Apple Creator Studio
apple.com
apple.com
Educational discount with verification required drops the price to $2.99/mo / $29.99/yr.
The regular-price subscription includes family sharing, education price does not.
One-time purchase versions remain available: Final Cut Pro ($299.99), Logic Pro ($199.99), Pixelmator Pro ($49.99), Motion ($49.99), Compressor ($49.99), and MainStage ($29.99).
Comes out January 28th
Ah, yes - cross finance your loses by selling compute in your own data centres / hosting service because you can.
They want marketshare to enhance their other market positions and give them optionality for future strategy.
They'd love the whole market, but they don't need it and they won't employ too many resources chasing that.
They're a powerful giant with hands in so many places. Each enforcing other endeavors.
This encourages people to stay in the Apple hardware ecosystem, for instance. It dog foods their silicon. It keeps people thinking of Apple as the creative brand and operating system. More creatives buying Apple -> more being produced and consumed for and on Apple.
Also the strategy of getting kids young has always been genius. They started that in the eighties, I think.
Best framing I’ve seen of the answer to, “Why is Apple in the streaming service business?”
As someone who came up along side adobe, the only reason photoshop is as entrenched as it is is simply because of piracy. Ditto for premiere. It created the market that they then locked down with subscriptions.
I think you are going to see shops that are smaller, doing their own design stuff internally, increasingly moving away from adobe subscriptions.
"software and services" really should be broken out from the App Store cut.
Anyway, this isn’t really a meaningful quibble argument-wise, it is obvious what you mean!
Also so many people are paying for Canva, Capcut etc that taking a piece of that cake is quite a low hanging fruit if you have a distribution platform.
It’s even a similar pricing model, though technically with Pages / Numbers / Keynote covers a little more ground but I think the main intent is to get creatives using Apple’s creative software again
Pixelmator being the only 3rd party software because Apple never made a competitor to Photoshop
Though since Canva went full on toward more robust tools I imagine they have started capturing the entire editing chain more than they did 2-3 years ago, hence the Affinity acquisition
Pixelmator isn’t third party. https://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2024/11/01/a-new-home-for-pi...:
“November 1, 2024
A new home for Pixelmator
Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple”
That deal completed almost a year ago.
Apple absolutely has data centres. Where do you think Apple TV, Apple Music, iCloud, Maps, etc compute happens?
Here's a press release straight from the horse's mouth about one in Denmark, in late 2020: https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2020/09/apple-expands-rene...
> Can people purchase compute on Apple's data centers?
Not to my knowledge, but that's not saying much.
But that's the entire crux of their comment: undercut the competition, and make them pay for compute on Apple's data centers.
My comments weren’t related to whether apple has data centres or not (afaik they don’t and actually use google hardware).
My comments were related to a business model used by amazon to destroy local shops in our neighbourhoods: offer products at vastly reduced prices, making a loss but covering those losses by profiting on aws. Once there is no competition left, prices rise and shareholder profits are made.
Hence my conjecture that apple was doing the same and hence they were offering this product at undercut price. As was the OP was wondering about.
I was actually criticising the business model increasingly used by big tech. Which has the consequences that are neighbourhoods are emptied out and left with stores that act as amazon package pickup stores or stores where packages are returned to be sent back to amazon.
The real competition in this market in 2026 is Canva.
I see the rise of and have to deal with Canva-generated PDFs instead of Adobe Illustrator. So the low end market of video / animation, I could absolutely see Canva dominating. Doubt we'll see audio tools though.
Final Cut Pro -- Professional non-linear video editing * Canva? Partial: Best for social clips; lacks FCP’s RAW, multicam, and AI transcript tools.
Logic Pro -- Professional music production and MIDI sequencing * Canva? No: No DAW capabilities, plugin hosting, or live mixing.
Pixelmator Pro -- Advanced image editing and graphic design * Canva? Partial: Good for templates; lacks Pixelmator’s precision layers and AI retouching.
Motion -- 2D/3D motion graphics and cinematic effects * Canva? No: Canva uses presets; Motion offers granular keyframing and VFX creation.
Compressor -- Advanced media encoding and batch exporting * Canva? No: No control over specific codecs, bitrates, or pro output formats.
MainStage -- Live performance audio rig for stage use * Canva? No: No live audio processing or MIDI instrument hosting.
Keynote -- Cinematic presentations and slide decks * Canva? Yes: Canva’s primary competitor for collaborative, template-based slides.
Pages -- Word processing and page layout * Canva? Yes: Canva Docs is a direct alternative for visual/marketing documents.
Numbers -- Spreadsheets and data visualization * Canva? Yes: Canva Sheets handles basic data viz, though lacks Numbers' complex formulas.
