It's $12.99/mo or $129/yr for a subscription that includes Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, MainStage, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers
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).
The most important benefits in my opinion are choice and price - people like me who prefer to buy software outright can still do so at a reasonable cost, while others who opt for a subscription can also do so (again, at a reasonable cost).
It's pretty clever that they keep the "pay one time" option still alive while announcing the availability of subscription, so anyone who says "Boo, not you too Apple" can easily be shut down with "You still have the option to buy it!" instead of leaving those critics without answers. Of course, they'll eventually remove the option to buy the software by paying once, I think everyone can see the writing on the wall, but still clever of them to choose to do it later for PR purposes. 1-0 to Apple :)
So what about next year when all of the apps receive updates/upgrades? Will the paid-in-full versions receive the upgrade for free, or will they have upgrade prices? I remember the days of Adobe's annual version upgrades, and they were at least $99 per app. Using that as the basis, the Adobe subscription plan is not more expensive that just broken up into 12 payments. People that kept running v4 to avoid the upgrade prices eventually got left out as they could not open files provided to them from others using the most recent version. Let's not forget our history on the one-time purchase pros/cons
All companies should do this. Sometimes I want a one-time purchase. Sometimes I want to try the program for a few months and I prefer a cheap subscription over a big upfront cost. And very, very rarely, I'll prefer the subscription, even though it's more expensive over time, to support a cool indie studio with recurring revenue instead of one-time purchases that may dry up and lead to lack of interest from the devs.
The competition for the Creator Studio is not exactly Adobe. Of course Apple will be happy to build on their offerings to be able to really take on Adobe, but this subscription is priced to compete with the online services popping up from nowhere that have stolen the ease of use market away from Adobe.
The real competition in this market in 2026 is Canva.
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.
There's a lot of information in a traditional western score that cannot be easily represented in a pianoroll, at least not losslessly.
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.
Thank god they preserved the one time purchase. I bought all of these apps back in like ~2013 and have been using them for literally 13 years with all updates (fcp, compressor, motion)
It's rare for a company to not only offer one-time purchases, and keep updating them, but also not rebranding/renaming/version cut-off charging at some point.
Make the one-time purchase while you still can. The educational version is a great value, and the license allows the software to be used for commercial purposes.
I finally had to give mine up. Needed to reset the password which required a trip to 4HELP office and I live halfway around the globe now. But the kiddo will be starting college soon so I can mooch off their edu email address.
If you are planning anyway to break the terms of the license and effectively steal the software, why even bother paying something for the privilege? Just get it for free, surely it has to be available cracked
Not related to your comment exactly but I feel like I need to get this out in this thread somewhere:
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
> Resolve Studio outclasses it top to bottom for the same one-time cost and runs great on both MacOS and Windows
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.
the other benefit is that subs can be a sort of extended trial. Ive been wanting to try out final cut pro but I don't want to do a full video project if i'm going to be evaluating it. better to have 1-3 months to really know before I plunk down 299 bucks.
My concern here is are they going to start locking features for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote behind a paywall? Yes, it’s free—but will they still have all of the newer features without a subscription?
They'll be pressured by gdocs and other similar products to not keep too much of this behind a paywall. I already don't know anyone who loves using Pages (every time I share a document I have to export it to .docx, which is annoying), so they're already starting off behind by a bit.
The individual one time purchase versions are still available for all the apps. Final Cut, Logic, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage are offered in a bundle for education by Apple as a $199.99 one time purchase (no education status is verified) [1]. Pixelmator Pro is available as a one time purchase as well for $49.99 [2]. Not included in the Creator Studio is the Lightroom alternative Photomator, which is available as a one time purchase of $119.99. You could recreate just the Creator Studio as a one time $250 purchase, or the entire suite (including Photomator) for $370.
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.
Additional info: Final Cut Pro is going to keep getting updates, but certain features (presumably AI related) are not going to be included with the one time purchase and are gated to the subscription [1].
The inclusion of Pixelmator Pro is simply so they no longer have a hole in the software lineup as a competitor vs Affinity (I think the real competitor to this bundle) and Adobe
I think they view Photos as a viable replacement for Lightroom and equivalents.
After Apple suddenly discontinued Aperture, which left users like me with huge complex photo archives hanging, I will never trust any professional software tool from Apple again. It is a disaster that I still haven't fully recovered from.
I've learned my lesson — all my archives will now be maintained by me, in file structures, with metadata in text files.
Learned that lesson too. Then got into Lightroom. Now getting out of that by exporting stuff slowly. Moving to files on disk and edits in Darktable now. No "library".
Please don’t take this as me saying you were wrong to ever trust Apple, however the best way to organise any data is usually just files on a disk.
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.
It's all true, but if you think organizing photo archives is easy, boy have I got news for you.
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.
From what I recall, aperture did use files-on-a-disk, maintaining original photos read-only and letting everything else be operations on those originals.
Agree with all of this, apart from possibly OneDrive but that's for another post.
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.
> These apps will continue receiving updates, with the latest versions adopting the beautiful new visual design language with Liquid Glass on all platforms
Are the Apple people really this oblivious, or is someone in PR trolling us?
I read it less as obliviousness and more as internal language leaking into marketing. What’s “Liquid Glass” to Apple reads like an aesthetic system though but to outsiders it sounds like jargon inflation. I feel the gap between internal coherence and external clarity shows up in these releases a lot.
You’ve never worked at BigCorp have you? At Amazon, part of the initial indoctrination when I was hired there was competitive messaging when talking to clients (I worked in ProServe) and what you were never allowed to say. I remember we could never say we had a “moat”.
Doesn’t matter. The apps run on the OS, the latest hardware only runs the OS at the hardware release date and later. You’re getting the Fisher-Price UI whether you want it or not, even if the apps never change a thing.
I guess it's enforced top-down. Yesterday I picked up my MacBook from a logicboard repair and they forced Tahoe on it despite running Sonoma originally so I spent most of yesterday getting rid of Tahoe and reverting back to Sonoma.
