Hands on with Apple Creator Studio: A bittersweet bundle

Apple’s Creator Studio has arrived, a new subscription bundle that includes some venerable Apple pro creative apps, a new acquisition, a content library, and a surprising integration with the company’s productivity apps. I’ve spent the last week or so noodling around with these apps, and here are my impressions.

Nice Pro App upgrades

Just to be clear, while I am a “professional creator,” I am also not the kind of person who spends all day making mission-critical edits in Final Cut Pro or music in Logic. (I do generate some podcasts in Final Cut Pro and Logic both, and have used them for years, but I’m definitely one of those people who uses a tenth of their features.)

Still, I’m a big fan of both apps. These are substantial apps that Apple continues to invest development resources in, and moving them to a subscription model makes me optimistic that they’ll continue to grow and evolve.

Transcript search is more exciting when it’s not a podcast.

The debut of this bundle includes Final Cut Pro version 12, with a bunch of new features. Audio of footage is now transcribed and searchable, so you can find the location in a particular clip where someone says a particular phrase or even covers a specific topic. Similarly, video is indexed so that you can search for items and actions that appear in the video. If you’re managing lots of footage across a lot of clips, this will be a productivity boost. There’s also support for Beat Detection, which makes it easier to snap clips to the rhythm of any music track. (Final Cut Pro scans music and detects where the beats are.)

Specifically on the iPad version of Final Cut, Apple has added support for multiple selections (great for batch adjustments, which in the past I’ve had to do one at a time) and support for using an external monitor for preview. The app also supports iPadOS 26’s background API, so that you can leave Final Cut Pro while it’s exporting.

I freely admit that I am a person who professionally misuses Logic to edit podcasts rather than create music. (I have created the occasional song, as well, but they’re entirely limited to Robot or Not theme songs.) So I can’t really address the new features in Logic Pro 12 very well.

I’m excited to use a retro synth Session Player in a future podcast theme song.

There’s a new Session Player, focused on synth keyboard and bass, and I have used these AI-driven “artificial musicians” in past projects, and they’re kind of magical. There’s a new Chord ID feature that uses AI to analyze audio and detect what chords are being played. The Mac app now has access to the same downloadable stock packages previously available only in the iPad version. And on the iPad, there’s support for a wild new feature that lets you swipe multiple takes together in order to build the perfect final track.

It also still edits podcasts.

A little more than a year ago, Apple bought Pixelmator. Clearly, that purchase was designed to add a photo-and-illustration editor to Apple’s creative professional offerings.

I am, alas, a person broken by Photoshop in the 1990s and not yet reformed. (I pay Adobe roughly the same for that privilege as you would for this entire bundle, by the way.) But even I, as a Photoshop Sicko, can appreciate how good Pixelmator Pro is—not just on the Mac, but now on the iPad for the very first time.

For its Apple debut, Pixelmator Pro 4 for Mac adds a new version of the Warp tool. But the real big news is that the whole thing is on the iPad for the first time, complete with Apple Pencil support and full document compatibility with the Mac version.

As Joe Rosensteel pointed out earlier this month, this suite is missing a photography component equivalent to Adobe’s Lightroom. Will that ultimately be Photomator Pro? A freemium update to Photos? Something else? There’s room for more stuff in this bundle, is what I’m saying.

Productivity for creators?

I created a slide deck in Keynote from notes using AI, then searched the Content Hub for an appropriate image.

I dislike Apple’s choice to roll its “iWork” suite of apps into this bundle, not just because it turns a set of free products into freemium products with upsell, but because there are plenty of users of Pages, Keynote, Numbers, and Freeform who do not need the powerful features of Final Cut, Logic, and Pixelmator.

With that said, the new features in the three classic iWork apps are all pretty impressive. (Apple says Freeform will gain suite integration at a later time.) All three apps get access to Content Hub, a media library full of photos and illustrations that can be integrated into projects for all three apps. There are also a bunch of new “premium” templates that add more options for people who don’t want to create that flyer or presentation all by themselves.

I like the Content Hub, which is accessible from the toolbar and is searchable and filterable by media type. I was able to very quickly pick out a background image for a slide and an illustration to use on a birthday card, for example. I pay an annual subscription for access to a limited number of stock media images from a library; it’s very nice that Apple is rolling this library into the Creator Studio subscription.

Does this mean Apple’s never going to make new free Keynote templates?