Apple can't take the market from professionals; they need the easel they learned at school. But they can definitely compete with Canva, whose market are untrained artists who need something done easily.
We're all (mostly/some) software people here, you don't need to use terms established by the "anti-piracy" firms to make your point, no one is "stealing" anything here, even if they were getting it for free from TPB or whatever.
Seen it in media for decades at this point, which makes sense, most people can't tell up from down.
What's sad is hearing those things echoed here of all places, a community for hackers, and people are repeating the words of the MPAA.
oh come on I thought we had gotten past this crap
So now I'm getting an education too.
Microsoft still offers a one time purchase of Office. There is precedent for Bigcorp keeping a one time purchase version and offer a prescription.
Office 2024 has every feature that was added since Office 2021 to the subscription version - while a chunk of loyal customers are unaware of them. Back when Google was competing hard with Google Suite, a big perception problem formed with the perpetual customers believing and convincing others that Google were far ahead, with collab editing and other features - after Office had added equivalent.
So for me, If there's a subscription and one-time option - I wonder if the one-time gets all updates going forward. If it doesn't, I realise that they'll regret that if competition picks up, and try to fix it later. If it does include updates... I worry it will be like many other lifetime updates one-time purchases - when competition is low they'll renege on that promise.
Of course ... ? Before the subscription model, you wouldn't get free Office upgrades.
If you look at Adobe Creative Cloud, you see cloud storage and cloud libraries for maintaining files and assets and sharing them for collaboration, Behance, asset licensing such as Adobe Fonts, and generative AI tooling, as well as a pile of additional apps which were never sold separately. There's also tutorials to help you learn that smattering of apps and plugins.
Apple Creator Studio is a service, so there will likely be at least some product development going to create exclusive functionality - likely in the form of new apps which cannot be bought separately, content packs, AI integrations, additional collaboration features relying on hosted infrastructure, and so on. Since a lot of the storage features and base collaboration are instead part of the iCloud infrastructure, that last point may be a tricky line to walk though.
- the System 7 transition
- the 040 Macs and to get a “32 bit clean version”
- to get the full speed of running natively on PPC Macs
- to get a native OS X version instead of one that ran in the OS 9 sandbox
- the Intel transition to get native performance.
I would much rather pay $150 (?) a year for a five user license where each user gets 1TB of storage and each user can use Office across Macs, Windows, iPhones and iPads.
It’s the same price as Dropbox’s 2TB plan and all you get for that is storage.
On a related note: Steve Jobs was right - Dropbox is a feature not a product.
Soon the company formerly known as Microsoft will turn into a garbage slop Pokémon capable of emoting only with its name, copilot.
he writing is on the wall, they will remove it sooner or later.
They're doing it because it makes them more money. Corporations are not your friend.
Obviously you're right that PR ultimately translates into money.
Probably not. Those customers are almost completely irrelevant and not people who Apple or anybody else cares about. They won't mind if you kick and scream.
Seriously? This is incredibly reasonable.
Apple wants its customers to buy/subscribe to these tools so that you’re in the Apple ecosystem and buy more hardware and services.
Unlike Adobe, they have profit-maximizing incentives to let you stay on the buy/rent model that you prefer.
This is like saying that it's clever for Mars to keep Mars Bars while launching a new bar, as it "shuts down" complaints that Mars Bars will no longer exist.
You have any email I could reach out to you on once Apple finally removes the purchase ability for this, and only lets people subscribe?
If they do this, then still no one will ever have to say something as silly as "they only kept the other option so people won't complain about them removing the other option".
There's no indication Apple is planning to end the option of paying once for these apps.
Apple introduced subscriptions for Final Cut and Logic nearly three years ago [1]; this isn't new by any means. Pages, Numbers and Keynote remain available at no cost.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/apple-brings-final-cu...
You're making up an individual to get mad at for no reason.
> The other thing that’s going to go away is purchasing only what you need
There is no proof of this. So you're making up a situation to get mad at for no reason.
> I want exactly one of these apps
Perfect, Apple lets you buy the one app you want for a reasonable price! So what's the issue?
It’s not set in stone, but it’s supported by the times this has happened before and by trends in Apple and in tech. “Nothing will ever change” is a prediction, too, and one much less supported by evidence.
At the time, the common wisdom was that they'd go the same route as Adobe: you'd have to buy Final Cut X+1 in a couple years for another $299, and Final Cut X+2 a couple years after that... to their credit, that's not the way it's gone.
So that way, I imagine, all the film folks have a little more money to chuck at their high-powered Mac hardware budgets in the next refresh cycle instead... An evergreen Final Cut Pro license costs almost as much as 1TB of SSD from those guys!
I'd argue that it is very likely that Final Cut X+1 was Apple's plan. It just did not pan out and they were busy with other things. Now they made the first step correcting that (or cutting the losses, depending how you want to see it).
