Should I Choose “Apple One” Or “Apple Music”? (Explained)

Subscription services are everywhere these days, and the cost sure can add up if you’re subscribed to several at once.

Apple, for example, has engineered a solution to a problem of their own design in the form of Apple One.

If you’ve heard of Apple One, which bundles together services like Apple Music, TV, and Arcade, you might be wondering if it’s worth it or if you should just stick to your Music plan.

Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to find out today, so wonder no more and keep reading!

Here’s Whether or Not You Should Get Apple One:

Apple One is a subscription bundling service that combines several Apple Subscription plans The Individual and Family plans bundle Apple Music, TV, Arcade, and iCloud, and the Premier plan also includes News and Fitness. If you use all these services, Apple One is definitely more cost-effective.

Are Apple One Services Worth the Money?

Whether or not you should get Apple One is a personal decision that only you can make for yourself.

But what we can do is give you all the details we can find so that you can make an informed decision based on your own wants and needs.

And we can start by dissecting the cost of Apple One’s several subscription plan options and how they each compare to the separate costs of the services they bundle.

First off, Apple One has three subscription tier options, each more expensive than the last.

Let’s take a look at what each offers:

• Individual Plan: Bundles Apple Music, TV, Arcade, and iCloud (50 GB) for one person. Costs $16.95 per month.
• Family Plan: Bundles Apple Music, TV, Arcade, and iCloud (200 GB) for up to five people. Costs $22.95 per month.
• Premier Plan: Bundles Apple Music, TV, Arcade, iCloud (2 TB), News, and Fitness for up to five people. Costs $32.95 per month.

Alright, let’s break these down one by one.

The Individual Plan boasts a $7 savings compared to purchasing each subscription separately, according to Apple’s website. Let’s do the math and see if that checks out.

Apple Music’s Individual plan is $10.99 a month, TV+ is $6.99, Arcade is $4.99, and iCloud+ with 50 GB is $0.99. These individual services’ costs total $23.96 if you paid for each separately.

Apple One’s cost of $16.95 is exactly $7.01 cheaper, so that checks out if you round down by a penny.

It’s a similar story for the family plan.

Purchasing Apple Music’s family plan and iCloud+’s 200 GB plan, plus Arcade and TV, which are already shareable, nets a total of $31.96, exactly $9.01 more than Apple One’s $22.95.

We’ll spare you the details, but we did the math on the Premier plan as well, and the total cost of services would be $58.94, which is $25.99 more than the Apple One price of $32.95.

So with all the math out of the way, we can safely say that Apple’s claims of savings are accurate as long as you round up or down by a penny.

Now, whether or not all these services are actually worth the cost is an extremely personal question that will be determined by each individual user.

However, what we can say for certain is that it is indeed cheaper to use Apple One than it is to buy all the services included in Apple One separately.

The savings also go up with the more expensive plans; you’re spending more money but get greater total savings compared to the cost of separate purchases.

Check out our article about Apple Music’s subscription options.

Should I just Get Apple Music?

Is Apple Music the only Apple service you use, or have any interest in using?

If you answered “yes” to the above question, then yes, you probably should just get Apple Music; you’ll save more money compared to paying extra for services you won’t use.

But what if you are interested in Apple Arcade, TV, iCloud, News, or Fitness?

In that case, Apple One might be worth considering. You’ll still get full access to Apple Music, but you’ll also get other services you might be interested in.

Finally, what if you’re already using all these other services?

Well, if that’s the case, it’s really a no-brainer: if you’re already paying for all the services Apple One includes, you’ll save money but bundling them with an Apple One subscription.

So as you can see, it ultimately depends on whether all these different services are worth it for you or not.

If you’re only using one or two Apple services, you’ll save money by avoiding Apple One and just paying for those one or two services separately.

But by contrast, if you’re using many Apple services, or want to use many Apple services, then you might save money by using Apple One.

Do Music Playlists Carry Over to Apple One?

When signing up for Apple One, there’s actually nothing to carry over.

See, Apple One is just a subscription bundling service; you don’t listen to music on Apple One.

Rather, Apple One provides you access to Apple Music (and all the other bundled services), and you listen to music on the Apple Music app.

So, to rephrase the question to more accurately reflect how subscription bundling services work, we should be asking the following question:

“If I already use Apple Music and I switch to a bundled Apple One subscription plan, will I still have access to my playlists?”

And the answer to that question, as far as we can tell, is a resounding “yes!”

Because, again, Apple One itself is just a bundling service.

Nothing should actually change with your Apple Music account (or any other service on the list you already use) when you switch from paying separately to paying a bundled cost.

What Other Apple One Services are Most Popular?

Apple Music is definitely among the most popular and widely-adopted Apple Services available, with 88 million users in 2022, but what about the rest?

Well, it turns out Apple TV and Apple News also make the top three.

Apple TV had almost as many subscribers in 2021 as Apple Music, at 75 million.

And Apple News actually beats them both with a whopping 135 million users in 2021.

Of course, Apple News has a free tier, and Music and TV do not, so we don’t know how many users in that statistic were paying for it vs. using the free option.

Regardless, the statistics show that Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple News are among Apple’s most popular subscription services.

It’s not hard to see why Apple Music and Apple TV are so widely adopted when you consider the success of their biggest competitors: Spotify and Netflix.

Apple has managed to create an effective alternative to both, in addition to competing in the realms of video game services, cloud storage, news, and fitness.

You may be wondering why iTunes isn’t part of the Apple One offering. This is because iTunes is a media store. For more about this, take a look at our article answering the question, is Apple’s Music app the same as iTunes? 

Do You get All Apple Music Features When Purchasing via Apple One?

You get all the features of the bundled plan, though which specific Apple Music plan you get depends on which Apple One plan you select.

Specifically, if you purchase an Individual Plan Apple One subscription, you get the Individual Plan of Apple Music with all associated features.

If you purchase the Family or Premier plans of Apple One, you get the Family Plan of Apple Music with all associated features.

This logic extends to the rest of the services as well; for example, if you get any Apple One plan, you get access to all the same features of Apple Arcade as if you paid for it directly.

And so on and so forth for all the other bundled services.

A helpful way to think about it is that Apple One is like a shopping cart that contains Apple Music, Arcade, TV, etc., with a special discount applied to getting them all together.

Because Apple One, contrary to its name, is not just “one” subscription service; it’s a whole bunch of them all grouped together.

And you get all the features of every included plan, just as if you had paid for each of them separately.

Except, of course, it’s cheaper than paying for them separately, which is the whole reason the bundle exists after all.

Please also read our simple answer guide to questions about Apple Music and storage.

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