics, which creates a news feed curated for you. There are some adds within the articles themselves, but they aren't too obnoxious and there are no adds on the news feed itself. One of the best parts of using this app is that you don't have to deal with cookie disclaimers, pop-up ads and videos, etc. It is a much cleaner experience than clicking on links from X. This cleaner and less annoying approach to reading news that I care about is a much better experience than using X. With that being said, I wasn't able to completely get rid of X because of the individual contributors that I'm interested in. However, I was able to trim down the number of people I follow and thus the time I spend on X by quite a bit on a daily basis.

When you subscribe to News, you get access to daily puzzles which is a service that I didn't necessarily want but I do use periodically. Primarily I do the mini crossword puzzle, even if the clues frustrate me sometimes. Subscribing also gets you access to 100+ magazines, most of which I don't have interest in, but there are a handful I will check out from time to time. Retro Gamer is a magazine that I didn't even know existed that I've come to enjoy. The News app reminds me of RSS apps I used to use in the past. Its an app that collects your news stories in one place, and allows for easy access without the annoying cookies and pop-ups. The free service is good, but if you want to pay for the subscription you get access to pretty good additional content. You still have to scroll a lot, so it doesn't eliminate that part of internet reading, but for a low cost you get access to tons of content for the same price as 1 or 2 of the sources individually.