I’m hand waving there because I’m not a pro but my neighbor is and I don’t recall the details.
But I’m curious how you see FC also lost in semi pro to Davinci specifically.
I spent last week helping out at a short filmmaking course. The DP running it has used Final Cut for his entire career. But not a single student chose to edit their film using Final Cut. The class was split between resolve and premier pro. (Premier was chosen by a lot of people because it’s what they use at school, and they have a free licence to premier from their school while they’re studying.)
- The studio version of DaVinci is still affordable should you need it.
- DaVinci has many good tutorials
Now BMD have "prosumer" cameras available too that doesn't cost half a liver, which the second-hand market seems flush with too, so you can grab really good hardware for "cheap", and get excellent software with it too as the license is movable across hosts :)
It's an optional way of editing separate from the 'edit' tab.
And that's despite Apple having zero interest in doing things that don't ultimately make them money.
I have a theory for how sales of these one-time-purchase yet indefinitely-updated apps happens to work out positively on Apple's balance sheet, while it doesn't for most other large players right now.
And that's that, due to Apple's vertical integration (they make the hardware, they make the OS that runs on the hardware, they make the apps that run on the OS) — and due to these apps only targeting their own OSes+hardware, with no consideration of portability to other platforms — a lot (like 90+%) of the "enablement" work for these apps ends up time-budgeted as OS work, rather than apps work.
Or, I guess, to be more charitable, you could say that Apple's engineers develop first-party apps not just to sell them, but at least in part to drive the development of the OS as a developer platform. You could even describe the OS frameworks as the product, and the apps themselves as the byproduct. (In that lens, the only reason FCP would cost anything at all is to avoid accusations of anti-competitive behavior.)
Now that the iPhone made Apple much more of mainstream company, it's harder to do -- what does it mean to focus on cultural leaders when 90% of American teens have an iPhone? But in the 15 years since Steve Jobs' death they have still been doing a decent job of it.
The company
It also frames the cost of the software differently, as part of a much larger purchase and as enabling other uses for the new machine. I suspect this is a fairly large sales channel for the software.
That makes me wonder how this new suite strategy (as well as other subscription efforts like AppleCare One) play into the purchase experience going forward.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/13/apple-creator-studio-ex...
JetBrains tried something similar a while ago too, and almost screwed it up - but managed to listen to their customers and nailed it with the perpetual fallback licensing. Making me not just pay the subscription but feel respect to the company.
YMMV, of course.
Adobe also started out as a choice between subscription or buying. The only thing maybe keeping Apple honest is that their stuff isn't as popular.
The best one to watch at the moment is if Pixelmater Pro license holders from before it was bought by Apple get access to any of the new improvements.
1. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/13/apple-creator-studio-ex...
As someone who defended FCPX and used it professionally for years even when it was at its most hated (2011 or so), it’s been woefully supported the last few years and no one should be on it anymore. Resolve Studio outclasses it top to bottom for the same one-time cost and runs great on both MacOS and Windows. Linux it’s bumpy unfortunately but it does technically run lol
Best 200-300 EUR I spent some years ago, and still receives free updates, Blackmagic Design is a really nice company. And, not only does Resolve run great on macOS and Windows, they have Linux native builds that run even better than it does with the same hardware using Windows, which is REALLY nice.
It lacks some flashy social media features and modern conveniences for sure, but it's still a very good and widely used editor.
I used it professionally from 2011-2020 or so. Around 2020 the gaps in feature parity became wider and more apparent, it’s clearly not a priority anymore. Once I went to resolve I basically abandoned it. I use maybe every 6mo tops now for quick stuff for friends and family or to open an old project.
The one thing I will say is for speed cutting, it’s probably the best. And that’s no small thing! But that’s about it.
In the end, their creative software is just ok; it's probably best to not rely on it too much if you don't want to get stuck. After they canceled Aperture for no good reason and destroyed the iWork suite while taking forever to even manage feature parity, I'll never rely on or recommend Apple software.
good on them
Even if I had to purchase an occasional update (assuming they were reasonably priced), I'd still be coming out ahead.
I hate "renting" software.
I could see using an iPad for automation, triggered by midi, but I use an Air for that (and even if I used an my Pro, I still have to use a USB C hub because for some reason Apple things 1 (or 2) USB ports is enough. Sigh.
> plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers
I wonder why? Why not today but 28th of Jan?
Part of me thinks M5 MacBook Air and M5 Pro MacBook Pro will also be released on January 28th.
I could see a press release refresh on that day to M5 chips.
https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/14/apple-may-have-hinted-at-a-hi...
There are many discussions e.g. https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1433515-why-does... about the reasons for its popularity, but one stands out to me - its event data model.
