When I bought my iPad mini a while ago, Apple included a 3-month free trial of Apple News. The offer was set to expire soon so yesterday, out of curiosity, I decided to check it out. The app let me choose newspapers and magazines to follow. I selected a half dozen or so from the list.
The app also has screens for “latest news”, “top stories” subsections for specific categories and topics.
I lasted less than 1 day before canceling my trial.
I hated the way information’s presented. It had dozens of rectangle buttons with clickbait-y truncated headlines accompanied by a photo (kind of like Bing news).
The buttons were like a frenetic series of never-ending bad news. I was overwhelmed reading about:
- Iran shooting missiles into Israel and the possibility of war involving the US resulting
- Details of the trial of a mother who threw her children off of an overpass to murder them.
- A lunatic who stabbed 8 women and a baby in an Australian shopping center
- Bird Flu found in a US cow
The magazines I selected were ones I used to like reading such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside, GQ and Men’s Health. After reading a few stories, I gave up.
- A story about a family that moved off-grid to BLM land during Covid after going deep down a conspiracy laden rathole. They disappeared and a few months later their bodies were found by a hiker. They had starved to death.
- Several current events stories that focused on transgender and racial micro-aggressions and bathroom polices. (Really, like we need to see more of this?)
After an hour, I felt agitated, anxious and irritable.
In addition to my disappointment with the format and content, I found the user interface to suck. There was no “search functionality” for articles, newspapers or subjects. You had to either click one of the features sorry buttons or scroll through a list.
Even worse, there were ads embedded within all of the articles! Ugh. I forgot how obtrusive these are since I use ad blockers when browsing the web normally.
I had thought that I might enjoy reading the news online using Apple News because it’s a subscription product. After all, for most of my life I thoroughly enjoyed reading the local paper, the national papers and magazines until they collapse of the print media industry that started in the 90s.
I was wrong.
Paying for the content made absolutely no difference so I cancelled my 3 month trial after just 1 day.
