By Joe Rosensteel

January 22, 2026 9:15 AM PT

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Picking up the missing pieces of Apple’s Creator Studio

In October, I wrote a little piece about how I was concerned over the lack of a clear strategy with Apple’s creativity apps—in particular, the recently-acquired Pixelmator and Photomator, as well as the inconsistent development effort behind Apple’s video apps. As speculated and rumored, progress was being held for a pro apps bundle, Creator Studio, but only sorta-kinda.

It’s not the first time Apple has made a bundle for its pro creativity software. People may remember Final Cut Studio, which included Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Compressor (as well as other software). So Apple glued Logic Pro to that. Then they glued Pixelmator Pro to that. Then they said, “Do you know what’s just like these? (Pregnant pause.) Our productivity office applications.” and bundled those in as well, but only freemium beta features. When I think of Final Cut Pro, I certainly think of “extra things I can do in Freeform.”

While it’s positive that people who have paid for apps, or just like iWork, get to continue to use them, the way the features are partitioned between all of these versions makes very little sense, and will probably make even less sense over time. Take Pixelmator, which is supposed to be Apple’s answer to Photoshop. It will still be available to buy in the Mac App Store, but won’t have the new warp tool.

Sure, that’s the one thing in your Photoshop competitor that requires a subscription, the improved warp tool.

Just one more thing…

What’s the deal with Photomator?

Pixelmator Pro received an update and an iPadOS app, but there are no updates for Photomator, a Lightroom analog, and it is not a part of the Creator Studio bundle. It continues to be a product that you can pay a separate subscription for on a monthly ($8), or yearly (there are three $30 a year plans, and one $40 a year plan, with no clear differences) basis that offers nothing beyond bug fixes.

It seems unlikely Apple is going to kill Photomator, because when Creator Studio was announced, Apple didn’t say anything about it—while it announced that Pixelmator Classic for iPhone wasn’t going to receive any updates.

We’ll get back to Photomator. But first, let me explain how maddening that announcement about Pixelmator Classic was.

Pixelmator Classic was the only Photoshop-like app on the iPhone that was truly Photoshop-like. Adobe’s own iPhone Photoshop apps (there have been many) have all been attempts at reimagining Photoshop for the iPhone, and seemingly aimed at customers who find Photoshop too intimidating. Unfortunately, its solution has just been less elegant than Pixelmator Classic’s.

I pay Adobe for Creative Cloud and don’t use their Photoshop iPhone app. Instead, I use Pixelmator Classic, which is bizarrely being put out to pasture with no imminent or announced replacement. Maybe there will eventually be a Pixelmator for iPhone, and maybe that will eventually be in this Creator Studio bundle. There will simply be no way to know until, and unless, it happens. Apple loves its little surprises!

Why not forecast that possibility by telling us what will happen with the multi-platform app Photomator? It’s the direct analog to Lightroom, making it the most obvious missing piece in Apple’s bundle. If it’s because there are no updates to announce for Photomator after over a year, then I would ask, “Why is Apple charging $30 a year for the existing version of Photomator?”

If it’s because Photomator will instead be a $30 a year freemium unlock for the Photos app, then I would ask, “What’s the Creator Studio bundle for if it doesn’t include photography? And why is Apple still charging $30 a year?”

Let’s say it’s going to make it a separate up-sell for Photos. Then we’ll probably find out in June, but it won’t ship until the fall. Conveniently, that gives me just enough time to start another yearly billing cycle for Photomator, so I will have paid $60 since Apple acquired Photomator and did nothing with it.

I am not arguing that Photomator should be free. Free is unhealthy, because then there’s no motivation to improve the software. I’m arguing that if there’s a subscription fee I’m paying annually, then there needs to be at least annual development of the software. I don’t need massive updates, but I need some sign that there is, and will continue to be, value in paying an annual subscription.

This isn’t software from a small, independent company any longer. It’s now software from Apple, which embarrassingly struggles to release its yearly OS updates for its platforms, and still can’t match its multi-platform apps feature for feature.