There are far too many tools out there (from FL Studio on one end, to MuseScore on the other) that present piano-roll-based rapid prototyping and traditional western score notation as diametric opposites. From day 1, Logic challenged itself "what if we can use the same event-based data model to render both."
None of this complexity is hidden - you can edit the raw event stream directly. If you're a developer familiar with, say, React, it makes music creation quite intuitive - everything from visual to audio output is a function of a transparently formatted data store.
And while that has its challenges, and some of the UX innovations of e.g. MuseScore have been slower to arrive in Logic, because of this "dual life" it's unmatched as a pedogogical tool, and a professional creative tool as well.
Are you saying other sequencers are unable to render the same data as piano roll and score?
And on the notation-oriented side, you have things like MuseScore, Finale, etc. where there is an event model, but the UI itself doesn't have mature (or any) support for tracking mixer/knob automation (outside of what can be derived automatically from dynamic symbols).
Years ago, I used Logic in a musical theater context where I could build a constantly-updated demo for pitching/rehearsals/live-iteration and edit the final orchestration to be printed for the pit orchestra, both from the same living document. Could I have duplicated my changes in a DAW and notation software separately, and kept them in sync manually? Absolutely, and many creators do. But there's something special about having that holy grail at your fingertips.
Cubase, surely? I'm pretty sure it has done this for decades unless I am misunderstanding what you're saying.
https://blog.dorico.com/2024/11/cubase-14-score-editor/
I'm still a Logic Pro fan, but credit where credit's due!
Considering them as alternate views of the same data model gets problematic when the composer uses the full bag of tricks that score notation allows (notably repeats, but also the problem of representing tuplets correctly when a pianoroll can offer no clues about how to structure them). So for example, the user can create a set of notes in the pianoroll that will never be played correctly by anyone reading the score; the user can create dynamics in the score that cannot be correctly presented in the pianoroll version.
I'm not saying it isn't possible to do an MVC-style system with two different views of the same data model - it clearly is. It's just moving between the two views is not lossless, and moving between the two controllers (i.e. editing) is not equivalent.
As it is, it's barely better than GDocs but less convenient, and since people rarely need to print stuff, layout isn't that important.
If it's graphics/presentation heavy, you most likely will need something like InDesign. If there is a lot of math, you'll need something like Latex (typist). If there are a lot of tables, you probably need something like Word to auto-update embeds from Excel. In general, Word will allow you to control features like footnotes/endnotes, tables of figures, etc, much better than Pages ever will.
If it's mostly literature, you can use something like Vellum (https://vellum.pub/)
I don't have a list of solutions ready, but maybe I should make one. This is a complex problem, and the safe answer is usually to just use Word.
The problem with Pages is that it is extremely mediocre at everything while still locking you down to Apple hardware.
The young, foolish version of myself was a rabid Apple fanboy and pushed people to use Pages (back in the day when the iWork suite was paid but cheaper). Then people came back to me with problems that could be solved in Word relatively easily, but I had no answer for with Pages.
After being tired of saying, "no you can't do that" or "that has to be done manually," I stopped advocating for Pages.
I don't do much document preparation nowadays, but I think the ideal solution would be a GUI to bridge between web publishing and paper publishing.
Guess it’s time to take some online self-paced courses at a university for no reason in particular …
Not available for one time purchase are the AI features and templates available for the free apps (Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Freeform).
Personally, I'm glad that one time purchases are still options for the core pro suite: long term they do hold value compared to paying Adobe a subscription (or dealing with the high seas on macOS). However, I don't see things like the education bundle sticking around much longer, so purchase it sooner rather than later.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/product/bmge2z/a/pro-apps-...
[2]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixelmator-pro/id1289583905
I think they view Photos as a viable replacement for Lightroom and equivalents.
If they're essentially shutting down Photomator development, after doing similar with Aperture many years ago, they do seem very determined to drive people to Lightroom....
[1]: https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/#:~:text=A%20one%2Dtime%...
I've learned my lesson — all my archives will now be maintained by me, in file structures, with metadata in text files.
This is a useful tool: https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive
However, you still need to run an older OS. I've still got on my todo list the process of fixing all of this.
That’s becoming a recurring theme for me and even some of my corporate clients now. Confluence, for example, is out the window for secure documentation around sensitive environments and Word Docs in One Drive are back in. It’s surprisingly refreshing and gets the job done way better.
(am I recalling correctly?)
Not Apple-specific really that point for sure anyway. Personally I don't think we should ever ever trust any vendor to control our data or act as a proxy for access to it. If it's not on a physical disk in your hands, in a format which is documented and can be opened by more than one application, then you're one step away from being screwed. There are so many tangible risks we love to sweep under the rug from geopolitics, commercial stability, security, bugs to unexpected side effects. And I've seen some real horror stories on all of those fronts.
