Apple Creator Studio
Apple (Hacker News, ArsTechnica, MacRumors, 9To5Mac, MacStories, Reddit, Mac Power Users):
Apple today unveiled Apple Creator Studio, a groundbreaking collection of powerful creative apps designed to put studio-grade power into the hands of everyone, building on the essential role Mac, iPad, and iPhone play in the lives of millions of creators around the world. The apps included with Apple Creator Studio for video editing, music making, creative imaging, and visual productivity give modern creators the features and capabilities they need to experience the joy of editing and tailoring their content while realizing their artistic vision. Exciting new intelligent features and premium content build on familiar experiences of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform to make Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite to empower creators of all disciplines while protecting their privacy.
Apple Creator Studio will be available on the App Store beginning Wednesday, January 28, for $12.99 per month or $129 per year, with a one-month free trial, and includes access to Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad; Motion, Compressor, and MainStage on Mac; and intelligent features and premium content for Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. College students and educators can subscribe for $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. 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.
[…]
For the first time, Pixelmator Pro is coming to iPad, bringing an all-new touch-optimized workspace, full Apple Pencil support, the ability to work between iPad and Mac, and all of the powerful editing tools users have come to appreciate on Mac.
[…]
In addition to Image Playground, advanced image creation and editing tools let users create high-quality images from text, or transform existing images, using generative models from OpenAI.
It does not seem to include Photomator. I don’t really use any of these apps—preferring Microsoft Office and Acorn—and nothing announced here sounds like it would change that.
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.
This means that if you bought Final Cut Pro or Pixelmator Pro via one-time purchase, which will still be an option going forward, you will no longer have access to all new features. However, Apple promises the apps will continue to receive updates.
Apple is becoming Adobe. There are two types of apps in this suite: pro media apps and office apps. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are not used by the same people as Logic and Final Cut. There should be a separate iWork subscription.
On the one hand, I fully understand why Apple is finally going Adobe and doing a subscription for the creative apps. On the other hand, I don’t know if I can see this as having enough value for me to want to pay $130 a year when I use these apps almost entirely on the Mac.
My hope is that the UI shown today for Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, and MainStage is a flat-out rejection of Liquid Glass for “serious” apps. My fear is that it’s only a result of their continued support for MacOS 15 Sequoia. (But I think they need to continue supporting MacOS 15 Sequoia because so many pro users are rejecting MacOS 26 Tahoe.)
But… how viable is it, really? I have my doubts, especially given that I recently tried Final Cut Pro and found it lacking in several areas compared to freemium competitors like DaVinci Resolve. And I have been using Logic Pro for years. It’s a solid DAW, but it faces stiff competition from Ableton Live and an increasing number of free or low-cost alternatives. But that’s my personal experience; I wonder how this will play out for the broader market, where there’s stuff like Affinity Suite, which has recently surfaced after the Canva acquisition as a free alternative Pixelmator Pro (with paid add-ons).
Icon History
The Logic Pro app icon, before and after being part of Apple Creator Studio.
Look at how they massacred my boy...😭
We lost something here
the ultimate icon downgrade
Previously:
- Tahoe’s Terrible Icons
- Canva Acquires Affinity/Serif
- Apple Tends to Do Right by Apps It Acquires
- Does Apple Smell Blood in the Water?
- Apple Acquires Pixelmator
Update (2026-01-14): Joe Rossignol:
Alongside the news that Pixelmator Pro is coming to the iPad, Apple has confirmed that the more basic Pixelmator app for the iPhone and iPad will no longer be updated.
I’m just calling this out because I think it speaks to the massive influence the AI industry has had over the past three years. A couple years ago, many of us thought that Apple would never use the word “AI” to describe what they were doing. It would be “machine learning” or stuff like “Apple Intelligence”, but they’re just calling it AI now like everyone else.
[…]
These new icons remind me of when Google normalized all their icons to the point that they all look the same…no soul…no joy…just the same icon with a few shuffled pixels.
Today’s app icons look as if they came out of an assembly line. All looking the same, designed for maximum scale, and devoid of any identity or soul.
If you put the Apple icons in reverse it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design.
See also: Apple Design and BasicAppleGuy.
Final Cut Studio used to cost $1,300 at one point, and now it’s available to students for $2.99 a month. That’s a huge win in my books.
Update (2026-01-15): Michael Flarup (Mastodon):
When everything looks the same, nothing feels loved.
Update (2026-01-20): Adam Chandler:
It’s been like this for a year and I still absolutely HATE that Final Cut Pro just doesn’t open an import dialogue box anymore and thinks there’s a universe where a video editor would want to import an image from Image Playground into Final Cut Pro.
Someone actually fixed the terrible Apple Creator Studio icons
The problem isn’t with these icons in and of themselves. The problem is with the rules Apple has imposed for Liquid Glass app icons, along with their own style guidelines for how to comply with those rules. Given Apple’s own self-imposed constraints for how icons must look (with the mandatory squircle) and how Apple has decided its own app icons should look (a look which can best be described as crude), I actually think the icons in the Creator Studio are pretty good, relatively speaking. But that’s like saying one group of kids has pretty good haircuts, relatively speaking, at a summer camp where the rule is that the kids all cut each others’ hair using only fingernail clippers.
