Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and Apple News+ Just Got a Big Price Hike

Sadly, it seems Apple fans aren’t going to be able to avoid the price increases that have been coming across nearly all streaming services. The company just announced some of its most significant price hikes ever, impacting Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and Apple News+ subscribers.

The price increases affect those who subscribe to one or more of these services individually as well as subscribers to the company’s Apple One bundles, which all contain at least two of the three services.

Thankfully, there’s been no increase for Apple Music, Apple Fitness+, or iCloud storage subscriptions. Apple increased the price of Apple Music last year, starting with its student plans in July before adding the same $1/month increase to its individual Apple Music plan and $2/month to its Apple Music Family Plan. Those changes marked the first price increases for any Apple Music tiers since the service launched in 2015 — increases that Apple said were made necessary by increased licensing costs for music.

However, Apple also increased the price of Apple TV+ by $2/month last fall, explaining that it had never intended to keep the service at the $4.99 monthly price that it launched at in 2019 — a rate that Apple said was a “very low price” intended on get people on board when it had very little content.

Since then, Apple TV+ has expanded to what Apple calls “an extensive selection of award-winning and broadly acclaimed series, feature films, documentaries, and kids and family entertainment from the world’s most creative storytellers,” and it clearly feels that last year’s price hike wasn’t enough to justify that as it’s now increasing the monthly cost of Apple TV+ by another $3, bringing it up to $9.99/month.

Granted, that’s still peanuts compared to what Netflix and Disney+ charge for an equivalent plan — at least in terms of features and streaming quality. With Apple TV+, you’re getting six simultaneous streams in 4K UHD with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos that can be shared with everyone in your Apple Family Sharing group — up to six users in total.

That’s two more than Netflix’s now-$22.99 Premium tier, and you don’t need to worry about password sharing, as every family member can use their own Apple ID. Apple TV+ is also effectively ad-free, save for the occasional skippable pre-roll trailer for other Apple TV+ movies and TV shows.

Of course, Netflix has much more content available, but it’s arguable whether the quality of that content is worth nearly double what Apple TV+ is charging. Price increases always sting, but at least Apple hasn’t yet crossed the $10/month threshold. We can only dream of the days when Netflix and Disney+ were that affordable — at least without being subjected to an ad-supported tier.

Sadly, the price increases don’t only affect Apple TV+. Apple Arcade is also getting a $2/month hike from $4.99 to $6.99. Apple News+ also goes from $9.99/month to $12.99/month for the handful of people who might actually still subscribe to Apple’s news subscription service individually. However, those are the first price increases for two services since they launched four years ago.

Apple News+ was never an overwhelmingly popular service, even at $9.99/month; however, the increase in this case is more likely tied to increased costs from news and magazine publishers, with whom Apple has to share a large chunk of those subscription fees.

Unsurprisingly, the Apple One bundles have also seen similar price increases to compensate for these changes, with the Individual and Family Plans going up by $3/month — basically the price of the Apple TV+ increase — while Premier, which includes Apple News+, jumped by $5/month.

Nevertheless, Apple One bundles remain the better deals for those who want to bundle multiple Apple Services, and that gap has increased since the prices of those have gone up less than the collection of services they include.

For instance, an Apple One Premier bundle saves you $28.99 over the price of the individual subscriptions, which means you’re effectively paying the same as you would for an Apple Music Family Plan, Apple TV+, and 2TB of iCloud storage while getting Apple News+ and Apple Fitness+ thrown in for free and paying only a buck for Apple Arcade.

Meanwhile, the Apple One Individual Plan is still $9.01 less than the individual prices of Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 50GB of iCloud storage, and the Apple One Family Plan now saves you $11.01 per month compared to getting Apple Music Family, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 200GB of iCloud Storage.

Apple has also somewhat cleverly mixed up the storage tiers between Apple One bundles since opting to add the 2TB plan on top of an Apple One Individual bundle would cost more than simply moving up to Apple One Family, which includes 200GB, and adding the 2TB plan to Apple One Family would put you at nearly $2/month less than Apple One Premier, which would also give you Apple News+ and Apple Fitness (although you would get 2.2TB of storage for that price since the 2TB would be added to the 200GB included in the Apple One Family bundle).

The new prices are in effect now for new subscribers and will take effect on the next renewal date after 30 days from today for existing customers, who will likely get emails within that time period to advise them of the price changes.