Let’s skip to the part you care about: Apple Creator Studio now adds Pixelmator Pro and puts every major Mac and iPad creative app under one subscription, and it’s not too expensive. But just as importantly, though, you can still buy the Mac versions of Logic, Final Cut, Pixelmator, and others as a one-time purchase — no subscription needed.
Yeah, yeah, subscriptions, AI prompting in apps, template content, etc. etc. — that seems to be everywhere. But the good news is, Apple is keeping their subscription pretty affordable. That’s $12.99 per month or $129 per year. (The service launches later this month.)
Apple introduces Apple Creator Studio
This is not a review of Creator Studio. But just to cover what’s in their announcement. Just at the time that a lot of us are dumping Adobe, one of our favorite Mac apps is suddenly an Apple property.
- Pixelmator Pro is now an Apple app. (This was announced in February of last year, along with Photomator.)
- Pixelmator Pro is now on iPad, too, with Apple Pencil support.
- Logic Pro for Mac and iPad adds Chord ID and Synth Player (both AI-powered — Synth Player joins other Players; Chord ID analyzes harmonies from audio). I’m expecting a more complete changelog for this, though, given past Logic updates, so if those don’t excite you, expect more.
- Logic has a new Sound Library, because apparently, everything needs this now.
- Logic Pro for iPad adds Quick Swipe Comping and something called “Music Understanding” in its Sound Browser (AI-powered).
- Final Cut Pro adds Beat Detection from Logic — been a long time since I heard that kind of integration between DAW and video editor. (Vegas and Acid, anyone?) Plus Transcript Search, Visual Search are on both versions — key for their target users.
- Final Cut Pro for iPad has a new Montage Maker for fast edits.
- Motion gets Magnetic Mask!
- There’s a bunch of template content now included with the subscription (which seems to be part of the value pitch for actually subscribing).
All of these updates to the apps are delivered to people who bought the one-time purchase — like, even if you bought Logic or Final Cut years ago. And Apple promises to continue delivering free updates for those apps.
If you want subscriptions, that thirteen bucks gets you everything on both Mac and iPad, all at once — Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad, plus Motion, Compressor, and MainStage on Mac. (since those aren’t available on iPad yet — which is too bad, as MainStage would be a natural)!
You do also need to pay for the subscription for the iPad versions, unlike the Mac versions. AI features for the free consumer apps (Keynote, Pages, etc.) require a subscription — that parallels the way Affinity (now owned by Canva) works. As with Affinity, though, you could skip AI and just get this stuff for free. And it doesn’t impact Final Cut, Logic, or your paid Pro app.
If you don’t want another subscription, you can still buy Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage as one-time purchases on the Mac. And given you could have bought one of those over a decade ago and gotten nothing but free content, that’s a pretty great value. So they’re presumably leaning on content (and AI, maybe) as the justification for the subscription.
At least this is not an expensive subscription. (Apple has… ways of making money, of course. Well, even if we’re all upgrading our Apple hardware a little less often since it just lasts and runs really nicely for an extended period of time.)
As for the AI stuff — this is all local AI, not cloud. So there’s an added privacy bonus, plus different resource consumption — the water issue is related to putting everything in big data centers.
Quick Swipe Comping, by the way, makes even more sense on an iPad than on Mac:
I won’t lie — the thing here that excites me is really just getting extra support for the excellent Pixelmator Pro. And the Final Cut stuff continues their focus on quick-and-dirty, on-the-road content, which is great — now I just have to test how well it all works. (Montage Maker is giving me early iMovie and iMac flashbacks! But, like, in a good way.)
And ironically, despite the AI emphasis in the subscription, what may sell this to a lot of people is more Apple Pencil support — as designers in 2026 use more handmade touches to indicate that their designs aren’t AI-generated.
I’m equally encouraged that we have a subscription offering that doesn’t discontinue app purchases. That seems a wise move from Apple not to alienate its loyal pro users. Some of those folks have been very loud about resisting subscription-only offerings.
Lots more to say. More on this later this month.
We’re all singing the same song, though: Apple don’t take our lifetime purchases away! (Let me fire up Synth Player and we can make this a hit single. Uh… “Mammas don’t let your babies grow up to force people into subscriptions”?)
Got questions about this or areas you’d want to explore? Let me know.