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In a way, owning something connected to the internet is a lot like owning a car.

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It's not enough to just drop $25,000 on the vehicle and drive off.

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You've also got to pay for gas, insurance, oil changes, and

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dank paint jobs just to be able to keep using it.

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And so it is with a phone. You can get online, sure, but increasingly more and more of the good stuff is hidden behind pay

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walls. And now there are two such options that are being provided directly by the phone's

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operating system makers to unlock things that are literally already installed on your phone.

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I'm talking, of course, about Google One and Apple One.

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Yeah, it actually does kind of remind me of the time the CFL had two different teams,

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both called the Rough Riders. So what do you get with these One services and are they worth paying for?

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Let's start by looking at Google One, since it was the first to appear on the scene back in 2018.

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Wait, wait a second. Apple copied Google at something?

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Anyway, at first it was merely an expanded cloud storage subscription,

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and it still does offer quite a bit more storage than Google's free storage option,

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if you're willing to fork over the cash. But now Google seems to be marketing it as a way to get extra little niceties

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with the cheapest tier, just $2 a month at the time we wrote this video,

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giving you access to Google experts to reduce confusion every time they mess with their UI,

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along with extra member benefits such as hotel discounts.

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More expensive tiers also give you cash back in the Google Store,

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as well as a Google VPN that is Android only for the time being.

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Of course, signing up for a service that promises unspecified benefits

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means that Google could put a growing number of things behind its paywall as time goes on.

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In fact, it's already come out that members will get three free months of Stadia Pro.

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Additionally, an option in the pre-installed Google Photos app to use the

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ColourPop filter on photos without depth information will only be available to Google One subscribers.

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To be fair to Google, this option was not already previously available for free,

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but given how plenty of cloud services have put once free content behind paywalls,

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it's worth keeping an eye out for free Android features possibly becoming subscription-based in the coming years.

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Let's switch gears now and talk about Apple One, which only debuted in 2020,

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and in our opinion is a bit more appropriately named since it attempts to be a

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many things in one kind of service. You do get expanded storage on iCloud, similar to Google's offering,

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but there are other services bundled that you might be more used to paying separate monthly fees for,

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like Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, and Apple Arcade.

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Unsurprisingly, it's more expensive than Google One's most barebones offering,

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but at $15 a month, it is cheaper than buying each of those services separately.

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That is assuming, of course, that you wanted all of them in the first place.

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Apple Arcade subscribers, uh, raise your hands? Yeah, okay.

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So what we're seeing then is two pretty different models.

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Google seems to be trying to expand the functionality of core phone features

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and get you to pay for it, while it looks like Apple is attempting to push more people

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to start using their additional services like TV Plus and Apple Arcade,

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since iCloud and Apple Music already have very large user bases.

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So offering those as part of a discounted bundle could help their less popular services

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be propped up by their more popular ones. Apple has also seen some of its investors get upset over how sales for the iPhone

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and its associated services have been stagnating a little bit lately.

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So a big drive to draw more people into their ecosystem

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and then lock them in with a suite of cloud services isn't too surprising.

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Has it worked on you guys? Or have you gone the other direction and purchased a Google One subscription?

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Or do you just refuse to buy a subscription to use your phone?

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Let us know in the comments and if you'll excuse me, I have to go sign up for a Peacock Premium membership

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for the WAN Show over there that I want to watch. Thanks.

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Thanks for watching guys. You can like or dislike. You can check out our other videos and you can leave a comment

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if you have a suggestion for a future fast as possible. Also, don't forget to subscribe so you can see what we're doing with like,

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oh wait, well they're using sets instead of a green screen. What is this?