At the same time I managed to embed myself thoroughly in it and I'm 3 months in to undoing the mess. It's VERY hard to get back to files on disk. No moving away from that is probably the best option I suspect a lot of us never took.
Hardest stuff to get out of is iCloud/Apple and Adobe.
Metadata, versions, version groupings, projects, albums, there is lots of structure that most people don't realize exists.
Think every picture has an EXIF date and that's the date when it was taken? Think again. Scanning date is not the same as picture date.
Actually, even if you think of a date, you probably imagine the usual ISO8601 2026-01-14T17:37:46Z date — how about when we only know a year? This is something Aperture didn't do either, but when dealing with photo archives what you want is arbitrary precision date intervals. E.g. 1900-1902 for example.
Anyway. Just pointing out that even though "just files on disk" is the right approach, managing those files and their metadata is far from obvious.
I also bought Final Cut Express. Not sure I'll buy Apple software again either.
Are the Apple people really this oblivious, or is someone in PR trolling us?
/S
An idiotic aesthetic system that ignores all the human interface guidelines that the Apple of 30+ years ago helped start.
(And yes, I'm holding off on Sonoma for as long as possible because... yuck)
Apple wasting years of everyones time on bad faith UX design
the beatings with liquid glass will continue till morale improves
How? If they reverted to the previous iOS and macOS designs, Apple would go out of business?
What are you basing these claims on?
You can look at Apple’s own published consent regarding Liquid Glass development. It’s very evident that it was thoughtful and involved.
I think it's more realistic to expect that they're going to stick with a UI officially called "Liquid Glass" for the next decade, but it's going to go through some serious iterative changes in the next couple of years -- probably much more than it would have were Alan Dye still around.
I’m sure there is approved marketing copy.
Lightroom never matched Aperture's organizational abilities for libraries with tens of thousands of RAW photos.
On the other hand, Final Cut / iMovie will exist side by side because it’s truly a basic vs Pro situation.
Not a product manager at Apple, of course, but this is what logically seems to make sense.
darktable has supported Fuji raws since 2014! It currently supports the classic "uncompressed" RAFs, as well as the newfangled "lossless" (compressed) RAFs. I do not believe that it supports the "compressed" (lossy) format. So setting "recording type" appropriately on your camera is necessary.
I'm curious where the notion comes from that there is no support for Fujifilm RAF files, as I see this in a cousin comment as well.
They look AWEFUL.
I think these new icons will grow on people. There were similar negative reactions back ~15 years ago when Adobe switched to their minimalist icon style.
Adobe icons are terrible and should not be the standard. Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2 were so much more memorable and recognizable than the lazy minimalist slop we have now. Even the first CS or CS2 icons were a thousand times better. The fact that the company behind the most powerful and popular creative software did this is unforgivable.
Some tasteless manager made a PowerPoint about "brand cohesion", got his promotion and ruined it for everybody else.
Look at the new Pixelmator icon: geometric shapes overlayed with Bezier Curve handles at the bottom. What does it look like? Vector design. What does the app do? The exact opposite, raster design, pixel painting. What the previous icon signaled.
The previous Compressor icon: A machine compressing film, because despite the name Compressor is for encoding video files. The new icon? Sure with the context of the label you will understand it's something being squeezed, but what? And without the label?
The previous Final Cut icon was unmistakably a movie slate. The new one almost looks like a radio. Why is the pattern under the body? Why is it only at on the bottom and not the top clapper stick?
How are the new ones superior design? How does it improve on anything? It's forcing everyone to learn new icons that convey are less clear, convey less meaning, look uglier, just to serve the corporate interests of "brand cohesion"?
macOS Tahoe icons are a regression on every single front. I invite you to compare Disk Utility (where is the disk now?), or Migration Assistant (where is the notion of migrating from old to new?). And these are just a few examples.
And Final Cut Pro looks like Windows 11's garbage free ClipChamp! None of them have the gravitas of the old ones.
It's weird because uniformity and minimalism haven't been "in" in years, outside the Silicon Valley bubble. They're very culturally out of touch.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1qbz6g8/whos_excited...
I saw the new icon and it nearly made me puke. Had it been coming from Google or Microsoft I would have thought oh not surprised.
So Apple is copying Adobe's business model?
Its actually like taking on MS and Adobe together... but they aren't really taking on MS office.
It is also the only way to convince developers to pay for software.
Having a part hosted on some server is so much better than whatever anti-piracy schemes one can think of, and provides the continuous growth curve for printing money.
Thus subscriptions aren't going away in the modern software world.
I don't care about video, so I'll be buying Pixelmator now, and maybe music stuff later, and Video part never.
So it works like before, if you want.
...and they integrated some of the Aperture to new Photos app, which is again was a transition to free.
