ONE week with APPLE NEWS PLUS: a dirty but good enough NETFLIX for MAGAZINESAre

more magazines than you could reliably read worth $120 a year?

There's a lot to evaluate here about Apple's new News Plus subscription service, including whether it's a good deal for the media business and forecasting how much of an existential threat it poses to an already at-risk industry. But inherent in those debates is whether iOS users actually use the service and find enough value in it to pay for it in the long run. Does it provide a decent user experience, and is it worth the $10-a-month subscription fee, considering it doesn't offer you a lot of real news?

I've spent the past week using Apple News Plus. It launched last Monday as the only fully materialized product from Apple's big media and services event that was designed to Gin hype for its post-iPhone future. While it certainly has its odd design quirks, I will say that for $10 a month, News Plus is the most comprehensive magazine subscription service on the market. (Scribd is a very solid alternative for non-iOS users.)

If you are thinking about subscribing, that ? and only that ? is what you should focus on:

get a service designed primarily for magazines. For some customers, unrestricted access to new issues of The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Wired, and hundreds more might be worth it, and I'd have to agree. But there are plenty of caveats, and we'll get to those.

That the company offered a strong magazine experience should come as no surprise, considering that Apple based the entire product on the offerings of Texture, a Netflix startup for magazines that it acquired last year and has retooled into the premium tier of Apple News. Apple News Plus has many of the same offerings in place that Texture originally secured, including those with mammoth publishing brands like Condé Nast, Time Inc. owner Meredith Corporation, and Hearst.

Many of those magazines already published stories in some form or another in Apple News, but now you get full print issues as downloadable files in the company's Apple News format or in something closer to the PDF-style files that magazines started using when the iPad first launched. (According to MacStories, just under half of all magazines available on the service are using the Apple News Format, or ANF, which means they can make use of the more complex mobile- and tablet-specific layout options).

For those on the fence, the question of whether to pay for Apple News Plus depends on

primarily, of whether you like to read magazines enough to fork over $120 a year for access to more than you will ever be able to reliably consume. Going one step further, how you like to have your news delivered will also greatly affect how valuable this service is to you. Do you prefer the standard Apple News mix of algorithmic and human curation, or do you prefer to manually select individual stories as you browse through a collection, which is arguably what News Plus is best at? To make those determinations, it's best to approach Apple News Plus by evaluating its main pillars: its design, its news delivery mechanisms, and overall value.

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