I’ve been waiting to see what happens with Photomator, and the fact that it’s not being included in anyway here makes me think it might not survive? Either that, or it’s gonna be heavily integrated into Photos…
I was also surprised to not see Photomator included. Wouldn’t it perfectly complement the lineup? I hadn’t thought of such a pessimistic interpretation, but now I’m worried as well …
Frustrating that Photos is really not suitable for anything other than editing snaps. I'd love to ditch Adobe, but Darktable doesn't support Fuji raws, and there really aren't that many great commercial alternatives to Lightroom that don't also have a subscription model.
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.
It's a massacre. The originals[0] were metaphorical and easy to grasp. These new ones are meaningless, for most of them you can't guess what the app does from the icon. The beautiful 3-axis colorwheel gimbal, gone. The concert access badge, gone. The pressed record award replaced with a disc? Is that the MP3 player app?
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.
Oh Thank You for the link. Exactly what I am talking about. You dont have to like or agree with every icons beings used previously, but at least they serve its purpose which is easily recognisable.
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.
> Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage — plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers — come together in a single subscription
Well really they are copying the original Microsofts suite packaging which everyone has copied over the years! But yes specific they are trying to take market share on Adobe.
Its actually like taking on MS and Adobe together... but they aren't really taking on MS office.
Subscription model so it’s adobes model. But you can buy “one time”. Though they have a tendency to just end product support (aperture software was canceled leaving a lot of bad taste for photographers that used it)
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..
You're never free to unsubscribe because you become accustomed to the tools, and use the file formats, etc. (That's why I don't do subscription, ever.)
FTA: “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.”
It’s cheap enough it’s not enough to fund development of Final Cut but also not enough money to bother spending time on it. Find it odd personally, just offering them free to keep hardware makes more sense than trying to push a tiny subscription revenue number.
When there are no more new buyers to sell devices, or new versions of existing software packages, the only way to keep the curve growing for shareholders and MBAs is to sell subscriptions.
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.
It's a pity Apple didn't choose to acquire Affinity when there was a chance. Pixelmator Pro looks like a toy app compared to Logic or Final Cut. I don't see how it could ever catch up to Photoshop. Even at such small scale it's always been very buggy in my experience and development seems to have stalled (apart from some obligatory AI features).
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..
Your experience couldn't be more different than mine. I love Pixelmator Pro. One of my favorite apps on my computer. Super quick and snappy. Does what I need it to. Which doesn't mean it does what everyone needs it to. I get that it isn't a Photoshop replacement. But not everyone needs a Photoshop replacement.
Yeah, in my experience, Pixelmator looks the part but isn't a very good software, especially for vectors.
Affinity stuff doesn't look as good but gets much closer to Adobe quality tools.
Your experience is starkly different than mine. Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro’s much more toy-like predecessor from ~10 years ago?
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.
I guess it depends a lot on the use cases. I've used both the original Pixelmator app and the "Pro" may have been a rewrite internally but it didn't feel like a significant step up for me at the time, more like a rebrand and a way to charge for it again. And so many bugs. The development team did respond to a few of my bug reports, which was nice.
Seems like a pretty solid deal, if you need everything. I don't know who that person is though. The intersection between Final Cut Pro and Logic users is pretty small, I'd imagine.
I'm that kind of user but I would rather not use Logic, Final Cut, or PixelMator unless Apple really improves those. On top of that there's also the platform lock-in concern.
I played once with hosting a VSCode server on a raspberry pi for general development and it was actually quite powerful, when used from an iPad. Just not strictly for Swift unfortunately
I'm hosting a VSCode server with Termux/Ubuntu container on my old Pixel 6a and I cannot overstate how awesome it is for just a fun dev setup, especially with a tablet. Easy to nuke and start clean too!
The ecosystem is fine for non-Apple development. It's just building apps for iOS, macOS, etc. that is impossible on iPad right now past some basic applications.
Unless Apple gets off several high horses regarding code signing and, more importantly, app containerization; any Xcode for iPadOS is going to be useless. Like, imagine Xcode without custom build steps or third-party compilers.
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.
The only apps from Apple I give a sizeable fraction of a dam about are Pages and Numbers, and hopefully they’ll emerge from the scourge of AI largely unscathed.
Yeah I read that but what I meant (and failed to express clearly, I openly admit) is that I hope it doesn’t somehow become core functionality you’re kinda-sorta expected to have. Pages and Numbers work fine and I’d be willing to go back to paying for them as was true back in the iLife days (I still have an iLife ‘06 or ‘09 distribution CD or DVD on my shelf in a storeroom) but paying a subscription for creative apps I just never use just to get stuff everybody will expect you to have in productivity apps is a path I hope they don’t go down. Incidentally what Numbers really lacks is a circular converge-to-solution mode like Excel has had for decades, that would make it a serious tool tor simple business planning and financial projections.
It’s actually a pretty big deal. I always wondered why they didnt compete with Adobe. Even when Steve Jobs was still around. 90%+ of Adobe users are on Macs.
Why though isn’t such a significant announcement on the Apple.com homepage?
Here is a quick side by side comparison between Apple Creator Studio and the Adobe Creative Cloud suite.
Each app may be stronger or weaker depending on the use case, workflow, and specific user needs, so this is only a rough equivalence.
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) |
Disclaimer: table formatting assisted by ChatGPT (hope it works on HN).
What this misses is that Creative Cloud is much more than a bundle of apps. It includes everything you need around the apps for pro workflows (i.e. fonts, AI, stock, collaboration, etc...).
Logic Pro gets regular updates. I believe most of it is AI driven nonsense but they are making changes. Flashback capture was a nice fairly recent addition and surprising this wasn't implemented sooner. There are also regular bug fixes and performance improvements. I can't speak for the other apps.
TikTokers ("influencers" in general) don't do their editing or any part of their "production pipeline" on computers, kids are doing the full thing via smartphones nowadays. Blew my mind initially too, as I always did "serious work" at a computer and never the phone, but seems they're managing it somehow.
