Apple (finally?) reveals their pro suite of apps

Well, well, well, Apple announced Apple Creator Studio today, and it's worth breaking down the announcement a bit.

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.

I think this framing is interesting right off the bat. Apple is subtly suggesting this is the creative suite for everyone, presumably differentiating themselves from the Adobe Creative Suite, which is premium and only for Serious Professionals.

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.

It's interesting to see Apple bundling Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform in the press release. These apps are free already for Apple users, so this got a bit of an eyebrow raise from me. It will make more sense soon, though.

Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform, Apple Creator Studio subscribers can be more expressive and productive with new premium content and intelligent features across Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Okay then, so the free apps will remain free, but there will be content and presumably AI features that you need to pay to use.

Apple Creator Studio will be available on the App Store beginning Wednesday, January 28, for $12.99 per month or $129 per year, with a one-month free trial, and includes access to Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad; Motion, Compressor, and MainStage on Mac; and intelligent features and premium content for Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

$12.99 per month is a quite strong price point in the current market, although I don't expect it's price to immediately kill Adobe or anything. We would have seen they with Affinity's recent update to…checks notes…free. Still, it's a decent price for pro software. It is worth noting that existing Final Cut, Logic, and Pixelmator Pro users have been using those apps with no monthly fee for many years now, and I'm not sure what their incentive will be to jump on this subscription anytime soon.

College students and educators can subscribe for $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year.

Fantastic. College kids are going to get this sort of software one way or another, so making it dirt cheap is a good way to get something from them and hopefully turn them into long-term customers.

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.

As they clarify at the end of this post, these apps are already on the Mac App Store and you can get them now, you don't have to wait for January 28 when the bundle launches. This tells me that people like me who own all these apps already will be able to keep using them for the foreseeable future. As someone who mostly uses Final Cut Pro out of all these apps, it seems like I'll get all the updates discussed in this post, and will for at least some time into the future. I'm sure they'll push people to upgrade to the subscription eventually, but I plan on resisting as long as possible.

With Transcript Search on Mac and iPad, users can now easily find the perfect soundbite in hours of footage by simply typing phrases into the search bar to see exact or related results.

This is snazzy. The footnotes on this and other Final Cut features mention they only work in US English, but nothing about being exclusive to the subscription version of the app, so it looks like everyone gets this.

Using the power of AI…

I'm just calling this out because I think it speaks to the massive influence the AI industry has had over the past three years. A couple years ago, many of us thought that Apple would never use the word "AI" to describe what they were doing. It would be "machine learning" or stuff like "Apple Intelligence", but they're just calling it AI now like everyone else.

For the first time, Pixelmator Pro is coming to iPad

I'll be honest, their preview of the iPad version of the app has me mostly encouraged. The iPad app looks more feature complete than Final Cut for the iPad, which is exciting. That said, my heart did breat a bit when I saw the Mac screenshot and saw liquid glass doing its thing. I guess the good news is Final Cut and Logic don't seem to have gotten turned to brittle glass yet.

for Apple Creator Studio subscribers, both Pixelmator Pro for Mac and iPad bring a powerful new Warp tool for twisting and shaping layers any way creatives can imagine, alongside a beautiful collection of Warp-powered product mockups.

Maybe it's a killer warp feature, but this seems like a weird thing to put behind the subscription to me.

The Content Hub is a new space where users can find curated, high-quality photos, graphics, and illustrations. A subscription also unlocks new premium templates and themes in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers.

An alternative stock photos and themes library wasn't something I was expecting, but alright, this could be interesting. There's also some junk about generating images, but whatever.

Apple Creator Studio includes access to features in beta, such as the ability to generate a first draft of a presentation from a text outline, or create presenter notes from existing slides. Subscribers can also quickly clean up slides to fix layout and object placement. And in Numbers, subscribers can generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition with Magic Fill.

Google's apps have started doing things like this, and they're really useful.

All new subscribers will enjoy a one-month free trial of Apple Creator Studio, and with the purchase of a new Mac or qualifying iPad, customers can receive three months of Apple Creator Studio for free.

Listen, I'm game to give it a trial run, but my money is on me dropping it before it costs me anything.

Before I go, can I just say something about the icons? I'm not a fan. I'm so much not a fan it has me looking at the current glass versions of Final Cut Pro and Pixelmator Pro with nostalgia. Oh how good we had it!

These new icons remind me of when Google normalized all their icons to the point that they all look the same…no soul…no joy…just the same icon with a few shuffled pixels.

I guess I should be happy Apple at least used different colors.

And that's it! It's cool to see Apple getting into the creative pro game a bit more, after pulling back for so many years. Bring back Aperture, make it as good compared to Lightroom as it was back then, and you'll have me as a customer for sure.