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So many “I don’t get it” comments in this thread. And complaints about the subscription pricing. The market for this seems pretty obvious - teenagers. iPad seems like the default computer for kids these days and kids like to create. When I was a teenager I had to build my own PC, struggle to pirate Cubase and some plugins and it was a nightmare. When I finally got a MacBook Logic being $200 was out of reach still. A subscription makes it affordable for the people who are going to use it on a tablet. The same thought applies for teenagers trying to make YouTube videos. Now they can legally and easily use the professional tools on hardware they already own.

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That is not at all the obvious market; people in the HN bubble are just ignorant of the creative world and love to shit on Apple. The iPad is already huge for content creation among professions. It has made a huge dent in the tablet market (think Wacom), and is heavily used by professional artists. The audio options are amazing and USB midi output on instruments is very common now and works with iPads. An actual computer will probably remain a key component in artists' workflows, but iPads and iPhones are increasing part of it.

> people in the HN bubble are just ignorant of the creative world and love to shit on Apple.

defensive much? I didn't see anything even remotely resembling shit in GP's comment. You'd probably have a better time on the internet (HN at least) if you don't go around looking for things to be offended by whether they're intended or not.

To be fair, nearly every Apple thread features several stubbornly out-of-touch programmers sneering at iOS devices as "consumption-only" or something similar, usually with a tone that makes you expect to see the word "sheeple" occur. If we had a bingo card for HN Apple threads, you could just go ahead and make that the free space, the effect would be practically the same.

Reminds me of every HN thread about front-end/JavaScript/React. We should make a bingo card for those threads too.

Sure. But how many of those creative professionals are there v. teenagers who want to mess around with these tools--especially when it's priced at only $5/mo? Seems like Apple is continuing to make tools for creative professionals while also making them accessible to a wider audience of amateurs to broaden the revenue base.

The $5 per month pricing is for skeptics to try the product without committing to a $299 purchase.

And yes, it does bring in some revenue from non-professionals, but they have other alternatives on iPad. Including iMovie from Apple which is free, and others like CapCut, LumaFusion, etc.

Kids aren't creating on iPads though. The only tools needed are TikTok/Snapchat + filters. Beyond that, it starts to feel like work.

YouTubers making 'long form' video (> 5 mins) also aren't going to buy an iPad when their computer does the job just fine. And even then, Mac owners don't necessarily use Final Cut; Adobe Premiere and Davinci Resolve are enormously popular.

Bold of you to assume that YouTubers are using full-fledged computers in the first place. Video editing on cellphones and tablets has been a thing for yonks.

What about the people that will emerge as YouTubers because they can now run a channel without buying a computer?

You are ignoring how big capcut is

if you're pro enough to want to improve your quality (my 500k follower friend still uses capcut while living off of brand deals but in the future I could see her wanting to upgrade / hire an editor) then why would you use a tablet based editor rather than just a laptop with a real editing program?

It doesn't need to be a replacement, just comfortable enough that you'd be willing to throw an iPad and a keyboard (And maybe a pencil/mouse) in your backpack instead of a laptop if it fits your use case.

There's a non zero amount of people that have ditched the PC as their main computing device for this reason

Also if you want to do just one project (i.e. you don't produce music/video for a living, but you know enough to do your own stuff), then you can probably get away with paying $5 a month for just enough months to finish your project.

That was a use case completely uncatered for with a $400 one-off license fee.

Yep, I totally forgot about this use-case, but there were plenty of situations where it would've saved me. With one a couple a years ago that I vividly remember.

I volunteered to edit a demo video for our internal hackathon project, and had both an M1 iPad and a new macbook. I wanted to go all out on the video just for the fun of it, and I still had some of the final cut pro muscle memory from many years before, even though it was a much older version. iMovie proved to be extremely inadequate even for some basics (on both macbook and ipad). iPad had some third party options, but they were all either unwieldy or expensive or various other issues. For macbook, there were various alternatives (davinci, etc), but they either had similarly high pricing or various other limitations or an insane learning curve (which i don't mind usually, but not in those circumstances). Final Cut was only available as a full-priced option. I would have easily been willing to pay $10-20 for one month worth of access for this project, but no way I am paying hundreds for that. Ended up using iMovie and making the video that i absolutely hated and that wasn't resembling anything I had in mind for it at all.