There’s something very strange in Apple branding this as a Creator Studio, seemingly targeting independent “content” creators, but then not having a single iPhone app with a video, photo, illustration, image editing, or music specialization when the iPhone is the platform the creatives are the most concerned with as the final destination for their creativity.

That just leads me back to the same conclusion that I drew in October: What is the promise Apple is making by asking for these annual payments? The mismatched nature of the bundle, and Apple’s spotty updates before this, makes me question if it thinks that just continuing things as they were, but with a subscription fee, is good enough.

Needless to say, I’m skeptical of the Creator Studio being a Creative Cloud replacement when Apple can’t even say what its answer to Lightroom is, when they bought their own answer to Lightroom over a year ago.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]

By Jason Snell

January 22, 2026 8:36 AM PT

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Trim video fast with LosslessCut

There was a time when QuickTime was more than just a playback utility; I used it frequently to perform simple video edits, like removing commercials from an off-air recording or tacking the contents of one file on the end of another.

Since those days ended with the deprecation of classic QuickTime, I’ve never really had a go-to utility for these kinds of trims. Sure, I can import the video into an editor and then re-export it, but that requires a second round of lossy encoding, which can make video look lousy. Better is to edit the already-compressed video itself. (This is what I use Rogue Amoeba’s excellent Fission to do with audio. Fission lets me edit an MP3 file without re-encoding it and adding a whole second layer of compression artifacts.)

[Update: Reader Michaël wrote in to point out, amazingly, that at some point years ago Apple added editing features back to QuickTime Player. If I knew about this, I forgot it. If you press Command-Y, you can split clips, and you can delete and re-order those clips. The issue is that the final file you save is a MOV container featuring those clips, which (I believe—tell me if I’m wrong, Michaël!) means that in the end you have to re-encode the video to get a seamless mp4 file for a video podcast.]

A few weeks ago after a Total Party Kill session, I found myself once again needing to perform some trims to the “video bootleg” of the session. In the middle of the game, we took a ten-minute break, and I didn’t want viewers of the video to have to fast forward through 10 minutes of dead air.

This time, I decided to look for a visual utility (i.e., not something I have to drive from Terminal) that could solve this problem. And I found it: the open-source app LosslessCut, which provides a nice interface atop the powerful FFmpeg command-line app.

If I’m being honest, the app is not exactly intuitive, but there’s a bunch of documentation and after about five minutes I had learned every single keystroke required to do exactly what I wanted. The app let me cut segments out of the video, but it also supports rearranging segments, combining tracks, and an enormous set of other features I don’t care about, though you might.

Since the app is open-source and on GitHub, you can get it for free, or you can get it on the Mac App Store for $19 and support the work of developer Mikael Finstad, which is what I did.

By Antony Johnston

January 21, 2026 9:16 AM PT

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Can you chart a murder? How to build an interactive novel

[Editor’s Note: I asked Antony to detail the process by which he created his interactive crime novel, Can You Solve The Murder?, which required some specific tools and a lot of intricate planning. And of course this article contains no spoilers for the book or any of Antony’s work.—J.S.]

I’m an author, primarily writing crime and thriller novels. I’m best known for the Cold War spy movie Atomic Blonde, which was based on my graphic novel. I also write the Dog Sitter Detective murder mysteries, the Brigitte Sharp spy thrillers, and most recently the interactive novel Can You Solve the Murder?

Hang on — an interactive novel? That’s right. You see, in addition to all the above, I also write video games. I grew up loving both books and games of all kinds, and was fortunate (read: old) enough to have been a young boy when the original Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, and Lone Wolf books were first published.

Branching Out

Those series are examples of what came to be called ‘gamebooks’, because they’re both forms smushed into one; books where the reader plays an active part, directing the story by making choices, like playing a game. (These days we sometimes get fancy and call them ‘interactive novels’.) This is achieved by dividing the story into numbered sections and sending you to read different sections depending on your choices.

If you’ve ever played a text adventure game on a computer…

…Then you’ve essentially played a gamebook, just with all the page-flipping done for you by the computer. The modern ‘Visual novel’ form is basically the same thing, too. 