[…]
What Ive told me is that Apple didn’t change things just for the sake of changing them. That Apple was insistent on only changing things if the change made things better. And that this was difficult, at times, because the urge to do something that looks new and different is strong, especially in tech. “New” shows that you’re doing something. “The same” is boring. What’s difficult is embracing the fact that boring can be good, especially if the alternative is different-but-worse, or even just different-but-not-better.
[…]
I don’t think it makes sense to gate useful new features of these apps behind the Creator Studio subscription. Smarter autofill in Numbers, generating Keynote slides from a text outline, and Super Resolution image upscaling all sound like great features, but they sound like the sort of features all users should be getting in the iWork apps in 2026. Especially from on-device AI models. I could countenance an argument that AI-powered features that are processed on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers should require a subscription. But it feels like a rip-off if they’re running on-device. […] But it seems wrong for someone who just wants the new AI-powered features in Numbers and Keynote to need to pay for a subscription bundle whose value is primarily derived from Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, and Pixelmator Pro — apps that many iWork users might never launch.
Update (2026-01-23): Joe Rosensteel (post):
- It’s weird that a software bundle aimed at “Creators” has no iPhone apps at all.
- It’s even weirder when Apple acquired a software company that made creative apps for the iPhone.
- Weirder still when you consider they end-of-lifed a piece of that software with no hint it will be replaced
- The weirdest part of all is that one piece of software has received no updates, and is not part of the bundle, but you can still pay $30 a year to use separately.
16 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
These icons are a fever dream on LSD. And I still wish Apple would let a subsidiary like Claris handle these apps, because I feel like if they lose interest because some new shiny thing appears, they'll go years without updates.
My history on running a personal budget...
-- AppleWorks on an Apple ][c, started in 1985.
-- Moved to Lotus123 on a Windows 3.1 PC in 1993.
-- Quickly moved to Excel on a Windows 95 PC in 1995.
-- OpenOffice in 2003. (First on a Windows XP, then my first MacBook Pro (or was it an iBook?).
-- iWorks (or Numbers) in 2007.
Where do I go now? Unsure. I will not pay subscription. (At least not until Apple quits taking 15% of my app income.) But - for me - the real question is when does Apple stop supporting Numbers 14.4? Already looking for a "good enough" substitute.
Dave, they will keep updating them. The only thing missing for you would be “AI” features and some library of content. Not sure it’s worth it at the moment, we will see
The notion that these are a rejection of Liquid Glass is just absurd when you look at the icons. Apple isn’t going to update these apps significantly until its belly is nice and full of that yummy services honey.
@Lukáš, that's correct - for now. Apple is still updating (some) apps, including many of their OS versions (including whichever OS version of 26)... but, ONLY for Apple hardware that they decide it should be run on. FYI, I generally upgrade all but macOS to current (26.2) and use a beta (26.3b2) at hand. For macOS? I wait until Xcode requires it.
We're talking a straight up app though. Hopefully you are correct - Apple will continue updating it. But this is a clear fork.... and updating means new features (don't care), iCloud (don't use), and? Paying Apple for a subscription (won't do). At what point do YOU think Apple will simply say "... it's not worth maintaining on old hardware..."?
I find this so sad that it males me want to abandon Apple platforms https://mastodon.social/@heliographe_studio/115890819509545391
I for one am glad Apple still offers the apps in the Creator Studio as separate purchases. Imagine having to subscribe to all that when you only want Pixelmator Pro or Numbers.
Also, the irony of showcasing a bundle of 'creative apps' with those atrocious, badly designed, unimaginative, oversimplified icons is not lost on me.
They could buy Nitro or RAW Power from Gentlemen Coders to fill the Aperture slot. I believe these were written by a guy who used to work on Aperture.
@Leon - I keep seeing people say this, but I recently bought a copy of Aperture 3 from shopgoodwill, mostly for the box art. I installed it on a 2008 MBP running 10.9 and honestly I don't see what the hype was about. It's uncharacteristically ugly for an Apple-produced application. Seemed blocky. Workflow seemed meh. Looked like an Adobe app, and the kind of Adobe app after they stopped using native platform controls on Mac OS X and Windows. I was shocked, because it seemed like the older versions of iPhoto seemed superior/higher quality.
Michael Tsai/this blog published an article a few years ago about what was going on inside of the Aperture team at Apple. https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/01/30/behind-the-scenes-on-apples-aperture-team/
@Ben I think Aperture felt way more native than Lightroom does. In terms of the features, interface, and workflow, I think it’s harder to see looking back just how much of what we take for granted these days Apple got right and figured out first.
@Ben I think this article illustrates well what was that Aperture brought to the party: tools usable in absolutely all contexts, without any exceptions, and without modality.
https://ikennd.ac/blog/2026/01/old-man-yells-at-modern-software-design/
Found via Nick Heer: https://pxlnv.com/linklog/lament-for-aperture/
Count me among those still missing Aperture. I say "missing", but I still use it, it's just a lot less convenient to do so. Aperture is dated and aesthetics are subjective, but I personally never found Aperture ugly and I do value aesthetics. And the workflow — for most of the things I wanted to do — clicked quickly, and it was easy to accomplish things without all the extra navigation most apps seem to require to get in and out of editing.
I'm hoping against hope that Apple turns Photomator into a viable Aperture replacement instead of just dropping or ignoring it. Few others seem interested in the asset management side of things, and the ones which do haven't been comfortable for me. (There's one or two which I've discounted for other reasons, the primary one being that I'm not going to lock my valuable photo library into something which requires a subscription.)
