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All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
Apple AirTags are moving up the list of must-haves for travel. The $29, coin-shaped gadget makes it easy to track your luggage and other items that might get lost in transit.
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AirTags have been flying off the shelves after Southwest canceled more than 13,000 flights over the holidays, leaving passengers stranded — sometimes for days at a time — and separated from their luggage.
The travel debacle ballooned into a travel nightmare that could cost Southwest upward of $800 million, and an unexpected sales win for Apple. Google searches for AirTags have spiked in the last few weeks and AirTags currently take up two spots on Amazon’s list of best-selling electronics.
AirTags have helped passengers find their bags when airlines either lost them or said they were at a different location. But they’re not only useful for travel.
AirTags are designed to help you keep a digital leash of sorts on personal belongings. That means you can use an AirTag to find or keep track of your wallet, a backpack, purse and other smaller items or something bigger like a car.
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Apple AirTag
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How does an AirTag work? It sends a secure, Bluetooth signal to iCloud that can be detected by nearby devices in Apple’s Find My network (the process is encrypted for added safety).
You’re the only one who can see the location of your AirTag, Apple doesn’t store your location or data history, and if an AirTag is near you without your knowledge, a notification will be sent to your iPhone.
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AirTag, 4-Pack
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Like other Apple devices, AirTag can also be placed in Lost Mode (a notification will be sent to your iPhone when the lost AirTag is located).
AirTags are compatible with iPhone (iPhone SE and iPhones 6s or later), iPad and Mac devices. They’re water- and dust-resistant and equipped with a replaceable, coin cell battery.
AirTag Alternatives for Android Users
Unfortunately, AirTags don’t work for Android, but there are alternative GPS tracking devices for Android users that cost around the same price as an AirTag, such as Tile Mate, LandAirSea and Samsung Galaxy Smart Tag.
Samsung’s Smart Tag finds items within 130 yards of the Galaxy Find My network and can only be used with Galaxy phones running Android 8.0 or higher (RAM 2.0GB+). The SmartThings app is required for use.
Tile has a Bluetooth range of up to 250 feet and is compatible with iOS and Android. It works with Amazon Alexa, Hey Google and Siri (download the free Tile app to get started). LandAirSea works for both Apple and Android and an app is required for use.
Shop GPS tracking for your luggage and more below.
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SAMSUNG Galaxy SmartTag Bluetooth Smart Home Accessory Tracker, Attachment Locator for Lost Keys, Bag, Wallet, Luggage, Pets, Glasses, 2021, US Version, Black
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Tile Mate (2022) 1-Pack, White. Bluetooth Tracker, Keys Finder and Item Locator; Up to 250 ft. Range. iOS and Android Compatible.
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LandAirSea 54 GPS Tracker
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Source: Apple / Macs
Apple is doing a major about-face on a feature that the late Steve Jobs did not want to see on his Mac computers.
Spotted on Bloomberg, Apple is now considering bringing touch screens to its Mac computers. It would break from Steve Jobs’ feelings towards the feature when that finally happens. He felt it was “ergonomically terrible.”
Per Bloomberg:
Apple engineers are actively engaged in the project, indicating that the company is seriously considering producing touch-screen Macs for the first time, according to people familiar with the efforts. Still, a launch hasn’t been finalized, and the plans could change.
For more than a decade, the company has argued that touch screens don’t work well on laptops and that the iPad is a better option if someone wants a touch interface. Apple also has worried that touch-screen Macs could cannibalize iPad sales.
Apple’s decision to go against its founder’s beliefs, Tim Cook upheld, could be from the pressure to keep up with rivals who are increasingly adding touch screens to their computers.
Plus, according to Bloomberg, the Mac has seen a resurgence, outselling the iPad, and Apple wants its computers to be popular among computer and laptop users.
When Will The Touch Screen Mac Arrive?
When can we expect to see the touch screen Mac? The website claims it could arrive in 2025 “as part of a larger update to the MacBook Pro, according to the people who asked not to be identified because the plans are private.”
