CUPERTINO, Calif. — Apple, in an expansive effort to build more services to run on its various devices, is launching a subscription service for news featuring some of the biggest newspapers and magazines.
At an event on Monday at its Silicon Valley headquarters, the company said its Apple News+ (Plus) subscription will include access to 300 magazines, including The New Yorker, National Geographic and InStyle. It will also feature newspapers like The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. The subscription will cost $9.99 a month and is available beginning today in the United States and Canada.
The subscription service builds on a free news app that the company released in late 2015 that comes installed on the company’s iOS software. Apple said about five billion articles are read monthly on Apple News.
The news subscription is part of a series of announcements of Apple’s new services, including a streaming video offering.
The new services represent an evolution of Apple’s business. For years, Apple focused mainly on selling hardware products, counting on consumers to upgrade phones and tablets every few years. But as technology and design improvements have become less apparent, demand for the iPhone, the company’s flagship product, has leveled off.
The company is now focused on selling content and services for Apple’s roughly 1.4 billion active devices, which include Apple TV boxes, Apple Watches, Mac computers and iPads.
In addition to paying $1,000 every two or three years for a new iPhone, Apple is hoping customers will also pay $10 a month for content, as well as $20, $30 or $40 a month to be their one-stop shop for music, videos, and news for all their devices.
Apple already has 56 million subscribers to its streaming music service. It offers additional cloud storage for a monthly fee, and it takes a cut of the money spent on apps running on its devices as well as a sliver of digital payments made by iPhones. Apple generated $10.9 billion from services in the last quarter of 2018, compared to $73.4 billion of hardware sales.