P.S. I am genuinely baffled by how terrible iMovie is compared to its big sibling Final Cut Pro, given how amazing and well-rounded GarageBand is compared to its big sibling Logic Pro. GarageBand is obviously not competing with Logic Pro, I was just trying to illustrate that Apple has those hobby->pro creative app relationships (iMovie->Final Cut Pro, GarageBand->Logic Pro), and the GB->LP one is imo fantastic overall, and both products are shining in their respective tiers, and I get a good use out of both of them. But with iMovie->Final Cut Pro, I am pretty much fighting against iMovie even for some basic things and would rather deal with Final Cut only. And yes, for basic video editing, I still miss windows movie maker (the newer MSFT replacement for it, Clipchamp, is the worst out of major basic video editing software i've ever used).

iMovie for iPhone doesn't even let you author in 9:16, which is criminal.

I find iMovie for Mac pretty useful, honestly.

> I find iMovie for Mac pretty useful, honestly.

Agreed, but only because comparable alternatives are even worse imo. Hopefully, one day Apple will nail it like they did with GarageBand, as GB used to be pretty meh as well not that long ago.

What are the top three things you'd like to see in iMovie?

And what has happened to GB to be considered good now?

I'll do you one better, I just started the App store on the Mac to check whether they've implemented the same model there. The only music I make is analog, but I'd have liked to try it out for a few bucks.

They offer a 90-day trial. I suppose you should get it while it lasts!

Oh awesome! Thank you for letting me know, I'm gonna check it out.

But you are not paying $5/month. That’s a gimmick. You are pre-paying a full year’s worth. It’s like paying (almost) full price but for only a year’s worth of use.

For Adobe, at least, the actual monthly rate is way higher.

nope, there's a $4.99/month option and a 49.99/year option

Fair enough. I was looking at Photoshop which is claimed at $20.99 a month, but if you actually rent it monthly it's $31.99 a month.

Oh, and I wonder how long the $5/month pricing will be in effect - when they'll raise the prices.

I see you missed the whole "Logic Pro costs $499" era and the earth shattering news when Apple lowered the price to $199. And far too many DAW creators refuse to learn that lesson, instead going "you can have a DAW for $199 but you only get three and a half tracks, only one can be a plugin, and your audio files must be in 17 bit RIFF wave with the bytes in reverse order. If you want something better, pay us more".

Logic used to cost far more than that. When Logic 6 came out it sold for $999 and was a great deal because they’d finally bundled all the plugins and synths in to one package. To buy the whole package before than was thousands.

I remember when they dropped the price to $200. It's what finally got me to move from Garageband/pirating stuff. It's also what keeps me away from playing with a lot of other DAW's.

honestly the only way to get most of the other ones is to go "okay if I get a MIDI controller with a free copy of the entry level version, then I can bump that up to the REAL entry level version for cheap, and then when they release the next version I can bump that up to the intermediate version during a sale, and then a year later I can probably get the REAL version as a black Friday upgrade."

Yay!

People have different nightmares. My nightmare is yet another subscription.

Then you’re probably not the target market. I would have loved this when I was younger and $5 a month was easy/$200 one off was impossible.

It is usually not billed monthly. They SAY it’s $5/month, but your actual price is $60 right now, for a whole year. That’s a huge difference. You’re paying a good portion of full price, with the “benefit” of having it stop working after a year.

I kind of wish they'd have an option for both. ToonBoom Harmony still lets you do that (though they kind of obscure that on their website). You have the option of paying $71/month for Harmony Advanced, or $1130 for a perpetual license.

It would be nice for people to do something similar with Logic; you can pay for a subscription, or you can pay a flat rate to own something forever; I'm personally kind of turned off by products that do not offer perpetual licenses.

This is so true. When I was a kid I could have gotten my parents to pay $5 / mo for me to explore my creativity. $200 not so much. I think this pricing is actually a really good thing for consumers.

I get it: Money

Apple thinks that they will make more money this way.

Yes, getting more customers is a tried and tested way of making more money.

EDIT: I misread: it's $5 per month not per day.

The fact that the surrounding market sucks does not make this intrinsically better.

It's the same situation as rent, except that a DAW is not the living necessity that a home is.

If the best deal you can get is to buy someone lunch every day, that's still prohibitive enough to price a lot of people out of the digital music scene. That's terrible for the market of creativity.

There are cheaper and even free audio editors and video editors already on iPad.

FCP isn't for teenagers.

> The market for this seems pretty obvious - teenagers. iPad seems like the default computer for kids these days and kids like to create.

For audio, isn't something like 99% of that market already covered well by GarageBand?

I do get it,

time to say good bye to Darwin (BSD kernel) MacOS..

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