After my last post, I did go ahead and upgrade my Apple One subscription to Premier, so I now have Apple News+. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and I have some thoughts. I’m not really sure where to start, so this will be a bit random.
I’ll start with the email newsletters. I subscribed to a few of those. They’re of the “collection of links” variety; there’s nothing to actually read in the newsletter itself. That’s fine, except that they’re links to Apple News stories, which don’t always open in Apple News, depending on where you are and how you open them. On Windows, obviously, they’ll generally get you to the original article on the web, which may or may not be behind a paywall. On Mac, with Firefox as my web browser and the FastMail web client as my mail client, they’ll generally open in Firefox. From there, I can open them in News via the Share menu, but that’s a bit of extra work. If I use Mail.app as my mail client, that’ll cause them to open directly in Apple News.
On the iPhone and iPad, they’ll always open in News. One slight problem on the iPhone: if I look at an Apple News newsletter in the FastMail app, it doesn’t really adjust to the iPhone’s screen size and is not easily readable. It’s better if I open it in Apple’s mail app instead.
So, maybe not a surprise, but the deeper you are in Apple’s ecosystem, the smoother things are with Apple News.
Next, I’ll talk about sharing stuff our from Apple News. I can definitely save an Apple News article to Raindrop.io via the share menu. Depending on the article, that might pull in the text (from the original article on the web), or it might not. It’s the same with Instapaper: if Instapaper can get the article text from the original web page, saving to Instapaper works. If it can’t then it doesn’t work.
Basically, there’s no way to get the text of an Apple News article out of Apple News. I didn’t initially think about this, but the Mac Apple News app has no option for printing articles, so there’s not even a way to save one as a PDF, or print it on paper.
Overall, I don’t really like this decision to make it nearly impossible to get an article out of Apple News. But I won’t spend too much time on that subject right now.
Next subject: the Apple News app itself. We’ll start with the home screen. In theory, it should (over time) learn more about what I like and surface more stuff that’s relevant or interesting to me. Right now, it seems to be pushing some NJ news and a bunch of sports news related to the teams I’ve told it I’m following. So it’s a start, but it’s not doing anything really interesting.
Since it’s difficult/impossible to get stuff out of the app, it’s pretty important that the app is usable and that text is readable there. Overall, it’s simple and easy to use, and the text is readable. You can increase and decrease the text size. You can’t change the font though, and it seems to vary depending on the publication. I haven’t seen a publication yet that uses a really bad font, but I’d much rather have some say in which font I’m getting.
Apple News has a facility for saving stories, but there’s not much to it. You can’t compare it to something like Instapaper. You can’t organize your saved stories at all, with tags or folders or anything. Also, for long stories, I’m not sure if Apple News saves your place. It initially seemed like it didn’t, but then I opened one I’d been reading the previous day, and it seems like it had saved my place. I’m not sure how that works yet. (Maybe it saves your place, but not across devices? I’ll have to experiment.)
Apple News+ also has audio stories. There’s a daily headlines podcast. That’s about 15 minutes long. There are similar podcasts from NPR and the NY Times, and I don’t think the Apple one is particularly better or worse than those. I’ve only listened to it once, and honestly didn’t pay much attention. I should probably listen to it a few more times at least, and get a feel for it. There are also narrated stories. Those are basically magazine stories that are read by a (human) narrator. They seem to do a lot of them, and I think they’re all using human narrators, not AI. I’ve only listened to one so far, but it was well done. (It seems like the audio feature only exists on iPhone, and not on Mac or iPad.)
Overall, I wish there was more ability to customize the app, more ways to get text out of it, and maybe a Windows version of the app (or a way to access it from a web browser instead of the app).
But it does definitely have a lot of content in it. It’s allowing me to access a lot of stuff that would otherwise be behind a paywall, so that’s cool.
I’m not sure if I’m going to stick with it long-term or not. But, for now, I’m going to keep using it.