We call these types of story a branching narrative, because the choice map often looks like a tree, with each new section branching off into further choices.

Continue reading “Can you chart a murder? How to build an interactive novel”…

By Glenn Fleishman

January 20, 2026 9:22 AM PT

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Apple is burying the Time Capsule, but how to replace it?

Apple’s Time Capsule was always a strange item in the company’s hardware lineup. Coming out in 2008, after the introduction of the sleeker version of the AirPort Extreme Base Station, the Time Capsule combined Wi-Fi gateway features with internal hard drive storage that Time Machine could access using the Time Capsule as network-attached storage (NAS).

Time Capsule was discontinued in 2018, and Apple will drop support for it with the release of macOS 27 this fall. Apple’s announcement has prompted many people—including Six Colors subscriber Mattias—to replace a long-used (but long-in-the-tooth) backup solution:

My mom still uses my old AirPort Time Capsule as a Time Machine backup. Since it won’t be supported any longer, what’s the best replacement?

Matthias wondered about a simple Network Attached Storage (NAS) device as a replacement, but notes, “I never had to touch the Time Capsule. Don’t think it’d be the same with a full NAS.”

It’s a problem. Many people have continued to rely on a Time Capsule for simplicity’s sake. Plug it in, configure, and (one hopes) forget about it until you need to retrieve a file or restore a volume. While hard disk drives don’t last forever, they keep ticking away for years and years before—often suddenly—giving up the ghost.¹

At some point, all Time Capsule owners will need to face the problem, even if they’re not planning to update to macOS 27 El Cerrito (or whatever it’s called). So let’s think about a solution.

Why the Time Capsule fit the time

Time Capsule tried to solve some interrelated problems: while you can use Time Machine to back up to a different Mac on your network, that required you to have a Mac you can leave on all night, or at the very least one you didn’t want taxed by performing network backups while you were working away on it.

Time Capsule was always on, could be located anywhere you could plug it in, handled connections over Wi-Fi and Ethernet, and allegedly just worked. As any of us who owned one recalls, it often didn’t just work. Backups would fail, requiring erasure of the entire internal drive with no option to recover older backups.² There was no Disk First Aid for Time Capsule.

This became extra galling as the models advanced to 2 TB and 3 TB capacities in their final versions. While you could add an external drive, that seemed to defeat the point of a standalone unit, particularly when you remember the port was USB 2.0 or 480 Mbps, far below internal hard drive rates.³

Nonetheless, we didn’t have better options when the Time Capsule came out, and for years afterwards. Internet-hosted backups are a good supplement, but I don’t think there’s a drop-in replacement that boasts the same ease, even if reliability were not an issue.

Replace the Time Capsule

What can you do today to replace a Time Capsule and provide the functionality it offered? You have effectively three choices:

• Add a drive (or drives) to a desktop Mac.
• Install a NAS that supports the features required for Time Machine.
• Use a third-party tool that is tweakier than Time Machine, but may fit the bill better.

Time Machine’s key attributes are that you can set it and forget it, that it prunes older backups over time without intervention, and that it’s integrated into macOS for easy (by some definitions) retrievals of older versions of files and deleted files.⁴

I have a desktop Mac, and use cloning software to make a nightly duplicate of my startup volume and Backblaze for Internet-based encrypted backups. Most of my documents are on Dropbox or iCloud Drive, so I felt I had sufficient redundancy. I balked at using Time Machine, as it was so fiddly and unreliable for a long time, requiring erasing external drives or poking at low-level settings.

The other issue was how inefficiently Time Machine interacted with hard drives. During active backups, whatever CPU management Apple said was in place, my computer would be affected, and I’d also have to hear the whirs and whines of active drives.

