Apple is going to make some big changes to its services this year. If you have an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch or Apple TV you're going to be getting some important new features including changes to the Health app, changes to Apple Pay and maybe even changes to the way you buy your iPhone 14.
The news comes from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, as reported by Macrumors. According to Gurman, Apple is preparing a big push with its various services this year – and one of them is the hardware subscription service that was leaked earlier this year.
Apple is reportedly working on a way to make getting Apple kit as simple and straightforward as upgrading your iCloud storage: you'd simply go into Apple's app, choose the iPhone you want and choose the subscription plan that's best for you.
However, it seems that this has proved a bit more difficult to implement than Apple perhaps expected, so the subscriptions may not arrive until 2023. Apple's still aiming for a 2022 launch, though.
New features for Apple Fitness+ and Apple Pay
In addition to the usual additional workouts we'd expect in iOS 16, Apple also intends to add a new component to Apple Fitness+ this year: an "Instacart-like service that integrates with nutrition data in the Health app". Instacart is a US service for ordering delivery or pickups from local food shops. That sounds like an odd one for Apple because as Gurman points out, the margins in food are very low and such a system would be very complex to create. It's possible that while Apple has indeed "explored" such a service, it may have decided that the returns aren't worth the effort.
One feature that's very likely to arrive this year is a Klarna-style pay later option with Apple Pay. Pay-later services are making huge inroads in ecommerce right now and Apple already has Apple Pay (and in the US, Apple Card), so it's not a huge leap for Apple to add staged payments to its existing offering.
Last but not least there's the Apple TV, which sometimes feels like the forgotten device in Apple's hardware line-up. Gurman says there will be substantial upgrades to the device but so far, there's no indication as to what those upgrades might be. But with Apple TV+ killing it with its programming right now, hopefully Apple has renewed its interest in its TV hardware too.
