For my use case of simply wanting to have myself and my wife on a custom domain email, this is still unreasonably expensive. I don’t care about the other offered services as I have everything else that I need running on my own server but email is safer to run off premises.

I’m curious why you would trust Apple and not the others you have listed. All of them will do literally anything to just earn more money and exploit you as much as possible.

What is the target audience for this product? I don’t expect it can be used reasonably when travelling as it needs internet to work. Is it simply for when the TV is taken up by somebody else who really doesn’t want to watch their movies or tv series on a laptop like children perhaps?