At some point (I’d say about four or five years ago), Time Machine improved in quality, and solid-state drives started to drop in price for compact 1 TB USB 3.x models, which could connect at 5 to 10 Gbps; later 2 TB SSDs dropped in price enough to fit my budget, too. I’m embarrassed to show a photo, but here are three of the five SSDs connected to my Mac: four are 2 TB, and one is a dual 4 TB RAID 0 configuration that gives me an 8 TB volume.⁵ Two others are plugged in elsewhere!

Using an SSD plugged directly into a Mac could be a solution. Even if you don’t have a desktop Mac, plugging in an SSD on a regular basis when you’re using the laptop on a desk or other location is feasible, too: Time Machine automatically picks up when an associated volume is mounted.

The improvement I saw in Time Machine and the switch to SSDs made it feasible for a desktop Mac to serve as the networked destination for four family laptops, including mine. So I didn’t go down the NAS path. There are inexpensive NAS options that can be remotely administered, if you’re helping a relative or need remote access, and support the protocols needed for Time Machine. Synology has a tech-support note on using Time Machine with its devices. And I recommend looking at Tailscale for ensuring you can always tunnel in; the company also has NAS support. (See my long background look at Tailscale at TidBITS, and a specific usage case here at Six Colors.)

You might also look into third-party tools that perform various kinds of cloning and archiving operations, though you need an external drive, a networked Mac with an accessible drive, or a NAS to make use of them:

• Carbon Copy Cloner remains the best option for cloning, with some archiving options. (SuperDuper is a long-time favorite, but its Tahoe support remains in beta, according to its Website.)
• Arq and ChronoSync each provide exhaustive options for scheduled cloning and archiving, but have a learning curve that can be steep depending on your precise backup goal. They’re not drop-in Time Machine replacements, but can be configured to an approximation.

All of those apps offer flexibility in backup destinations. I’ve used ChronoSync to archive files on one of my virtual Linux servers over SFTP to my Mac, for instance. And you could archive critical files with encryption on cloud-storage systems, too.

I do wish someone would release a Time Capsule successor that was nearly single-purpose and had two or four slots for NVMe M.2 format SSDs. Rather than a highly configurable NAS, just give us something that plugs and goes—and can be upgraded and repaired!

For further reading

Take Control publisher Joe Kissell offers a deep dive into Mac backups that can help you find and execute the right strategy in Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac. It was updated in December for Tahoe, as well as the latest changes in the hardware and software he covers.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing (Aperiodical LLC) and How Comics Are Made (Andrews McMeel Publishing).]

By Jason Snell

January 19, 2026 4:56 PM PT

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If the future of e-readers is getting weird, I’m here for it

Late last year, a bunch of people, knowing that I love e-readers, asked me if I was going to try the Xteink X4, a $69 tiny, no-frills reader. Like, seriously tiny—so small that it comes with a stick-on magnet ring and will just snuggle into the MagSafe area on an iPhone 17 Pro Max.

The moment I saw that the Xteink X4 didn’t have any lighting, I decided I wasn’t going to bother—I spent way too much time clipping book lights to Kindles so I could read in the dark. But in a moment of weakness (possibly fueled by several Hazy IPAs and high altitude) over Thanksgiving, I bought one. It was $69! Why not take a chance on a weird little e-reader?

When the Xteink X4 arrived, I got my answer: I was deeply unimpressed with the hardware, which has two rocker switches on the front as well as a rocker on the side and a power button and a recessed reset button. Look, I love e-reader buttons, but eight is too many. Of course, there was the aforementioned lack of lighting, meaning you need to use it outside or in a well-lit room. Also, the whole premise of this thing seems to have been that it sticks on the back of your iPhone, but that’s not true unless you have absolutely the largest iPhone available.

But I’ll give it this: it was tiny.

The software was the real tragedy, though: It was really bad. Hard to navigate (so many buttons) and, tragically, just bad at being an e-reader. I couldn’t turn off forced justification, another deal-breaker for me. I tossed it on my desk and figured I wouldn’t write about it because why kick this little thing when it’s down? (I did say some unkind things about it on Upgrade, I’ll admit.)

And then a funny thing happened: Dan Moren sent me a message saying:

Finally got my Xteink ironically after hearing you slag it on Upgrade. So I flashed it with the community-made firmware, which by all accounts is better.