The touch screen Mac would be one of the most significant decisions the company has made in years. The late Steve Jobs had a total disdain for them, saying the idea of making users reach up to touch an upright screen “doesn’t work.”
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Jobs also said Apple would never sell phones or tablets, but we all know what Apple’s most popular device is: the iPhone.
One accessory we are pretty sure Steve Jobs would hate is the Apple Pencil, the man who created Apple couldn’t stand the idea of styluses.
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Photo: Apple / Macs
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
AirPods still rank among the list of top-selling wireless earbuds, and if you own a pair, they could probably use a little refresh.
Like iPhones, Androids and other electronics, your earbuds can get dusty and dirty. To clean AirPods or AirPods Pro headphones manually, all you’ll need is a soft, dry, lint-free cloth to gently wipe them down (don’t run them under water).
If your Airpods are stained or damaged from dried soap, lotion, perfume, shampoo, conditioner, sunscreen and other liquids, Apple recommends slightly dampening the cloth with water before wiping the earbuds clean — and don’t use them until they’re completely dry.
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To clean the charging case, use a lint-free cloth slightly dampened with isopropyl alcohol. Make sure that you don’t get liquid in the charging ports and use a soft-bristled brush to remove any leftover dust or debris.
Want an easier option? Get a cleaning kit, like the one featured below, which is on sale for $8.99 at Amazon. The Hagibis 2-in-1 cleaning pen is a best-seller at Amazon with a 4.5-star rating and lots of positive customer reviews.
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The multi-functional kit includes a flocking sponge to clean out dust in the earphones and charging case, a high-density brush to clean dirt off the sound outlet hole and other parts of the earphone, and a metal pen tip to dig out stubborn dust and thoroughly clean hard to reach spots.
The cleaning tool can be used for AirPods and other wireless earbuds, but also keyboards, laptops, tablets, etc.
Click here to see a wider selection of cleaning kits that are available at Amazon for less than $10, like the Akiki Cleaner Kit, currently on sale for $8.99. And of course, cleaning kits for AirPods and more are available at other major retailers, including Best Buy and Walmart.
Stocking up on more new gear for the new year? Be sure to read our picks for the best Bluetooth earphones under $250, best wired earphones and this affordable cleaning solution to help keep your vinyl records intact.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek on Wednesday (Nov. 30) blasted Apple for “stifling innovation and hurting consumers,” publicly renewing his company’s longstanding grievance that the tech giant abuses its dominant position over the market for smartphone apps.
In a series of tweets, the Spotify founder said Apple was “shameless in their bullying” of app developers and called on lawmakers in both the U.S. and the European Union to take “action” against a company that he said “doesn’t seem to care about the law or courts.”
“Over and over again @Apple gives itself every advantage while at the same time stifling innovation and hurting consumers,” Ek wrote. “Apple offers consumers the illusion of choice and give[s] developers the illusion of control.”
A spokeswoman for Apple did not immediately return a request for comment on Ek’s tweets.
Spotify has long been an outspoken critic of the rules Apple imposes on its app store — namely a 30% surcharge on most transactions made within the platform, and provisions that restrict how apps steer customers toward outside payment systems.
Apple says tight rules for app developers are needed to protect users from payment fraud and privacy violations. But critics say the company — which currently controls more than half the U.S. smartphone market with the iPhone and iOS operating system — is merely exploiting its dominant position to extract more money. Those complaints are even stronger from Spotify, since it also directly competes with Apple Music for subscribers.
Google, which accounts for the vast majority of the rest of the market for smartphone apps, is facing similar criticism and litigation.
The arguments against Apple’s app policies won a powerful ally last week when new Twitter owner Elon Musk raised the issue amid his own messy dispute with the tech giant. After claiming Apple had pulled its advertising and had threatened to pull Twitter from its app store, the polarizing billionaire asked his 120 million followers if they were aware that Apple “puts a secret 30% tax on everything you buy.”