Name me something a product, not a service which you can only subscribe in Apple's ecosystem.
The shows on Apple TV are only available via a subscription; there's no way to have a perpetual purchase (at least as far as that a la carte style of purchase is perpetual).
I used to buy the season passes so I could return to shows later; that's not an option for ATV stuff.
For video, the free version of DavinciResolve goes a very long way, and their Studio is a single-payment-life-time license.
Not quite “buying on release week” basis but some % of employees always getting new hardware at max specs in the design org
Makes even engineering jealous sometimes
If anything, Apple is refreshing their hardware much faster now compared to the Intel days. There's literally a new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air every year. And of course there are 3-4 new iPhones every year.
I'm not particularly interested in sustaining the financial growth of software companies. I did that for years and I'm done.
But, what you suggest is literally what the software industry did for decades before subscriptions became the norm.
Apple doesn't work that way.
Unlike almost all other tech companies that are organized by divisions, Apple uses a functional organizational structure.
So all of the software teams are under one head of software; there's no senior vp of the Final Cut division, for example.
For accounting purposes, all software is lumped together.
Apple made $391 billion in revenue last fiscal year; when you're making that kind of money, you can afford to do things for reasons other than the amount of money you could make.
Whatever revenue Final Cut generates isn't required to fund the Final Cut team.
This is what I'm saying and why I don't see the point in charging at all for these apps. The existence of the subscription price tag on them is evidence against what you're claiming.
I disagree. Apple doesn’t need the money, but they also know consumers don’t value free apps the same way they do for pay apps.
It also plays into people’s desire for something better than what everyone has. Everyone gets Numbers, Pages and Keynote for free, but if you subscribe, you get bonus content and features.
So while Apple doesn’t need this to be a blockbuster product, they’re not going to leave money on the table either.
Wonder what Adobe thinks of this. Their support for Mac was pretty important in getting OS X off the ground, now they’re competing with a unified stack.
When I was a Mac user I remember buying Logic express 9 (I still have the disk). The price is a good deal, but you really are all in forever..
I am glad the standalone purchases are still available and I assume they will stay updated in sync with the subscription-based ones. I would hate my copy of Logic getting slowly obsolete..
My experience is that while there’s a feature and community gap for both Pixelmator Pro and Affinity, Affinity just tried to copy Photoshop, positioning it as a worse but cheaper Photoshop, while Pixelmator Pro feels like an attempt to make a better photo editor, losing some familiarity points but also being tangibly better than Photoshop at most use cases it can handle, which is many. It’s also an excellent macOS citizen. Between those two factors, it seems much more up Apple’s alley.
But having one simple opex line item for "software I buy for the creative types" is appealing for a lot of orgs.
Photohsop, Illustrator and After Effects are pretty much industry standards.
In a past life, I’d have fallen quite squarely in the latter and I still fall in the former.
Given this also extends to my family, it feels like a no-brainer replacement for creative cloud.
The larger problem is that the iPad has a dual nature. At the launch of the product, Apple positioned it as a netbook killer - i.e. a simplified computer for specific tasks, one where the locked down nature of the device might actually be considered a feature. That's why they built everything on iPhone OS[0]. However, there's always been the implication that this is supposed to Someday™ replace the Mac. It keeps getting new features to make it more useful as a computer replacement, which just makes the deliberate restrictions placed on the device more and more glaring. And Apple seems to think they can just keep adding features until they can make you do every computing task wearing a strait-jacket in a padded room.
This particular duality came to a head with the Apple Vision Pro. Any app that would actually be useful on a VR headset is either:
- Incompatible with Apple's code-signing and containerization requirements (i.e. developer tools)
- Not economic to offer at the small scale of the visionOS app market (at least, not while Apple is demanding 30%)
- A game (Apple really doesn't wanna talk about the Vision Pro as a games machine)
On a related note, Swift Playgrounds stopped getting updates almost a year ago. I updated my HTML editor demo project for iPadOS 26 and now I can't even compile it because Apple has yet to ship the version 26 SDK. And there's really nothing any third party can do to fix Swift Playgrounds to make it actually usable again.
[0] Strictly speaking, Apple's first internal demos of capacitive touch were for a tablet project specifically to spite Windows XP tablets. Although by the time they were writing actual shipping code it was intended for iPhone and iPad came later.
It isn't about doing and publishing apps without having to buy a mac.
Rather having a more powerful development experience that isn't as constrained as Swift Playgrounds, useful for prototyping ideas.
I do not care if in a similar vein, to a Smalltalk like environment I would always need to run the app from inside the dev env, and then use a Mac, or some cloud build workflow if I ever would like to actually publish it.
Just like I use several other coding on the go environments.
