Apple kicked off its 25 March event with a revamp of Apple News: the unimaginatively named Apple News Plus. The name may not be wholly inspiring, but the idea could be wholly transformational. In short, Apple is adding more than 300 magazines to Apple News including the likes of The Atlantic, Marie Claire and The Hollywood Reporter. It’s not just limited to magazines either, with it featuring websites like The Skimm, Vulture and Techcrunch. It’ll even launch with The Wall Street Journal, which is something of a coup. As Tim Cook said on stage: “This is going to take Apple News to a whole new level.” In the demo on stage, we were shown exactly how Apple is thinking about making the magazine experience work on mobile. The tactile feel of turning pages is lost, but Apple is keen both to keep magazines’ distinct design style and make the most of the medium at the same time. One example of this is “Live Covers,” magazine titles that animate to grab the attention. This was demonstrated with a copy of National Geographic that showed a scrolling cityscape of Sydney, Australia.

Because Apple envisages all of your reading habits to be in one place, Apple News Plus can have the YouTube experience: learning about your reading habits, and offering suggestions as to the magazines you might like to read. It’ll even learn on a topic-specific level, and one demo showed the user getting recommended a Marie Claire article about Costa Rica, because they’d shown an interest in travelling there. Despite this, Apple insists that privacy remains important, and they were very clear on one point: there will be no tracking, “so it won’t follow you across the web.” If you live in the US or Canada, Apple News Plus is available right now – and in Canda, it’s available in both English and French. While Apple states that subscribing to all the magazines would cost over $8,000 per year, a subscription to Apple News Plus will be $9.99 per month, and family sharing is included at no extra charge. No word on exactly when Apple News Plus will arrive in Britain, but Apple suggested it’s next on the list, with it coming to Australia and Europe later in the year, starting with the UK.