In Wednesday’s thread, Ek directly quoted Musk’s tweet, as well as others who have voiced similar criticism. Citing “bipartisan support and global interest,” he said that “momentum” was building for some kind of action against Apple.
“So how much longer will we look away from this threat to the future of the internet?” Ek wrote. “How many more consumers will be denied choice? There’s been a lot of talk. Talk is helpful but we need action.”
Apple is already facing a high-profile lawsuit, filed by Fortnite creator Epic Games, that claims the app store policies violate federal antitrust laws. A trial court issued a split ruling on the case last year, and the battle is currently pending before a federal appeals court.
Though not directly involved in the Epic case, Spotify filed its own complaint against Apple in 2019 with the European Commission, the EU’s regulatory enforcement watchdog. Last year, EU regulators released preliminary findings that Apple had likely broken the law, saying the company “deprives users of cheaper music streaming choices and distorts competition.”
Even bigger changes could be coming via new legislation. In Washington, D.C., a bipartisan trio of senators are pushing a bill called the Open App Markets Act, which would impose strict new rules on both Apple and Google’s app stores. And lawmakers in the EU have already passed a new statute called the Digital Markets Act, which will place a raft of new restrictions on how app stores are run.
Though it will take time for the new EU law to fully go into effect, it was aimed directly at complaints like the one Ek voiced Wednesday against Apple. In an interview with Wired last month, one of the law’s architects said he expected “significant” consequences: “If you have an iPhone, you should be able to download apps not just from the App Store but from other app stores or from the internet.”
Spotify’s quest to improve its margins has taken another step forward, as a pilot program for billing subscribers using Google devices expands to the U.S. and additional markets. Called “user choice billing,” the system allows app developers to provide Google Android smartphone users with the option of paying the developer directly — at a reduced fee — or through Google Play.
Last week, Google’s user choice billing pilot expanded to the U.S., Brazil and South Africa, and Google announced that dating app Bumble also joined the program. Spotify was the first developer to join the pilot program in March with test markets of Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan and the European Economic Area. With the additional markets, user choice billing will be tested in most of the world’s largest smartphone markets and most valuable music markets.
With user choice billing, prospective Spotify subscribers are presented with two payment options side-by-side in an Android app: Spotify and Google Play. Choosing Spotify will take the user to a form to fill out credit card information to sign up for a subscription. Importantly, it all happens within the Spotify app, not Spotify’s external website. Choosing to pay with Google Play prompts the user to enter a password to pay with the credit card on file with Google.
Billing is an under-appreciated but important issue in the subscription music business. Because music streaming is inexorably tied to smartphones, and because consumers have come to expect simplicity when engaging in e-commerce on smartphones, in-app billing helps a company like Spotify sign up subscribers. The problem for a music service like Spotify operating on thin margins, though, is that app stores run by Apple and Google have traditionally demanded a cut of these in-app purchases. That’s left music companies either paying the app store fees themselves, without raising prices, eroding each subscription’s profitability, or raising the price to compensate for the fee, which could turn away potential subscribers. Prior to 2016, Spotify charged users 30% more for an in-app upgrade to Premium to offset Apple’s 30% fee.
There’s one other option, of course: To save on fees, a music service may disallow in-app subscriptions and encourage a customer to take a few extra steps and subscribe at its website. That process risks losing potential subscribers along the way, but nevertheless, Spotify has gone this route and not allowed in-app purchasing on its Apple app since 2016.
Companies have faced this quandary for years. In 2019, for example, Pandora raised the price for subscribers who used Apple’s in-app purchasing premium subscription service from $9.99 to $12.99 to offset the fees. Pandora reported paying $50 million in fees to Apple and Google in 2015 – 3.7% of its annual revenue.
“It certainly puts independent music services at a disadvantage where we’re paying 30% of the economics out to the platforms that distribute our apps, who also happen to be competing with us, and for the same users, and the same economics,” Pandora’s then-CFO Mike Herring told investors in 2016.
