[jldugger]

I agree it's possible, but their services offerings are all paid, and there are enough of them now that a discount bundle exists[1]. And then there's the App Store / iTunes / iTunes Match. Even checking out to buy hardware tries to upsell you AppleCare+ service.

There are many reasons it's done this way, but I can see the reasons people might compare it to being turned upside down and shaken for loose change like a piggy bank.

[1]: https://www.apple.com/apple-one/

[lotsofpulp]

> but I can see the reasons people might compare it to being turned upside down and shaken for loose change like a piggy bank.

How?

Licensing music requires ongoing payments from Apple to music owners.

iCloud requires Apple to maintain data centers and bandwidth.

TV+ requires ongoing investment into creation of new video productions.

News+ is similar to music, Apple has ongoing costs to pay the owner of the journalism.

Games also gets new games all the time, so presumably there are ongoing expenses there also.

And fitness+ might be one where there is less need for ongoing expenses, but they do seem to be adding content regularly.

[jldugger]

I'm not saying there aren't costs associated with building or running these services that need to be paid for. But owning the OS and pushing subs in the default apps is just as annoying when Apple does it as when Youtube does.

[skinnymuch]

I had never noticed the upselling of Arcade or Fitness before. I opened the apps up now and see there are tabs for them. I’ve opened the fitness and app stores up for ages. Never noticed before. I barely notice the TV+ stuff in the TV app. Can’t comment on the other two services. Still, yes, this is lame to do.

However if this is an extension of the original argument for why it makes sense to assume Apple is Nickle and diming over priced digital services. It doesn’t fit.

[skinnymuch]

This doesn’t make sense. Their digital services require ongoing costs that are obvious to even non technical people. IE even my non technical mom would know TV and music streaming costs regular money. Most people know storage space costs money because of the cloud sync apps.

I don’t see how people can compare this to being turned upside down like you say unless they are claiming that for every major tech company. At which point Apple has little to do with it. Otherwise I don’t see how that thinking can be for any reason other than strong to extreme bias against Apple specifically.

I don’t recall being upsold applecare+ before. Maybe it’s a pretty small part of the online checkout process and I haven’t noticed it? I’m sure it happens. A family member and a friend have asked about it because they were being unsold. Still, this isn’t like some of the infamous upselling industries and niches.