Tangential, but: MainStage the best deal in the entire pro audio industry.
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.
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.
> A one-time purchase will still be available, but access to some of the premium content is available only to Apple Creator Studio subscribers. If you already own Final Cut Pro, it will continue to be updated.
Looks like some new "premium content" features will be only available to those with a subscription
This seems like an Apple AI subscription under the guise of a software bundle.
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.
Sounds plausible. Someone internally likely has AI sales numbers to meet, so creating new subscriptions and adding "AI" to them can help juice AI-related numbers toward that quota.
I don’t get why they think “professional” is a generic tier.
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.
I think that's why they call it "Creator" studio. Creators - in the way the term is usually used today - indeed do use many of these tools. Maybe you produce music, create a video about you producing music and also need an engaging thumbnail for YouTube.
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.
Tons of professionals use logic. Really, you will find money making musicians using any of the major daws. Pro tools might still be the standard for recording studios but that's likely it.
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.
A lot of people round trip through various softwares to create things. As a film editor I use NLE’s, DAW’s, music production tools, various encoders (like compressor), graphic design tools…I’d say it’s the norm not the exception to need 2-3 specialized pieces of software during projects.
> 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
Many years ago, before Final Cut Pro x my cousin asked me to help inject some video from tapes and keep the time code. In Final Cut Pro. I couldn’t figure it out.
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.
I've had "buy motion" on my todo list for a while now.. just wanted to learn something new but it never made sense to buy it. With the subscription I think I'll give it a shot. Awesome!
I find it useful as a massive canvas for keeping a bunch of stuff in context, visually. And accessible via Mac and iPhone. But it is sorely lacking a major feature: highlight text to add a hyperlink. I end up with full URLs instead of hyperlinked words and it's pretty messy.
I use it regularly to do rough sketches of objects on my iPad to model in CAD later on the computer. It doesn't feel right for artwork or notes or basically anything else.
Yeah! They were courageous enough to take the step that Microsoft did with the Office suite (announced 1988, launched 1990) and with Microsoft 365 as subscription in 2011.
I'm keeping an eye on Graphite (https://graphite.art/) as something to move to from Affinity's stuff, but it's good there's a new option for people who need more.
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.
I am done with Apple. They've become a company only extracting money on the margins rather than innovating. Most products are stale, especially on the software side. Asking for yet another subscription is what makes the boiling kettle run over.
I'm curious how many people actually use all this stuff themselves. It seems like an extreme niche, and more often than not will have people paying for apps they will never use.
Maybe I'm old skool... but for the last 30+ years I've been using a combination of photoshop, illustrator, FCP, after effects (back when it was CoSA...), some audio editing and mixing in quite a bit of code as well. While others on my team specialize in one or two domains, I've managed to keep my skills in many.
Back in the day I was considered a 'MultiMedia' creative. I don't even know what to call myself these days.
Keynote is so much better for presentations that PowerPoint it's not even funny. But if you're not doing presentations, I can understand dumping it. I do like to have Pages because it means I don't have to bother with Word's annoying ribbon interface and Copilot AI when I'm writing...though sounds like that may be changing?
Keynote is completely underrated, likely because people assume it's just a Powerpoint clone, but it's more like a highly templated motion graphics app with a UI that steers people into using it as Powerpoint replacement.
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.
I put up with Numbers awful pivot table mechanics (why do they have to be manually updated?) because it genuinely allows you to create nice information displays with your tables.
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.
I paid for Numbers way back when it was a paid app. I have simple needs, and I much preferred the smooth inertial scrolling compared to running Excel in a VM (which was what I was doing before).
I absolutely would. I've used them for years, alongside MS Office on Windows and Libre Office on Linux, and while they lack a few features they're not ones I've ever needed and the UI and ease of use is far superior to Office. Especially Pages is a pleasure to work with compared with Word.
Except that isn’t an alternative title, unless you want to lie by omission thus being wrong.
“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.
God fucking damn not you too, Apple. Adobe isn't a role model to emulate. I hate Adobe's practices. The whole world hates Adobe's practices. I want to pay for a thing with my money and then use it without worrying about ongoing costs, the UI changing, features breaking, or shit being shoved down my throat because some seedy PM wants a raise.
EDIT: I know you can still buy the software... but for how long?
Doesn't sound like it
> 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.5
> 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.
And here's the ruining of Pixelmator Pro everyone was waiting for. I paid one time 20 euros for it (discounted). And I would gladly pay again even full price for a new major version.
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.
I think this is a huge mistake at least as far as the office software goes. One of the key advantages to Pages.app and friends is that they are pre-installed and free on MacOS. This will just drive people to M365 and Google Docs.
Pages and other iWork apps will remain free. The premium features are for curated images and templates, and AI assisted document creation. If you don't care for those features, you will not be affected by the change.
It's $12.99/mo or $129/yr for a subscription that includes Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, MainStage, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers
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
The most important benefits in my opinion are choice and price - people like me who prefer to buy software outright can still do so at a reasonable cost, while others who opt for a subscription can also do so (again, at a reasonable cost).
It's pretty clever that they keep the "pay one time" option still alive while announcing the availability of subscription, so anyone who says "Boo, not you too Apple" can easily be shut down with "You still have the option to buy it!" instead of leaving those critics without answers. Of course, they'll eventually remove the option to buy the software by paying once, I think everyone can see the writing on the wall, but still clever of them to choose to do it later for PR purposes. 1-0 to Apple :)
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So what about next year when all of the apps receive updates/upgrades? Will the paid-in-full versions receive the upgrade for free, or will they have upgrade prices? I remember the days of Adobe's annual version upgrades, and they were at least $99 per app. Using that as the basis, the Adobe subscription plan is not more expensive that just broken up into 12 payments. People that kept running v4 to avoid the upgrade prices eventually got left out as they could not open files provided to them from others using the most recent version. Let's not forget our history on the one-time purchase pros/cons
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This isn’t the whole story as one-time purchases will no longer have access to all new features without a subscription [1].
1. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/13/apple-creator-studio-ex...
All companies should do this. Sometimes I want a one-time purchase. Sometimes I want to try the program for a few months and I prefer a cheap subscription over a big upfront cost. And very, very rarely, I'll prefer the subscription, even though it's more expensive over time, to support a cool indie studio with recurring revenue instead of one-time purchases that may dry up and lead to lack of interest from the devs.
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For now. Let's not forget MS Office had a period like that as well. I give it five years max.
For *now.
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.
Except certain features in the software will be reserved for subscribers only.
That's actually surprisingly cheap compared to other subscriptions in the industry, especially for such a high powered suite.
As long as you buy a macbook to use it on, they are happy
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The competition for the Creator Studio is not exactly Adobe. Of course Apple will be happy to build on their offerings to be able to really take on Adobe, but this subscription is priced to compete with the online services popping up from nowhere that have stolen the ease of use market away from Adobe.
The real competition in this market in 2026 is Canva.
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That was my thinking. I already use several of these apps, the $130/mo. is a no brainer to pick up the others.
Get them in the door now and jack up the price later.
Undercut the competition until there is no competition, then raise prices or have I missed something?
Ah, yes - cross finance your loses by selling compute in your own data centres / hosting service because you can.
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As someone who's loved Logic Pro since the days before Apple bought Emagic, this is amazing that it will be accessible to a broader audience.
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.
There's a lot of information in a traditional western score that cannot be easily represented in a pianoroll, at least not losslessly.
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.
How else could you represent piano roll data than as a stream of events? I thought that was ubiquitous since the invention of MIDI.
Are you saying other sequencers are unable to render the same data as piano roll and score?
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Thank god they preserved the one time purchase. I bought all of these apps back in like ~2013 and have been using them for literally 13 years with all updates (fcp, compressor, motion)
good on them
It's rare for a company to not only offer one-time purchases, and keep updating them, but also not rebranding/renaming/version cut-off charging at some point.
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I thought they basically gave away Keynote/Pages etc to anyone with an Apple device?
It's literally in the introduction of the page.
> plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers
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Potentially AI slop features coming to both that they'll charge for?
>Comes out January 28th
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.
Well I guess either Great Mind thinks alike or they just read my HN comment
https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/14/apple-may-have-hinted-at-a-hi...
Mac Studio is still on M4 Max and M3 Ultra chips.
I could see a press release refresh on that day to M5 chips.
Could be related to billing cycles
I would like this to be very true. Can’t wait to get the new Air.
I thought Keynote, Pages, and Numbers were complimentary. Or part of an iCloud subscription or something. Is that changing?
> Educational discount with verification required drops the price to $2.99/mo / $29.99/yr.
Guess it’s time to take some online self-paced courses at a university for no reason in particular …
Make the one-time purchase while you still can. The educational version is a great value, and the license allows the software to be used for commercial purposes.
time to dust off that 20 year old edu email address. with these discounts, college has paid for itself!
I finally had to give mine up. Needed to reset the password which required a trip to 4HELP office and I live halfway around the globe now. But the kiddo will be starting college soon so I can mooch off their edu email address.
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That almost never works for me, they usually use a service that verifies current student enrollment like SheerID.
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If you are planning anyway to break the terms of the license and effectively steal the software, why even bother paying something for the privilege? Just get it for free, surely it has to be available cracked
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But Keynote, Pages and Numbers are already free
Hopefully staying as such. I like Numbers, but I suspect I could totally replace my use of it with Emacs org-mode.
From the subheading: “plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers”
Seems like a great "opportunity" for Apple to pump up their Services revenue
That's actually a hell of a deal considering I already pay $5 a month just for Logic on the iPad.
I bought Logic maybe 8-9 years ago, and get free upgrades.... If I had paid $5/mo it would already have cost me ~$280.00 more than I paid.
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.
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Not related to your comment exactly but I feel like I need to get this out in this thread somewhere:
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
> Resolve Studio outclasses it top to bottom for the same one-time cost and runs great on both MacOS and Windows
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.
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Not arguing against Resolve, but FCP is still great for edits.
It lacks some flashy social media features and modern conveniences for sure, but it's still a very good and widely used editor.
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the other benefit is that subs can be a sort of extended trial. Ive been wanting to try out final cut pro but I don't want to do a full video project if i'm going to be evaluating it. better to have 1-3 months to really know before I plunk down 299 bucks.
They offer a 3 month trial already.
Meanwhile the subscription for Adobe Premiere ALONE is 22.99/mo
Yeah, I'm pissed that the Photography plan (Lightroom/Photoshop) has gone from 9.99/mo to 24.99/mo in the last 18 months.
Does this mean Keynote and Pages are now paid products? Aren't they included with Mac OS?
From the subheading: “plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers”
My concern here is are they going to start locking features for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote behind a paywall? Yes, it’s free—but will they still have all of the newer features without a subscription?
I’m assuming that they’re going to (fairly) lock AI generative features behind the subscription since they’ll be incurring ongoing costs.
They'll be pressured by gdocs and other similar products to not keep too much of this behind a paywall. I already don't know anyone who loves using Pages (every time I share a document I have to export it to .docx, which is annoying), so they're already starting off behind by a bit.
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The individual one time purchase versions are still available for all the apps. Final Cut, Logic, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage are offered in a bundle for education by Apple as a $199.99 one time purchase (no education status is verified) [1]. Pixelmator Pro is available as a one time purchase as well for $49.99 [2]. Not included in the Creator Studio is the Lightroom alternative Photomator, which is available as a one time purchase of $119.99. You could recreate just the Creator Studio as a one time $250 purchase, or the entire suite (including Photomator) for $370.
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
Additional info: Final Cut Pro is going to keep getting updates, but certain features (presumably AI related) are not going to be included with the one time purchase and are gated to the subscription [1].
