I’ve been enjoying all the posts about people’s default apps, and other posts about subscriptions. I’ve found many new awesome people to follow through my feed reader. So here’s my contribution.
I’m pretty boring, for personal use I generally use all the default apps (Calendar, Mail, Notes, Safari, Contacts, etc) because I find them sufficient for my needs, and I have history in all of these apps going back to 2004 or 2005. Seriously, I can look at my calendar from 2005 to see what I was doing back in college because that was the first year I got a Mac.
For work, I use whatever they give me, usually Gmail & Slack.
Outside the Apple apps, here’s what I’ve settled on for other uses:
- Tasks: Things. (I am VERY bad at keeping this up to date)
- Journaling: DayOne. (1,500+ streak strong! :D)
- Feed reader: Reeder
- Bible: NeuBible except when I really want to read the Message or NLT, then YouVersion
- Podcasts: Pocket Casts (though I have not listened to a podcast in over a year at this point)
- Read it later: Pocket (and I’m very unhappy with it)
- Music: Apple Music (it’s only okay)
- Library books: Libby (love it)
- Audio book subscription: Libro (support independent booksellers!)
Subscriptions
Alas, it is hard to get by these days without a bunch of subscriptions. Here’s what I have:
- Apple One Premier: $38 + tax.
- When it started, it was only $30/month. I use all the services that are included (top ones being: Apple Music, TV+, Fitness, and photo storage space) but the price has been increasing much faster than the value. If there’s another price increase, I will probably seriously look at scaling this back or eliminating it entirely.
- YouTube TV: $73/mo.
- This one is new for our family, got it to give our media obsessed (especially sports obsessed) kids something to watch at our house instead of going out to Buffalo Wild Wings every-time there’s a game. It’s basically cable but with a much better digital UI.
- Netflix: included in cell-phone plan.
- We’re back on Netflix. Of all the streaming services, I find Netflix content to be the most mediocre. For a while we subscribed to the $9.99 ad-free plan, but they killed that literally a week after we subscribed. We changed cell-phone providers and now it’s included in that plan. I wouldn’t bother otherwise.
- Libro.fm: $15/mo
- Basically Audible but supporting independent bookstores. I just put this on pause because I now am way behind on using my credits. Without a daily commute, I’m finding I listen to very little audio content.
- Journaling: DayOne premium. $25/yr.
- We’ll see what Apple’s journal app provides after a few years of updates, but I am liking DayOne quite a bit.
- Website: Vultr. $10/mo.
- Hosting this blog on a little instance for $10/mo. Been completely satisfied with them.
Previous subscriptions
- Disney Plus.
- I loved Disney+ when it came out and considered it a great deal at $7.99/mo. Now at $14.99/mo, I’ve already watched most of the back catalog I was interested in, and all the new content is hit or miss. Andor was amazing. Most of the rest of new content was not that appealing.