Apple Creator Studio Now Shipping
Agen Schmitz (MacRumors, Reddit):
Goodbye iWork, hello Apple Creator Studio. Apple has released version 15.1 of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers with a bevy of new features, as long as you pony up for the Apple Creator Studio subscription[…]
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$129.99 annual Apple Creator Studio subscription; Keynote, 906.7 MB, release notes; Numbers, 722.3 MB, release notes; Pages, 859.6 MB, release notes; macOS 15.6+
Final Cut Pro, $299.99 new, 7.39 GB, release notes, macOS 14.6+; Compressor, $49.99 new, 253.2 MB, release notes, macOS 14.6+; Motion, $49.99 new, 3.94 GB, release notes, macOS 15.6+
In lieu of running through each of these apps’ new features one by one, we’ve gathered answers to some questions about how the new subscriptions will work and how they’ll compare to the standalone versions of the apps.
While Apple’s iWork apps all have a free mode, all the pro apps (including Pixelmator) have a splash screen to force you to subscribe at launch, with no way to play around without agreeing to the 3 month subscription trial. No real surprises there.
I’m sure I’ll have something pithy to say about a word processor needing a whole top-level menu item called “Privacy & Analytics” once I’m done picking my jaw up off the floor and then fuming.
“Share Analytics Data” is enabled by default. Because of course it is.
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.
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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.
The Creator Hub image library is really laggy to scroll around. Feels like classic SwiftUI on AppKit performance issues.
However, what’s most exciting to me is the fact that Apple is clearly repositioning these apps to appeal to a broader cross-section of creatives. Apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are no longer just for Hollywood and music studios. By filling out the iPad lineup and adding Pixelmator Pro along with enhanced versions of their productivity apps, Apple has taken the first steps toward realigning its apps with what it means to be a creative professional in 2026.
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I’ve played around with the beta versions of Final Cut Pro for both Mac and iPad, and the new features work as advertised with the exception of Transcript and Visual Search, which I couldn’t get to work on the Mac. As is the case with a lot of the Creator Studio apps, my Final Cut Pro needs are pretty simple. Background export and full external monitor support on the iPad are the two features I find most compelling, but there’s a lot to be said for Transcript and Visual Search, both for editors on longer-form content and possibly for creating chapter markers for YouTube.
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The lack of a podcast editing app in Creator Studio feels like a gaping hole. Podcasting straddles the audio and video worlds in a way that can be handled by a combination of Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro, but practically, a simpler app that could handle standard audio and video podcast formats would be better and would serve a large segment of the audience Apple appears to be trying to reach with Creator Studio. The fact that such an app doesn’t exist yet, despite Apple’s prominence in podcasting, is surprising, but Creator Studio’s focus on a broader swath of the creative community makes me optimistic that we might see a podcasting solution someday.
What problem is Creator Studio addressing for creators, I asked?
John and Will noted that modern creators are no longer focused on just one skill. Musicians are often also video editors, and anyone running a creator business has to be as comfortable managing finances as they are cutting together an Instagram Reel.
By bundling together production apps like Final Cut Pro and productivity apps such as Numbers, Apple is hoping that modern creators will view Creator Studio as affordable access to high-end tools.
In AppleInsider testing, Apple Creator Studio’s Final Cut Pro for iPad is proving buggy, and if you use the default settings, your work can even be completely lost.
For some reason I’m really taken by Pixelmator Pro’s new-document/template window, especially how it shows a preview of the clipboard. Maybe it’s the years of the travesty of Photoshop’s new file window and all of its terrible, slow variations, but seeing this all done natively makes me feel warm inside. This is a nice bit of UI
Something I outright hate about Apple’s new Pixelmator Pro is that it saves changes automatically to disk. There’s no experimentation, no temporary workspace, it just goes right to iCloud.
That’s bad enough for something like TextEdit, but when you’re talking about a pro image editor working with potentially multi-gigabyte files, that is so incredibly irritating.
You can disable this behavior on macOS, but not on iPadOS, which I think is an existential mistake. I really hope they fix that.
Comparing the toolbars between Pages 15 (15.1?) and Pages 14:
Why is this a unified toolbar? You can barely see any of the title. Sure, you can expand the window but sometimes you just don’t have the space. The fat toolbar items are just so space inefficient.
Oh and it gets worse if you show the labels (as the default used to be).
Apps just tend to get more and more user hostile and I'm really trying to understand why?
Every single update to Logic Pro breaks fundamental interface behavior I use on every project. Sometimes its how panes open and close. Sometimes it’s how adjusting region edges changes edges you aren’t adjusting (and can permanently lose audio). It literally is like they have zero QA/testing on this stuff.
With Logic Pro 12, now it’s how it sets default scroll bar placement on the region editor EVERY SINGLE TIME. It’s either slammed to the very top of the scrollbar, or slammed to the very bottom.
Following the launch of Apple Creator Studio this week, Apple has quietly stopped selling its “Pro Apps Bundle for Education” separately, but it remains available with the purchase of a Mac on Apple’s Education Store on the web.
Previously:
- Apple Creator Studio and the App Store
- Apple Creator Studio Icons
- Apple Creator Studio
- Runaway Spotlight With Pages Document on iCloud Drive