[1]: https://www.apple.com/final-cut-pro/#:~:text=A%20one%2Dtime%...
The inclusion of Pixelmator Pro is simply so they no longer have a hole in the software lineup as a competitor vs Affinity (I think the real competitor to this bundle) and Adobe
I think they view Photos as a viable replacement for Lightroom and equivalents.
Photomator would be a more level Lightroom alternative, odd it's not included in the new Creator Studio package.
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Thanks for the info, I was looking for this. I have the "Pro Apps Bundle for Education" that I bought years ago and it is an fantastic deal.
Did Photomator increase in price? I seem to remember buying a lifetime license for $79.99.
After Apple suddenly discontinued Aperture, which left users like me with huge complex photo archives hanging, I will never trust any professional software tool from Apple again. It is a disaster that I still haven't fully recovered from.
I've learned my lesson — all my archives will now be maintained by me, in file structures, with metadata in text files.
Me too, with Aperture. Huge misstep and insult to the user base.
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.
It's been a decade and it still hurts that it was discontinued.
Learned that lesson too. Then got into Lightroom. Now getting out of that by exporting stuff slowly. Moving to files on disk and edits in Darktable now. No "library".
Not only Aperture. The FCP7-FCPX transition was a disaster as well.
Please don’t take this as me saying you were wrong to ever trust Apple, however the best way to organise any data is usually just files on a disk.
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.
It's all true, but if you think organizing photo archives is easy, boy have I got news for you.
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.
From what I recall, aperture did use files-on-a-disk, maintaining original photos read-only and letting everything else be operations on those originals.
(am I recalling correctly?)
Agree with all of this, apart from possibly OneDrive but that's for another post.
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.
Power tip: replace the Word docs with Markdown.
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The Aperture discontinuation still pains me as well. Especially since I can't even run it anymore.
I also bought Final Cut Express. Not sure I'll buy Apple software again either.
Logic users on Windows also weren't too happy when Apple bought Emagic and dropped Windows support shortly after.
> These apps will continue receiving updates, with the latest versions adopting the beautiful new visual design language with Liquid Glass on all platforms
Are the Apple people really this oblivious, or is someone in PR trolling us?
They don't have much of a choice. They bet the house on liquid glass and need to keep up appearances.
I think they just need to wait a bit and then present something more sensible as the new hot design.
> They bet the house on liquid glass
How? If they reverted to the previous iOS and macOS designs, Apple would go out of business?
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When you are in a hole you can at least stop digging.
I read it less as obliviousness and more as internal language leaking into marketing. What’s “Liquid Glass” to Apple reads like an aesthetic system though but to outsiders it sounds like jargon inflation. I feel the gap between internal coherence and external clarity shows up in these releases a lot.
> like an aesthetic system
An idiotic aesthetic system that ignores all the human interface guidelines that the Apple of 30+ years ago helped start.
Pretty sure these marketing speak was decided half-an-year before. Sales and marketing just do their job
/S
It sounds like internally it’s a checklist item they have to mention everywhere.
Yep, it's not trolling, it's just them doing the job. A well paid lawyer will defend a client even if they're guilty
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You’ve never worked at BigCorp have you? At Amazon, part of the initial indoctrination when I was hired there was competitive messaging when talking to clients (I worked in ProServe) and what you were never allowed to say. I remember we could never say we had a “moat”.
I’m sure there is approved marketing copy.
Next version will probably "build on Liquid Glass", while moving away from it. At least that's my guess.
I like the Liquid Glass design so this is a point for me.
[flagged]
Dear Apple, Please do not add liquid glass to your professional applications. Keep it simple, gray, performant, and functional. Thank you.
Doesn’t matter. The apps run on the OS, the latest hardware only runs the OS at the hardware release date and later. You’re getting the Fisher-Price UI whether you want it or not, even if the apps never change a thing.
I guess it's enforced top-down. Yesterday I picked up my MacBook from a logicboard repair and they forced Tahoe on it despite running Sonoma originally so I spent most of yesterday getting rid of Tahoe and reverting back to Sonoma.
Sonoma won't receive updates for long any more. Better off switching to Sequoia. It'll give you 20 months to switch away, instead of 8 months.
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At least in the screenshots I did not notice absurdly large window corner radii.
Because every app is presented in fullscreen. Showing the windowing system would make sense if this was announced pre-LG.
Have you never had to toe a company line before?
someone in PR is trolling
the beatings with liquid glass will continue till morale improves
Apple no longer supports GL, so Liquid Glass - GL = Liquid Ass.
I still miss Aperture. Photos is a far cry still, many years later.
Lightroom never matched Aperture's organizational abilities for libraries with tens of thousands of RAW photos.
I’ve been waiting to see what happens with Photomator, and the fact that it’s not being included in anyway here makes me think it might not survive? Either that, or it’s gonna be heavily integrated into Photos…
I was also surprised to not see Photomator included. Wouldn’t it perfectly complement the lineup? I hadn’t thought of such a pessimistic interpretation, but now I’m worried as well …
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Frustrating that Photos is really not suitable for anything other than editing snaps. I'd love to ditch Adobe, but Darktable doesn't support Fuji raws, and there really aren't that many great commercial alternatives to Lightroom that don't also have a subscription model.
> but Darktable doesn't support Fuji raws
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.
I wish there was something like GOG but for old general software
Apple dropping Aperture right after I landed stateside was enough to knock me out of the photography hobby entirely.
Tried Darktable?
For me it didn't work with Fuji RAW, so I couldn't really use it.
This is Off Topic, but the first thing I notice on that page were those icons for apps with Apple Creator Studio.
They look AWEFUL.
It's a massacre. The originals[0] were metaphorical and easy to grasp. These new ones are meaningless, for most of them you can't guess what the app does from the icon. The beautiful 3-axis colorwheel gimbal, gone. The concert access badge, gone. The pressed record award replaced with a disc? Is that the MP3 player app?