I had seen several people report that the Xteink worked better with some community-built firmware, but I hadn’t tried it—mostly because I firmly believe that suggesting that someone buy hardware only to immediately replace its firmware with someone else’s fix is not really the endorsement it sounds like.¹

But Dan’s message intrigued me, moreso when he pointed out that I could install the new firmware directly from a web page using Chrome. Loading a web page and clicking a button seemed like a very low-effort way to see what all the fuss is about, so I went ahead and installed CrossPoint reader.

What a difference. The CrossPoint software draws labels next to the four rocker directions on the front of the Xteink x4, so you know what each button does. It parses ePub files properly, offers font and justification control, and will even display the cover art of the book you’re reading. There’s even support for uploading books via Wi-Fi!

Is it as sophisticated as other e-readers? Absolutely not. Most readers are either Android or Android-based; the Xteink X4 is an ESP32-based thing, so it’s incredibly bare bones. But it works.

Do I recommend that people rush out and get the Xteink X4? No, I don’t. It’s fun to mess around with, and if you’re looking for a super-tiny e-reader that you can keep in a pocket or bag and break out in well-lit spaces at the drop of a hat, it will suffice. It won’t sync with other readers or your phone, so consider it the digital equivalent of throwing a paperback in your purse or backpack.

What I am enthusiastic about is the potential for interesting e-readers. Amazon seems comfortable shipping Paperwhites that are boring and featureless, Kobo’s innovation seems to have slowed as well, and everyone seems distracted by the possibility of finding a new market with E Ink-based note-taking devices like the Kindle Scribe.

But there’s still room for weird. The Android-based Boox Palma is shaped like a phone, but it’s an e-reader. At $250, it’s not cheap, and it’s a bit too big, but who’s to say where experimentation with smartphone marks and E Ink screens might lead? And coming from the bottom up are devices like the Xteink X4, with basic software running on ESP32 hardware.

If I were Xteink or any similar hardware developer, I’d be looking hard at giving support to the CrossPoint project and then focusing my efforts on making a device with simpler controls (fewer buttons!). Adding lighting and potentially a touchscreen would make this interesting, too. There are a lot of directions this sort of product could go—so let’s get to experimenting.

In the meantime, I’ve loaded a bunch of DRM-free public domain books from Standard Ebooks on my Xteink X4 and am letting it just hang around the house. I can pick up an Agatha Christie on a sunny afternoon and just enjoy a little bit of reading time. There’s a lot of potential here.

By Dan Moren

January 15, 2026 10:54 AM PT

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Wish List: SSH keys in Passwords

It might be weird to describe myself as an “authentication enthusiast,” but I guess I’ve never claimed to not be weird. I’ve written a whole lot about passwords and passkeys, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m a big fan of Apple’s Passwords app. It lets you easily store your authentication details, share them with others, and even view the history of changes to your accounts.

Previous to Apple offering features like iCloud Keychain and Password Autofill, I relied on 1Password to store a lot of this information, but in recent years I’ve transitioned in large part to Passwords. But you’ll note I said “largely.” There are still a few things that I use 1Password for and while Apple is generally good about ticking off the lowest hanging fruit and leaving third parties to offer more niche products, I’d argue that authentication and security are important enough to our everyday lives that the Passwords app can afford to take on more responsibility.

So, maybe it’s time for a power user feature. cracks knuckles SSH keys! You know them, you love them. If you don’t know them, you should love them. Like passkeys, SSH keys are credentials that rely on public-key cryptography to simplify connecting to remote servers and computers without the use of passwords.

And before you dismiss this as something that’s just for those of us who enjoy diving into Terminal, lots of services and sites let you use SSH keys, from GitHub to apps like Edovia’s screen-sharing app Screens and many more. Again, like passkeys, their use helps make our lives more secure and more convenient.