Apple typically charges a 30% fee for in-app purchases during the first year of a subscription and 15% thereafter, according to Apple’s website for developers. Neither Apple nor Spotify have said publicly what fees are paid for Spotify subscriptions. The fees that Spotify pays Google are also private.
“We’re not going to comment on the terms of our agreement with Google because they are confidential,” a Spotify spokesperson tells Billboard, “but it’s safe to say that our [user choice billing] partnership is based on commercial terms that meet our standards of fairness.”
Generally, subscription services such as Spotify pay a 15% fee for in-app purchases, but the fee can go lower. App developers in Google’s Play Media Experience Program, which integrates apps into Google’s ecosystem of wearables and other hardware products, can pay less than 15%, for example. For subscription-based services with significant licensing costs — such as music, video, books and audiobooks — fees “can be as low as 10%,” according to a Google spokesperson.
User choice billing provides additional savings for app developers on top of any other program or discount. If an Android user presented with user choice billing opts for the app developer’s payment system, Google lowers the fee by 4%. So, if an app developer were paying a 10% fee to Google, user choice billing would reduce the fee to 6%.
Small improvements to gross margin are crucial to a music service that pays more than three-quarters of its revenue to rights holders. Spotify’s gross margin on its Premium subscription service was 28% in the third quarter of 2022, meaning that Spotify paid out 72% of its subscription revenue for licensing fees and some smaller costs of sales. Every percentage point of revenue represents about $100 million in subscription revenue in 2022, based on past earnings and Spotify’s fourth-quarter guidance. If Spotify can move its gross margin by a small amount, it would greatly impact the company’s free cash flow. To put it in perspective, Spotify’s net cash flow from operations for the first three quarters of 2022 was $109 million.
While Google seems willing to consider alternative approaches to in-app billing, Apple does not. Prominent app developers, including Spotify, have been fighting for better terms for years. In 2019, Spotify filed a complaint against Apple with the European Commission for anticompetitive behavior alleging that Apple “continue to give themselves an unfair advantage at every turn.”
Additionally, Apple is currently involved in a lawsuit brought by Epic Games regarding its control over the App Store. Although the judge in the case has mostly sided with Apple, the judge did order Apple to allow apps to provide links to payment alternatives outside the App Store. The lower court’s requirement has been delayed until the appeals court rules on the case. The two sides began oral arguments in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday (Nov. 14).
Apple’s strict rules are particularly meddlesome to Spotify’s latest attempt to improve its margins — audiobooks. In September, the streaming service began selling 300,000 audiobook titles following its acquisition of audiobook distributor Findaway in June. The plan makes sense: Audiobook purchases on its platform can provide Spotify with 60% gross margins — about twice the margin in music streaming – and audiobooks are a natural addition to its burgeoning podcast business.
But Apple’s rules for in-app purchases would make audiobooks purchased through an iOS app far less profitable — and a less straightforward process. Whereas the Google app provides “a beautiful experience,” CEO Daniel Ek said during the Oct. 25 earnings call, the process of buying an audiobook through Apple “is inherently broken because Apple decided it wanted it to be broken.” Spotify had lawyers “in the room” working with developers, but Apple rejected Spotify’s app multiple times, according to Ek. “It holds developers back and holds creators back,” he said. “And it’s bad for consumers.” Plus, there’s the added element here that Apple happens to be Spotify’s leading competitor for music streaming.
With audiobooks, Spotify currently sells titles on its website rather than inside the app to avoid fees (the user can listen using the Spotify app after the title is purchased). But just getting people to its website isn’t straightforward. As Spotify claimed on a website called Time to Play Fair, Apple does not allow Spotify to explain how to purchase an audiobook outside of the app, include a link to direct the user to a Spotify audiobook page, request or receive an email with instructions on how to purchase an audiobook or reveal an audiobook’s price in the app or in an email. Spotify’s Android app does not sell audiobooks, but the app allows users to receive an email with a link to Spotify to purchase a title.
