Apple One to bundle services like Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, iCloud

This story is part of Apple Event, our full coverage of the latest news from Apple headquarters.

Apple One, the gadget giant’s new bundle of services, will package different combinations of subscriptions including Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, Apple News Plus and storage service iCloud. The news — long expected since Apple made services a big strategy more than three years ago — came at Apple’s online event Tuesday, which also focused on its iPads and Apple Watches.

For years since Apple ramped up creating and selling you more services, the gadget giant has been widely expected to package these subscriptions together into one bundle to rule them all, so to speak. Tuesday, Apple finally made the leap with Apple One. 

Apple One is a gambit to lure more people deeper into Apple’s interconnected network of devices and services, which all work most seamlessly together. It’s a major step as Apple’s closes in on its goal to eclipse $50 billion in services revenue before the year is out. 

But Apple One also crystallizes Apple’s ambition to become a services powerhouse, something that has already raised the hackles of rivals — and raised the attention of more than one competition regulator worldwide. 

Major competitors like Spotify and Fortnite-maker Epic Games have cried foul about Apple’s practices in its powerful App Store, which offers their apps alongside Apple’s own that directly compete against them and others. Claiming Apple abuses the App Store to give its own services an competitive advantage, these complaints have triggered antitrust investigations in Europe and the US, with CEO Tim Cook testifying about it before Congress earlier this year.

Apple’s constellations of services include Apple Music, its $9.99-a-month streaming music rival to Spotify; $4.99-a-month Apple TV Plus with big-budget original programming like series The Morning Show and Defending Jacob; Apple Arcade is its $4.99-a-month mobile game subscription service. Apple News Plus is its $9.99-a-month subscription to access more than 300 magazines and newspapers. And iCloud is its remote storage service, which millions of people use free and costs between 99 cents and $9.99 a month for expanded capacity.

Tuesday, Apple also unveiled a new service, 

Bundles of online media services aren’t new by a long shot. Amazon‘s $12.99-a-month Prime membership service unlocks a host of services, including its Prime Video rival to Netflix and Apple TV Plus and its Prime Music catalog of streaming tunes. Disney offers a package of its Disney Plus, ESPN Plus and Hulu streaming-video services for a discounted $12.99-a-month. 

And separate companies work together to bundle deals — Spotify offers Hulu or Showtime streaming-video services as discounted add-ons to its own paid, premium music subscription. (Editors’ note: Showtime is owned by ViacomCBS, the parent company of CNET.)

But Apple is unique in the breadth of services it can group together and the dominance of its iPhone — the most popular smartphone in the world and the frequent starting point that hundreds of millions of people access many of these services. 

Apple typically holds a fall event each year to announce new iPhones before the holiday shopping season. This year, Apple appears to be doing things differently. Leading up to it, Tuesday’s event was expected to include news about iPads, Apple Watches, its operating systems software and other surprises. A separate announcement for the next iPhone is expected to come later. 

Apple warned investors on a July conference call that this year’s batch of new iPhones would arrive “a few weeks later” than in previous years. That puts this year’s iPhone launch sometime in October or possibly November.

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