Managing these credentials, however, can be a headache. In part because they can be stored or viewed in many places: in your user’s home directory on macOS, synced via iCloud Keychain, in macOS’s Keychain Access app, the command-line ssh-agent tool, and even some third-party apps like, yes, 1Password can handle them.¹

A veritable surfeit of solutions. Too many, really. I’d love to be able to have all my keys stored in a user-friendly interface like Passwords, which would hopefully work under the hood with the command-line tools as well as providing a system for more easily using the keys. 1Password seems to provide the best implementation here, where you can set it up to have requests for your key pop up a dialog box where you can use biometrics or your main password to authenticate.

Just as Apple eventually supported (or at least didn’t actively hinder) Touch ID for sudo on the command line, it’d be great to see Passwords embrace SSH key management for those of us who need it. Which, honestly, is all of us.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]

By Jason Snell

January 15, 2026 8:48 AM PT

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Apple’s pro bundle makes sense, but making iWork freemium doesn’t

The Apple Creator Studio subscription bundle announced earlier this week makes sense. We live in a world where Adobe’s Creative Suite and Microsoft Office have been subscription plays for more than a decade. When Apple bought Pixelmator in 2024, it seemed like Apple really was building its own take on the Creative suite, and later this month it’ll finally arrive.

At $129 a year, it’s a lot cheaper than Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription and roughly what I pay for just Photoshop and Lightroom… but it’s obviously more expensive than Canva’s Affinity suite, which threatens a new business model of “free software, but pay for AI features.” Still, I’m old enough to remember when Logic and Final Cut cost many, many hundreds of dollars—putting them entirely out of the reach of most people. Now you can just spend $13 for a month in Final Cut or Logic to work on a project or even see if it’s the right tool for you. I think that’s a pretty good deal.

Truth be told, Final Cut and Logic are among Apple’s two most updated apps. I’ve been using them both for ages, and there are always new updates with new features—and I’ve very rarely been asked to pay for an upgrade. (The Logic Pro release notes are a sight to behold.) When a developer is committed to consistently improving its subscription product, I think it’s a fair exchange that benefits customer and developer alike.

The addition of Pixelmator also gives Apple a piece it was missing before. Pixemator combines many features found in Photoshop and Illustrator, giving Apple the design tool that it was missing previously. It’s hard for me not to look at this bundle and think that, for the people it’s designed to serve, it’s a pretty compelling offering.

But something about this announcement really doesn’t sit right with me.

Apple has chosen to roll its “iWork” apps—Numbers, Keynote, Pages, and Freeform—into this bundle. While the company has gone out of its way to assure everyone that those apps, which come free when you buy Apple hardware, will remain free… it’s also essentially converting them into “freemium” apps that have features that will only be unlocked if you pay $129 a year for the Creator Studio.

Some of the additional items do make sense as subscription offerings. Apple is offering loads of templates and themes for those apps, limited to subscribers. It’s not unreasonable to ask for money in order to access a content library, and the templates and themes seem geared at the target audience for the bundle: creators.

But it’s some of the other stuff that gives me pause. Apple is adding features to the iWork apps, and locking them behind a paywall. There’s a feature that generates a Keynote presentation from a text outline, and another that creates presenter notes from an existing slide deck. Users of Numbers will be able to have access to Magic Fill, which lets them “generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition.”

On the one hand, these read like they’re AI-powered features that might have actual costs attached to them. But they still don’t seem like features designed for the creative customers targeted by the bundle. They seem like regular features of Keynote and Numbers, ones that those apps’ much more general user base might want… but rather than being broadly released, they’re being withheld.

I don’t generally like the idea that Apple’s taking the free software that has added to the value of its premium hardware for a couple of decades and turning it into an upsell designed to generate more services revenue. But at least I can understand that if there’s an actual cost to running AI-powered functionality, giving it away entirely for free might not be a wise thing to do.

More specifically, this move stinks for anyone who uses Keynote and Numbers and isn’t in the target audience of Pixelmator, Final Cut, and Logic users. If Apple wanted to offer an iWork subscription for $20 a year that enabled AI features, some nice templates, and the rest, I’d… probably still complain.