> Apple today unveiled Apple Creator Studio, a groundbreaking collection of powerful creative apps designed to put studio-grade power into the hands of everyone, building on the essential role Mac, iPad, and iPhone play in the lives of millions of creators around the world. The apps included with Apple Creator Studio for video editing, music making, creative imaging, and visual productivity give modern creators the features and capabilities they need to experience the joy of editing and tailoring their content while realizing their artistic vision. Exciting new intelligent features and premium content build on familiar experiences of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform to make Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite to empower creators of all disciplines while protecting their privacy.
Count with me:
1. Groundbreaking
2. Powerful
3. Studio-grade
4. Power into the hands of everyone
5. Essential role of <INSERT APPLE PRODUCT(S)>
6. Exciting new
7. Familiar experiences
8. Empower
9. Privacy
---
P.S. is HN frontend open-source? I'd like to submit a fix for Markdown list rendering
It's in the announcement and look at what Microslop and Google have done to their versions.
Why though isn’t such a significant announcement on the Apple.com homepage?
Function | Apple | Adobe | Adobe price / month
--------------------|----------------------|---------------------|--------------------
Image editing | Pixelmator Pro | Photoshop | ~USD 20
Video editing | Final Cut Pro | Premiere Pro | ~USD 23
Motion graphics | Motion | After Effects | ~USD 23
Audio production | Logic Pro | Audition | ~USD 23
Video encoding | Compressor | Media Encoder | Included with Premiere Pro
Live audio | MainStage | No direct equivalent| N/A
Docs/presentations | Keynote/Pages/Numbers| Express/Acrobat | ~USD 10 to 24
--------------------|----------------------|---------------------|--------------------
TOTAL | USD 12.99 / month | ~USD 100+ / month |
| (7 apps bundle) | (5 apps separately)|
| | USD 69.99 / month |
| | (bundle 20+ apps) |
Pixelmator is closer to Photoshop, you can do some photo editing, but its not focused on it, and does not have asset management.
(I work for Adobe)
More info here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/technology/apple-ceo-tim-...
My old job dealt with this quite a lot as they were our target market, so I got some up close views of how for example, creators like MrBeast go about their editing (well the employees anyway)
Though I did note a lot of creators that do graduate to more robust software basically go from lightweight editor via Canva -> iMovie or equivalent -> professional software e.g. FCPX or Premiere
To them what Apple just announced is trash.
Like Adobe CC
I love Logic and all but really?
I can’t help but notice Apple in the last decade has kind of been spinning in circles software wise while their hardware division makes breakthroughs with M-series chips.
2026, the year of the Linux Desktop…
As a keyboard player who mainly plays (and owns) classic electro-mechanical keyboards like Hammonds, Rhodes, Clavinets, and Wurlitzers, Apple's emulators that they brought from Logic are really top-notch - often better than what you get with dedicated hardware.
$30 is an insane price for what it delivers. I just wish it were available for iPad, and I'd use it more for gigging.
It’s a good value for some, especially if you want to use FCP, but seems like a bad value for most users who are expecting more value from their Mac purchase.
I wonder if new Macs will offer a three-month trial for this suite, or if the standard apps will be pre-installed and the AI features are unlocked through a subscription.
If bundled versions of iWork go away, we may see a renaissance for G Suite.
I'll say this loud for the people in the back: YOU CAN STILL BUY IT OUTRIGHT
They are still offering one-time purchases, calm down.
If I’m a music producer, what’s the value of being given a digital art drawing program? If I’m an illustrator, why do I need a cinema post production suite?
Some people might happen to do both, but overlap is largely accidental, right? The fact that they think of all professions as a bundle is even insulting as it signals the products are mostly toys/hobbyist stuff.
Are you talking about Adobe here?
In a feature film production, these would certainly be separate roles. But apart from maybe Logic Pro for composers, Apple's tools are not really relevant at those levels of the entertainment business anymore. Post-pro would be Pro Tools for audio, something like Avid Media Composer for editing etc.
I think Apple has realized they are not playing on that level anymore and target their marketing to where they are still in the game. That's not necessarily a bad move.
I know Logic is widespread amongst beat producers and songwriters, especially in the US. But you will also often see tracks getting produced on Logic but the final mix then happens on Pro Tools (by professional mixing engineers).
But that's why I explicitly mentioned Logic, I think it's the one pro app from Apple that still deserves the moniker, at least in regards to where it is used. The video stuff not so much anymore.
The target market is prosumer, not true professional.
The real difference is that a "true professional" already has the software—purchased at full price by themselves or by their employer—and doesn't need a subscription in the first place.
But besides, this subscription works with Family Sharing and is only $12, so it looks easy to get your money's worth.
If not, then this would likely go the way of others before where it will eventually be removed.
So in desperation I read the manual. It was seriously well written and I understood the program, what needed to be done and how to do it.