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...
Oh Thank You for the link. Exactly what I am talking about. You dont have to like or agree with every icons beings used previously, but at least they serve its purpose which is easily recognisable.
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.
I don’t think they look awful, and they’re more interesting and opinionated than most boring icons you see these days.
They're definitely awful compared to the icons they're replacing. Losing so much identity and detail.
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It has that new slop aesthetics.
Yup, looks like they have been created by some intern with Image Playground.
TERRIBLE! Can’t believe Apple is using these.
> Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage — plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers — come together in a single subscription
So Apple is copying Adobe's business model?
No, all apps are available for purchase for a one time payment.
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.
Pixelmator is great and integrates well with Apple's tooling for batch processing.
For video, the free version of DavinciResolve goes a very long way, and their Studio is a single-payment-life-time license.
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Available for purchase... for now.
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Well really they are copying the original Microsofts suite packaging which everyone has copied over the years! But yes specific they are trying to take market share on Adobe.
Its actually like taking on MS and Adobe together... but they aren't really taking on MS office.
How so? Apple's subscription cancellation is one click away, and you don't get overcharged when canceling.
Subscription model so it’s adobes model. But you can buy “one time”. Though they have a tendency to just end product support (aperture software was canceled leaving a lot of bad taste for photographers that used it)
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..
Depends on if you are stuck with the subscription for life, or if there's actually a reasonable way to unsubscribe.
You're never free to unsubscribe because you become accustomed to the tools, and use the file formats, etc. (That's why I don't do subscription, ever.)
FTA: “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.”
Yeah but this is $129/yr, that's significantly cheaper
It’s cheap enough it’s not enough to fund development of Final Cut but also not enough money to bother spending time on it. Find it odd personally, just offering them free to keep hardware makes more sense than trying to push a tiny subscription revenue number.
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One might argue it offers significantly less value too.
Adobe invented subscription bundles? In that sense did the Creative Cloud copy iCloud?
When there are no more new buyers to sell devices, or new versions of existing software packages, the only way to keep the curve growing for shareholders and MBAs is to sell subscriptions.
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.
It's a pity Apple didn't choose to acquire Affinity when there was a chance. Pixelmator Pro looks like a toy app compared to Logic or Final Cut. I don't see how it could ever catch up to Photoshop. Even at such small scale it's always been very buggy in my experience and development seems to have stalled (apart from some obligatory AI features).
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..
Affinity never made mac-assed Mac apps. Pixelmator is more a Mac app than Messages or Music. That's why they bought them instead of Affinity.
Maybe. Form over function, not a surprise.
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Your experience couldn't be more different than mine. I love Pixelmator Pro. One of my favorite apps on my computer. Super quick and snappy. Does what I need it to. Which doesn't mean it does what everyone needs it to. I get that it isn't a Photoshop replacement. But not everyone needs a Photoshop replacement.
Yeah, in my experience, Pixelmator looks the part but isn't a very good software, especially for vectors. Affinity stuff doesn't look as good but gets much closer to Adobe quality tools.
Your experience is starkly different than mine. Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Pixelmator, Pixelmator Pro’s much more toy-like predecessor from ~10 years ago?
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.
I guess it depends a lot on the use cases. I've used both the original Pixelmator app and the "Pro" may have been a rewrite internally but it didn't feel like a significant step up for me at the time, more like a rebrand and a way to charge for it again. And so many bugs. The development team did respond to a few of my bug reports, which was nice.
Seems like a pretty solid deal, if you need everything. I don't know who that person is though. The intersection between Final Cut Pro and Logic users is pretty small, I'd imagine.
TBF, you can say the same thing for adobe creative cloud - the intersection between After Effects and Indesign users is also effectively nil!
But having one simple opex line item for "software I buy for the creative types" is appealing for a lot of orgs.
But the CC subscriptions offers a lot more.
Photohsop, Illustrator and After Effects are pretty much industry standards.
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Yes, re: opex. The product is “renewals,” not software really.
I'm that kind of user but I would rather not use Logic, Final Cut, or PixelMator unless Apple really improves those. On top of that there's also the platform lock-in concern.
There’s quite a few creative hobbyists and freelancers.
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.
Subs like this are great for people who can’t afford the full versions yet
I am still waiting for "XCode for iPadOS", where we can have a Smalltalk like approach to development, beyond what Swift Playgrounds allows for.
I played once with hosting a VSCode server on a raspberry pi for general development and it was actually quite powerful, when used from an iPad. Just not strictly for Swift unfortunately
I'm hosting a VSCode server with Termux/Ubuntu container on my old Pixel 6a and I cannot overstate how awesome it is for just a fun dev setup, especially with a tablet. Easy to nuke and start clean too!
The ecosystem is fine for non-Apple development. It's just building apps for iOS, macOS, etc. that is impossible on iPad right now past some basic applications.
Unless Apple gets off several high horses regarding code signing and, more importantly, app containerization; any Xcode for iPadOS is going to be useless. Like, imagine Xcode without custom build steps or third-party compilers.
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.
Everyone that argues about this misses the point.
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.
The only apps from Apple I give a sizeable fraction of a dam about are Pages and Numbers, and hopefully they’ll emerge from the scourge of AI largely unscathed.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but they certainly won't.
It's in the announcement and look at what Microslop and Google have done to their versions.
Yeah I read that but what I meant (and failed to express clearly, I openly admit) is that I hope it doesn’t somehow become core functionality you’re kinda-sorta expected to have. Pages and Numbers work fine and I’d be willing to go back to paying for them as was true back in the iLife days (I still have an iLife ‘06 or ‘09 distribution CD or DVD on my shelf in a storeroom) but paying a subscription for creative apps I just never use just to get stuff everybody will expect you to have in productivity apps is a path I hope they don’t go down. Incidentally what Numbers really lacks is a circular converge-to-solution mode like Excel has had for decades, that would make it a serious tool tor simple business planning and financial projections.
Too bad they killed Aperture.