I’m a little less excited about the templates, which feel “premium” more in the sense that they’re not available to the people who aren’t paying. They didn’t really feel that much more creator-focused than any other Keynote or Pages template would. Shouldn’t Apple be making an effort to make nicer templates for all users of those apps? Does the introduction of premium templates mean that Apple’s no longer motivated to create new templates for everyone else? The whole thing just hits me wrong.

I generated this illustration to go with my presentation.

Content Hub also prominently features a prompt to create images using generative AI. I get why they’re doing it, and I have friends who heavily use AI image generation to build art for presentations. I don’t really appreciate most of the AI-generated imagery I’ve seen, and when I asked Apple to modify a photo from the Content Hub, the result was (predictably) a little uncanny and modified other areas of the photo in ways I found unsettling. So… your mileage may vary.

Also, I should point out that most of the AI features Apple is adding to these apps, including the image generation, are using OpenAI as the model source. It’s all properly disclaimed and explained—I just wonder whether this is a long-term partnership or if Apple will switch them all over to new, Google-supplied models as soon as it can. For now, it’s all ChatGPT, and given that every AI query has a cost, I can completely understand why these features are limited to subscribers only. (Apple says that users will get 100 tokens per month to use on AI image generation—essentially, the ability to generate about 100 images.)

Other AI features in Keynote include the ability to generate slides out of text and generate presenter notes out of slides. I tried this out and found it to be, again unsurprisingly, kind of mediocre. It did generate a bunch of slides from my notes for a presentation, but it was all pretty uninspired and had errors due to the AI misunderstanding my notes. I was left with a Keynote deck I’d still need to spend a lot of time getting up to par.

I also found the presenter notes a bit uninspiring, but I can at least see the concept that converting a bunch of bullet points into actual sentences might be helpful for some presenters.

There’s apparently an AI-driven “pattern analysis model” that allows Numbers to magically suggest the contents of table cells, but I haven’t seen that one in action. It feels like something that might actually be useful, but I can’t vouch for it.

I like the fact that Apple has imported the Super Resolution feature from Pixelmator into the iWork apps. This lets you take an image that might be a little too low-resolution for your purposes, and use a local AI algorithm to artificially increase its resolution by up to 300%. You can just right-click on an image in Keynote, for example, and choose Super Resolution. It’s really nice integration.

On the other hand, some integration just isn’t there. In Keynote, for example, you can use an image as a fill for a chart. I decided to see if I could find an illustration of money that I could use in one of my Apple financial-results charts. I could, but I couldn’t use it in the chart. The Numbers interface requires that you pick an image from the filesystem, with no connection to the Content Hub. It gives the distinct feeling that these apps were somewhat hastily added to this Creator Studio bundle.

The price of it all

Is a bundle that costs $13 a month or $129 a year a good deal or a bad deal? It all depends on what your needs are and what the other options are. If you have very little budget, you might be able to get by with free apps like Affinity Studio, DaVinci Resolve and LMMS. You can also subscribe to the Adobe apps for the very high price of $839 a year! (Also, good news for students and teachers: You’re eligible to pay only $3/month or $30/year for these apps.)

If you’re an existing subscriber to Final Cut or Logic for the iPad, you can continue to pay for just those plans, but no new single-app subscriptions will be available. This is a mandatory bundle. If you prefer to buy software and keep it “forever” (until the next full upgrade, anyway), Apple will sell one-time-purchase versions of the Mac apps for $300 (Final Cut), $200 (Logic), $50 (Pixelmator Pro, Motion, and Compressor), and $30 (MainStage). Existing owners of those Mac apps will just get these updates for free.

To sum up, Apple’s apps are really quite good. Pixelmator Pro gives them yet another one, and it’s a fitting companion. These are nice updates, with some thoughtful new features. While it feels inevitable that Apple would switch these apps to a subscription model, it’s so late in the game that it really does feel like the end of an era.

If you rely on even one of these apps, $129/year does not seem unreasonable. As someone who somewhat relies on both Final Cut and Logic, and has spent time learning both of them, that price seems acceptable, so long as the updates and new features keep coming. And I get Pixelmator in the deal? Hmm. It’s so good that I might even be tempted to drop Photoshop eventually, but don’t hold me to that.

So in the end, I am predisposed to view this new bundle positively. It’s only the clumsy inclusion of Pages, Keynote, Numbers (and later Freeform) that gives things a sour taste. Apple could solve this problem by offering a lower-priced productivity suite, and perhaps communicating how it will determine which features of those apps are for everyone and which ones are only available for those who pay. I didn’t expect the iWork apps to catch strays from the launch of an impressive professional creative suite from Apple, but here we are.