Looks like some new "premium content" features will be only available to those with a subscription
So, if you are a student, you can get logic, final cut, motion, compressor and mainStage for $199.99 for ever.
Photos isn't even close to the genuine Lightroom competitor that Aperture was
(For what it's worth, the iWorks apps – Pages/Keynote/Numbers are free and bundled with macOS.)
I hope I can still use the non subscription version of Pixelmator pro I bought
I tried it out when it was first announced and found it painfully limited --- did I miss something? Has it gotten better?
More seriously, the subscription probably comes out cheaper than buying several (even if not all) of the apps that come in the bundle.
The apps themselves are fine IMO.
Why would someone need to buy them, they only run on macOS and macOS hardware comes with it by default, doesn't it?
Not sure why tbh, my other invoices are done in LibreOffice.
It looks so much better than the grid enforced by Excel.
So not only is it a far quicker way to make a PPT than using Powerpoint. I also see it used for making presentation videos, interactive PDFs and even animated GIFs/HTML5 animations.
The number of motion graphics marketing videos I see which are actually just Keynote files exported to video is impressive.
(Sadly, my work laptop is Windows. So I create them on my personal laptop then migrate to PPT and do my best to fix up the fonts on Windows.)
I have a numbers file for my personal finances and it is so nice having some tables at the top with mortgage info and then details below. It makes running what-ifs super easy. Charts in excel and GSheets just kinda float over your content awkwardly.
> [...] to make Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite to empower creators of all disciplines while protecting their privacy.
Back in the day I was considered a 'MultiMedia' creative. I don't even know what to call myself these days.
Ummm ... no, thank you.
1.0 Creating a software bundle is the expected play by a company that keeps trying to grow their subscription revenue, but lots of creators are fed up paying an arm and a leg for software they'll never own that they need to do their job. Canva turned a lot of heads and got new people into Affinity just by making it free, I would have liked to see Apple lead with the same pitch rather than make just another bundle.
2.0 I feel like this is a u-turn on what made buying Apple hardware so great. You paid a pretty penny for the hardware but you would get high quality software with more care and attention paid to it than their competitors. This has changed in recent years, with many of the iWork products languishing with only minor updates as the market has evolved towards simplified cloud-based tools. Although there's still free functionality and the subscription provides a more affordable way to get into their pro tools, I fear the free versions will become second-class.
2.1 The same has happened to their stance on advertising as well, with the App Store getting ads and Maps being next in line to get them too. Microsoft and Google are still much worse than Apple in this regard, but I thought they would hold out for much longer than cave to growing pressures to grow revenue.
3.0 I'm not a fan of putting generative AI as a selling point in a product called "creator studio". Many artists are against the usage for various reasons, and Apple has a long history of aligning themselves with creative individuals. Seems like a misunderstanding of what their audience would want.
4.0 No Garageband or iMovie feels like they've abandoned them. Which is a shame for tools that have started so many creator's careers. There's still a need for simplified tools for creators early in their careers or with simpler needs, something that CapCut has shown.
5.0 There's still gaps in their bundle. There's no software for UI design. I could see Apple acquiring Sketch, they would just need to reach feature parity with Figma. There's lots of organizations getting squeezed by Figma's enterprise contracts, and most product designers I know are already on Macs. There's also no drawing or animation software. I could see them acquiring the team behind Procreate and Procreate Dreams to fill it. That software already sells iPads, many artists have gotten their start with digital art with it. Another gap is publishing, although they could probably add functionality to Pages or buy Swift Publisher.
6.0 Who is this for? Every organization under the sun already pays for Office 365, and I've never known a designer who's used Pixelmator for their day to day work. Affinity felt like a much more compelling alternative to Adobe, and anyone with simple enough needs to use these tools is probably already using web-based tools on their Windows laptop. I suppose hobbyists, but I'm not sure if a subscription is compelling for them.
I feel like if you were to be content with those tools, you wouldn't really want to pay for them. I guess the argument is getting access to Final Cut and Logic for cheap, but there are pro software of the same quality accessible for free or close to it (usually people get starter DAW licenses from buying hardware, and DaVinci has free stuff).
Apple is losing the plot on so many levels. If they want to make their stuff subscription, they really need to make it much better than it is at the moment.
“Apple offers new option for subscription in addition to existing one-time purchase optinos” might be an alternative though, and reduce the number of cynically inane comments from people that apparently didn’t RTFA before commenting.
EDIT: I know you can still buy the software... but for how long?
> Alternatively, users can also choose to purchase the Mac versions of Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage individually as a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store.
I don't want yet another subscription.
I see that they can still be bought (for now) but I wonder how long that will last.
You'll still be able to buy it if you want. All apps are still can be bought. It's in the text.
Apple surprised me nicely there.