Now they acquired Photomator with Pixelmator, but it's still an independent subscription... not even included in this bundle. Maybe they just forgot.
It’s actually a pretty big deal. I always wondered why they didnt compete with Adobe. Even when Steve Jobs was still around. 90%+ of Adobe users are on Macs.
Why though isn’t such a significant announcement on the Apple.com homepage?
Because Adobe would have gone Windows only, which would have been a potentially fatal blow to Apple at the time. Same reason Claris was spun out.
At least Acrobat reader is not relevant on macOS.
Here is a quick side by side comparison between Apple Creator Studio and the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. Each app may be stronger or weaker depending on the use case, workflow, and specific user needs, so this is only a rough equivalence.
Disclaimer: table formatting assisted by ChatGPT (hope it works on HN).
What this misses is that Creative Cloud is much more than a bundle of apps. It includes everything you need around the apps for pro workflows (i.e. fonts, AI, stock, collaboration, etc...).
(I work for Adobe)
A lot of those are paid extras. I know my Adobe CC didn't come with any stock credits.
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Pixelmator probably is Lightroom. And adobe has "Photography Bundle" with Lightroom and Photoshop for $20/mo.
No, Lightroom is a dedicated photo editor and DAM.
Pixelmator is closer to Photoshop, you can do some photo editing, but its not focused on it, and does not have asset management.
No, Photomator (and Photos) is Lightroom. Pixelmator is Photoshop.
Wow, RIP the icons I guess :/
Excited to see whether the new Apple boss will lead to software innovation, which has been pretty stagnant the last few years.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/technology/apple-ceo-tim-...
When was the last time Apple made some significant update to its professional desktop apps?
Logic Pro gets regular updates. I believe most of it is AI driven nonsense but they are making changes. Flashback capture was a nice fairly recent addition and surprising this wasn't implemented sooner. There are also regular bug fixes and performance improvements. I can't speak for the other apps.
https://support.apple.com/en-afri/109503
Forget that. TikTokers are the revenue stream now.
TikTokers ("influencers" in general) don't do their editing or any part of their "production pipeline" on computers, kids are doing the full thing via smartphones nowadays. Blew my mind initially too, as I always did "serious work" at a computer and never the phone, but seems they're managing it somehow.
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They use CapCut which is free and on the web and Google Docs.
To them what Apple just announced is trash.
Tangential, but: MainStage the best deal in the entire pro audio industry.
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.
Apple CC
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…
> A one-time purchase will still be available, but access to some of the premium content is available only to Apple Creator Studio subscribers. If you already own Final Cut Pro, it will continue to be updated.
Looks like some new "premium content" features will be only available to those with a subscription
This seems like an Apple AI subscription under the guise of a software bundle.
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.
Sounds plausible. Someone internally likely has AI sales numbers to meet, so creating new subscriptions and adding "AI" to them can help juice AI-related numbers toward that quota.
In this thread: No one who has even skimmed the article
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.
But for how long?
I don’t get why they think “professional” is a generic tier.
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.
I think that's why they call it "Creator" studio. Creators - in the way the term is usually used today - indeed do use many of these tools. Maybe you produce music, create a video about you producing music and also need an engaging thumbnail for YouTube.
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.
Tons of professionals use logic. Really, you will find money making musicians using any of the major daws. Pro tools might still be the standard for recording studios but that's likely it.
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> I don’t get why they think “professional” is a generic tier.
The target market is prosumer, not true professional.
I don't think there's that much of a distinction.
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.
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Many people that use professional tools are genuinely doing hobbyist stuff. Especially if they haven't already bought their tools outright.
But besides, this subscription works with Family Sharing and is only $12, so it looks easy to get your money's worth.
A lot of people round trip through various softwares to create things. As a film editor I use NLE’s, DAW’s, music production tools, various encoders (like compressor), graphic design tools…I’d say it’s the norm not the exception to need 2-3 specialized pieces of software during projects.
> 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
Are you talking about Adobe here?
Probably not, seeing as Creative Cloud has bundles focused on specific mediums.
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Is the one-time purchase versions guaranteed for life?
If not, then this would likely go the way of others before where it will eventually be removed.
Nothing is ever guaranteed for life...except the promise of death.
apple can pry my one-time final cut pro purchase from my cold, dead hands.
Many years ago, before Final Cut Pro x my cousin asked me to help inject some video from tapes and keep the time code. In Final Cut Pro. I couldn’t figure it out.
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.
An Aperture-like is still the stand out missing piece here, especially when you have the Garageband to Logic and iMovie to Final Cut progression
Photos isn't even close to the genuine Lightroom competitor that Aperture was
Not only that, but Photos has gotten less and less capable over time.
Last thing I did when I was a student was to buy the Apple pro apps bundle for education. It still haven't regretted it :D
So, if you are a student, you can get logic, final cut, motion, compressor and mainStage for $199.99 for ever.
I've had "buy motion" on my todo list for a while now.. just wanted to learn something new but it never made sense to buy it. With the subscription I think I'll give it a shot. Awesome!
> Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Keynote, Pages, Numbers
https://i.imgflip.com/2siu6l.jpg
When you're not plowing money into putting AI everywhere, it's easier to be cheaper than Adobe I guess...
(For what it's worth, the iWorks apps – Pages/Keynote/Numbers are free and bundled with macOS.)
I wondered when Apple was going to do this. Seemed inevitable when Final Cut Pro on the iPad had a subscription, I think.
I hope I can still use the non subscription version of Pixelmator pro I bought
Is anyone finding Freeform useful?
I tried it out when it was first announced and found it painfully limited --- did I miss something? Has it gotten better?
The main thing about Freeform that has been useful is that it has been a https://infinitecanvas.tools without a lock-in subscription.
I find it useful as a massive canvas for keeping a bunch of stuff in context, visually. And accessible via Mac and iPhone. But it is sorely lacking a major feature: highlight text to add a hyperlink. I end up with full URLs instead of hyperlinked words and it's pretty messy.