In its June investors’ day presentation, Spotify management looked beyond music, podcasts and audiobooks. In the next ten years, Spotify will add sports, news and education to the platform and double the current average revenue per user, said Gustav Norström, chief freemium business officer. The user choice billing pilot program can only help with that goal.
Apple services, the category which encompasses Apple TV+ and Apple Music, saw another slight drop in revenue during the fourth fiscal quarter ending in September.
The category generated $19.2 billion in revenue, down slightly from the $19.6 billion reported during the third fiscal quarter ending in June — a figure that was another decline compared to the record $19.8 billion in sales the services collectively generated during the second quarter. But compared to the previous year, Apple’s FY Q4 services revenue represented a five percent year-over-year increase.
Apple now has more than 900 million paid subscriptions, up from the 860 million reported during Q3, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Accounting for the tech giant’s product sales, Apple brought in $90.1 billion during the quarter — a quarterly record for the company driven by continued iPhone sales. “Our record September quarter results continue to demonstrate our ability to execute effectively in spite of a challenging and volatile macroeconomic backdrop,” Apple CFO Luca Maestri said in announcing the results.
The company’s earnings report comes just days after Apple instituted price hikes across Apple TV+, Apple Music and the Apple One subscription bundle. Apple TV+ — home to Ted Lasso and Severance — now costs $6.99 per month, compared to the $4.99 per month price point the service has maintained since its 2019 launch, while the annual plan for Apple TV+ now costs $69, compared to $49.
Speaking with analysts on the company’s earnings call, Cook said the increased price for Apple TV+ was a reflection of the increase in content available on the streamer. “We’re very focused on originals only, and so we had four or five shows or so in the beginning and priced it quite low,” he said. “We now have a lot more content and are coming out with more each and every month, and so we we increase the price to represent the value of the service.”
Apple Music subscriptions now start at $10.99, making it more expensive than Spotify, while the family plan costs $16.99 per month and the annual plan costs $109.
Apple also quietly updated its App Store rules to require iOS publishers to give the company a 30 percent cut for any boosted, or sponsored, posts purchased within their respective apps. The move has frustrated platforms like Meta, which sells sponsored posts.
This article was originally posted on THR.com.
Apple is increasing the prices of its Apple Music subscription plans in the U.S. starting Monday (Oct. 24), the company confirmed to Billboard.
In a statement, Apple noted that the Apple Music price hike is due to an increase in licensing costs, “and in turn, artists and songwriters will earn more for the streaming of their music. We also continue to add innovative features that make Apple Music the world’s best listening experience.”
The subscription prices of Apple TV+ and Apple One plans are also being raised, the company confirmed.
Prices are increasing $1 per month for Apple Music individual plans (from $9.99 to $10.99), $2 per month for family plans (from $14.99 to $16.99) and $10 per year for annual plans (from $99 to $109). Its bundled Apple One subscriptions are increasing $2 per month for individual plans (from $14.95 to $16.95) and $3 per month for family and premier plans — from $19.95 to $22.95 and $29.95 to $32.95, respectively. Notably, Apple Music subscriptions will continue to include lossless and Spatial Audio at no additional charge.
This marks the first time Apple has raised subscription prices for these services in the U.S. The website 9to5Mac, which first reported on the increases, also reported that Apple would increase its raise prices in international markets, though the company had not confirmed that by press time.
Though Apple does not regularly report subscriber numbers, in June, J.P. Morgan estimated Apple Music could hit 110 million subscribers by 2025. The lat time the company reported subscriber numbers for Apple Music was in 2019, when it reported 60 million subscribers to the service.
The Apple Music price hike comes amid reports that Spotify could be charging $19.99 a month for its forthcoming premium HiFi subscription tier, though the company has not yet confirmed that. Earlier this month, YouTube raised the price of its YouTube Premium Family plan, which includes its music subscription service, from $17.99 to $22.99 per month.