It junks up the simplicity of the classic iWork concept: Apple devices come, for free, with a suite of software tools that let you get things done. Even though Apple has taken great pains to say that the iWork apps will remain free, they’re now free with an asterisk: free except for the stuff you have to pay for. Asterisks make things less simple.

But at least if Apple chose to offer iWork users a targeted bundle, it would be something understandable and reasonable. This, though? A feature to make building formulas and tables in Numbers is, somehow, limited to people paying $129 a year for Final Cut? A feature to make it easier for someone to build a Keynote presentation out of their notes is only available for someone shelling out $129 for Logic or Pixelmator?

It just doesn’t make sense. It’s as if Apple has decided that there can only be one Apple software bundle, and all of its apps are just going to be dumped into it. And I’m worried about where this potentially might lead, in terms of making the entire Mac, iPad, and iPhone buying experience feel more exploitative and gross. Apple needs to recognize that it’s in the business of selling high-margin hardware that people buy because it’s nice. The more that an expensive phone or computer is just an upsell opportunity for the real thing that requires an annual fee, the less special it is.

I understand charging an annual fee for great professional audio, video, and design tools. But for features in a free bundled spreadsheet app? It just doesn’t pass the sniff test.

By Dan Moren

January 13, 2026 6:55 AM PT

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Apple launches Creator Studio pro app collection

Wonder no longer about what the future holds for Apple’s pro apps. On Tuesday, the company announced its Apple Creator Studio subscription bundle, including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Compressor, and MainStage as well as additional features for productivity apps Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform. The bundle will be available starting on January 28.

Let’s start with the top line news: the subscription, which is a universal purchase across Apple’s platforms, is sharable across up to six members of an Apple family and will cost $12.99 per month or $129 for a year, with a one-month free trial. There’s also a substantial education discount for the bundle: $2.99 per month or just $29.99 per year. Additionally, customers purchasing a new Mac or a specific model of iPad¹ will be able to get three months of the bundle for free.

You can also continue to buy the Mac versions of any these apps as an individual one-time purchase. The productivity apps themselves will stay free—subscribing to the bundle will only unlock additional features for that software.

All the pro apps gain new features as part of this update. Final Cut Pro gets Transcription Search to search through footage and find the right piece of audio; Beat Detection, which lets you time videos to beats in music; and Montage Maker, which uses AI to edit together a dynamic video where you can adjust the settings.

Logic Pro gains a Synth Player for its AI Session Players; Chord ID, which can turn audio into a chord progression; and a new Sound Library. The iPad version also gets the Mac version’s Quick Swipe Comping feature as well as Music Understanding functionality that helps you find a loop by using natural language to describe it.

Pixelmator Pro is perhaps the biggest part of this announcement, as many have wondered what was in store for the graphics app after its parent company’s acquisition by Apple in late 2024. The Mac app comes to the iPad for the first time with Apple Pencil support, and there’s a new Warp tool across all versions.

As for the productivity apps, the Apple Creator Studio adds a Content Hub for what Apple describes as “curated, high-quality photos, graphics, and illustrations.” There are also new premium templates and themes for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers and integration with image-generation tools from OpenAI. Apple is also, in an unusual move, including beta features as part of the bundle: the company mentions one that can create a draft of a Keynote presentation from a text outline and one called “Magic Fill” for Numbers with lets you “generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition.” Freeform’s premium features aren’t yet ready to roll out but will come later this year.

Overall, this ground is well trod. Other companies like Adobe and Affinity have offered creative bundles of their software suites, and recurring subscription revenue is an attractive prospect for the company.

I’m glad that Apple is retaining the individual purchase option for the Mac apps: if you’re a pro who really only needs a single app, an individual purchase seems to make more sense. Any more than that, and you might be better off with the subscription—as long, of course, as you don’t mind paying in perpetuity.

I do wonder a bit about those who’d prefer to have the iPad apps as individual purchases, but I’d speculate that Apple has probably looked at what customers’ buying habits on that platform and see this as a way to juice adoption there.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]