CUPERTINO, 30 AUG 2026 — Apple TV went to US$14.99 a month on 28 August, from US$12.99. Reported as a US$2 rise, it is the fourth increase in four years, and the annual plan rose faster than the monthly one.
The numbers
The monthly subscription moves from US$12.99 to US$14.99 and the annual from US$99 to US$119. Apple One Individual, the bundle carrying iCloud+, TV, Music and Arcade, goes from US$19.95 to US$21.95.
New subscribers pay the new rates immediately. Existing subscribers are to be notified roughly a month before they are charged.
The previous increase took the monthly price from US$9.99 to US$12.99 in August 2025. Twelve months and one week later it is US$14.99, which is a 50 per cent increase across a single year.
The annual plan quietly got worse
The monthly and annual prices did not move proportionally.
Monthly rose 15.4 per cent. Annual rose 20.2 per cent. Before the change, paying yearly saved about 36.5 per cent against twelve monthly payments; after it, the saving is about 33.8 per cent.
The annual plan is still the cheaper way to buy, and it is a less good deal than it was. The choice was likely deliberate. Annual subscribers are the most committed and churn least, so weighting the increase towards them risks the fewest cancellations.
Most people will compare the old and new monthly prices, a comparison that understates the change.
What the pattern says about the strategy
Four increases in four years suggests a strategy rather than a response to costs. Apple TV was underpriced at launch to win subscribers, and it is now being repriced for what it has become.
Apple TV entered a crowded market at US$4.99 with a small catalogue, and the low price was buying subscribers rather than covering content. The catalogue has grown, the awards have arrived, and the price is being walked towards what the service is now positioned to charge.
Read that way, none of these rises is surprising and the trajectory is the point. A subscriber who joined at the launch price has seen the bill triple. The service has genuinely improved in that time, so the increases are less unfair than they are relentless.
The Apple One increase is the more interesting number for Apple. A bundle is how a company converts a single-service subscriber into someone with four reasons not to leave, and raising the bundle by the same US$2 as the standalone service keeps the bundle's relative advantage intact while collecting from the stickiest customers.
The notification window is the actionable part
Existing subscribers get roughly a month's notice before the new rate applies to them, and that window is the only part of this a subscriber controls.
It exists because charging an existing customer more without notice creates consumer-protection problems in most jurisdictions, and it has a practical consequence: there is a period in which you are still paying the old price and can decide what to do about the new one.
Use that window to do two things. Check what you are actually paying across all Apple services, because a bundle bought when it contained fewer things you use is a different proposition now. And decide whether the service is worth the new price rather than whether the increase is annoying, which is the question the framing of a US$2 rise is designed to avoid.
The pattern of annual increases also means this decision recurs. Accepting each small rise is how a subscriber agrees to a compounding series. It is how a US$4.99 service becomes a US$14.99 one without any single increase feeling like the moment to leave.
These are US prices
Every figure above is the United States price, and this is where regional coverage usually goes wrong by omission.
Apple sets streaming prices per market, and Southeast Asian pricing for Apple TV and Apple One has historically sat well below the US level and moved on its own schedule. A US increase announced today does not automatically appear on a Singapore, Malaysian or Philippine bill, and when a local increase does arrive it may be a different proportion.
What a regional subscriber can reasonably infer is direction rather than magnitude. A service raising prices four years running in its largest market is not a service planning to hold prices elsewhere indefinitely.
The practical response, if you are on monthly billing and intend to keep the service, is to check whether switching to annual before any local change is worthwhile at your market's prices. The annual discount narrowed in the US and it may narrow here too.
The wider pattern in device and service pricing
This lands in a year when the cost of consumer technology has been moving up for reasons that are not all the same.
Hardware pricing has been driven by components: the Pixel 11's increase traced to the memory crunch, and memory contract prices have risen through the year. Services have no equivalent input cost — a streaming subscription does not get more expensive to deliver because DRAM did.
The hardware and service increases a consumer sees on the same statement have different causes, and only one of them is likely to reverse. Component-driven hardware pricing has historically come back down. Subscription pricing does not.