I use it regularly to do rough sketches of objects on my iPad to model in CAD later on the computer. It doesn't feel right for artwork or notes or basically anything else.
It’s odd not to see Photomator in this bundle. Feels even more likely that they’re going to kill it off in place of the regular Photos app.
Innovation!
More seriously, the subscription probably comes out cheaper than buying several (even if not all) of the apps that come in the bundle.
Yeah! They were courageous enough to take the step that Microsoft did with the Office suite (announced 1988, launched 1990) and with Microsoft 365 as subscription in 2011.
Are they planning to discontinue Garage band?
That Synth Player and Chord ID seem to be killer features on Logic Pro. Are they recent additions? Do they work well?
It's not released yet.
The icons...so this is what the future looks like under Steve Lemay?!
All these companies can go to hell with their subscription traps.
Cool, just don't send me your project files in email attachments.
I'm keeping an eye on Graphite (https://graphite.art/) as something to move to from Affinity's stuff, but it's good there's a new option for people who need more.
OT: ...protecting their privacy. LOL (wrong playbook triggered writing this)
> [...] to make Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite to empower creators of all disciplines while protecting their privacy.
Multiple thoughts on this:
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.
Agreed.
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.
I am done with Apple. They've become a company only extracting money on the margins rather than innovating. Most products are stale, especially on the software side. Asking for yet another subscription is what makes the boiling kettle run over.
How long until the option to buy-once for this software goes away? I am not a fan of this trend.
You will (soon) own nothing and be happy.
So can i use this to purge the liquid metal from MacOS 26 ?
You got Liquid Metal? I'm stuck with Liquid Glass :-(
liquid metal / glass whats the difference its all shiny and amorphous.
That's great if you need everything. If you need one of them, not so much.
You can buy the individual tools, if you want.
I'm curious how many people actually use all this stuff themselves. It seems like an extreme niche, and more often than not will have people paying for apps they will never use.
Maybe I'm old skool... but for the last 30+ years I've been using a combination of photoshop, illustrator, FCP, after effects (back when it was CoSA...), some audio editing and mixing in quite a bit of code as well. While others on my team specialize in one or two domains, I've managed to keep my skills in many.
Back in the day I was considered a 'MultiMedia' creative. I don't even know what to call myself these days.
That’s a great deal
> "come together in a single SUBSCRIPTION"
Ummm ... no, thank you.
Does anyone use these apps?
Pixelmator Pro is fantastic. I've forgotten about Photoshop for many years. Just buy it.
Bad move Apple. Bad move.
Pages, Numbers and Keynote are the first apps I bin whenever I'm setting up a new Mac. Would people actually pay money for them?
Keynote is so much better for presentations that PowerPoint it's not even funny. But if you're not doing presentations, I can understand dumping it. I do like to have Pages because it means I don't have to bother with Word's annoying ribbon interface and Copilot AI when I'm writing...though sounds like that may be changing?
Keynote is completely underrated, likely because people assume it's just a Powerpoint clone, but it's more like a highly templated motion graphics app with a UI that steers people into using it as Powerpoint replacement.
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.
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I'd forgotten Pages and Numbers existed, but Keynote is worth paying for if it means that I don't have to use PowerPoint.
Numbers is brilliant simply because of independent freely-movable tables
It looks so much better than the grid enforced by Excel.
Yeah Numbers wins, when going back to Excel I miss it. It’s not as powerful though.
I put up with Numbers awful pivot table mechanics (why do they have to be manually updated?) because it genuinely allows you to create nice information displays with your tables.
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.
> Would people actually pay money for them?
Why would someone need to buy them, they only run on macOS and macOS hardware comes with it by default, doesn't it?
I paid for Numbers way back when it was a paid app. I have simple needs, and I much preferred the smooth inertial scrolling compared to running Excel in a VM (which was what I was doing before).
I use Pages once a month for an invoice :)
Not sure why tbh, my other invoices are done in LibreOffice.
I absolutely would. I've used them for years, alongside MS Office on Windows and Libre Office on Linux, and while they lack a few features they're not ones I've ever needed and the UI and ease of use is far superior to Office. Especially Pages is a pleasure to work with compared with Word.
They want you to pay money for premium AI features in those apps, which is worse.
The apps themselves are fine IMO.
lol, what a money grab.
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Fuck Apple I’m done with all their rent seeking and shit lock-in. Broken CLI tools. Hello Asahi Linux and x64 FreeBSD.
Another subscription slop?
Alternative title: "Apple slaps subscription model on existing apps"
Except that isn’t an alternative title, unless you want to lie by omission thus being wrong.
“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.
God fucking damn not you too, Apple. Adobe isn't a role model to emulate. I hate Adobe's practices. The whole world hates Adobe's practices. I want to pay for a thing with my money and then use it without worrying about ongoing costs, the UI changing, features breaking, or shit being shoved down my throat because some seedy PM wants a raise.
EDIT: I know you can still buy the software... but for how long?
RTFA, you can still buy them for a one-time purchase on the App Store
For now...
You can. They are offering both options.
Is this replacing the one-time purchase of these apps on macOS?
Doesn't sound like it > 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.5
No, fta:
> 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.
And here's the ruining of Pixelmator Pro everyone was waiting for. I paid one time 20 euros for it (discounted). And I would gladly pay again even full price for a new major version.
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.
Pixelmator Pro is upgraded a couple of times under Apple's wings, and this thing is not being ruined.
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.
One-time purchase versions are still available. For Pixelmator Pro it's $49.99 on the App Store
That's not very reassuring.
For now.
I think this is a huge mistake at least as far as the office software goes. One of the key advantages to Pages.app and friends is that they are pre-installed and free on MacOS. This will just drive people to M365 and Google Docs.
Pages and other iWork apps will remain free. The premium features are for curated images and templates, and AI assisted document creation. If you don't care for those features, you will not be affected by the change.
Good thing they remain free and pre installed. As per the article.