Apple Introduces New 'Creator Studio' Bundle of Apps for $129 Per Year

[MacHeritage]

lol wait, Compressor is still around?
What about DVD Studio Pro, can they not include that one as well?

I know Apple was talking about maybe a 4th app but never actually shipped it and the three apps stayed only three. I think it was a Blu-ray Studio Pro since FCPX was so limited in that way. I still want one to this day! If I was Apple, I so would have made one and shipped it, along with v4 of Aperture, regardless.

I still use DVD Studio Pro along with Soundtrack Pro inside a VM. I love editing sound in Soundtrack Pro compared with anything else.

 

[Ctrlos]

For the occasional user like me, this is actually a great deal. Pay a few bucks to use it for a few weeks, pay nothing in the months that I don't. I use Affinity for most of my creative purposes anyways, but it's nice to have the ability to rent FCP every once in a while for a small buck. 🙂

I work in higher education which makes the $3 a month I'll end up paying inconsequential. I'll be happy with Pixelmator Pro.

 

[skitidetdu]

Waveburner as well please while they're at it.

I liked that software a lot but it was unreliable sometimes. One project I finalized and sent to pressing plant had a big digital spike embedded in the fist track. It wasn't there in Waveburner but

 

[skitidetdu]

Mostly here for Logic Pro but use Final Cut Pro now and then. I’m happy to read that my logic license will get the same updates as the subscription version even if I don’t use the AI stuff much.

 

[reden]

This won’t work. Many people won’t pay for this. Apply will continue to push for it to sell but there’s no real value. They’re trying to bundle and charge for apps that people don’t use. Some of these apps have been part of Mac OS for years. Yet people don’t use them when they’ve been free.

 

[TimB21]

I use Numbers and Pages every day at work. Used them plus Keynote in my prior job. Happy to pay $2.99 a month or not if I don't need the AI features.

 

[skitidetdu]

This won’t work. Many people won’t pay for this. Apply will continue to push for it to sell but there’s no real value. They’re trying to bundle and charge for apps that people don’t use. Some of these apps have been part of Mac OS for years. Yet people don’t use them when they’ve been free.

I use Pages and Keynote at work instead of Microsofts apps. At home I use Numbers for budget stuff. But maybe I'm a minority...

 

[Sanlitun]

Might this be available with an Apple One subscription?

 

[dypeterc]

Maybe they’ll merge Photomator editing features into the default Photos app

 

[OGdrknight]

Yea, no I’ll just use something that doesn’t need subscription! What the hell in Timmy smoking?!

 

[cbprrdoo]

Serious question..will I still be able to install a 90-day trial of Logic for free, then reinstall it 90 days later, repeat, repeat…?
*asking for a friend 🫠

 

[Solve4X]

At this point, given the state of Apple Intelligence, I will pay to turn off AI features in Apple stuff.

 

[alfonsog]

While that's true, to be fair, OSes and software back then were much less complex than they are now, as a whole. Software was also generally much more expensive (inflation-adjusted) and less widely used.

For example, Photoshop 1.0 was generally written in Pascal and Assembly. It was 128,000 lines of code. Versions 3.0/4.0 in the mid 1990s had maybe 300,000 lines of code. Today Photoshop is somewhere in the range of 10 million lines of code.

Some of that could be inefficiency (certainly is) and the use of various languages, but it also means the process of getting software 'out of the box' ready is a monumentally more complex task than it was 30 years ago. There are extra languages needed, a huge set of features, etc. to engineer and program and support.

The approach to software development and distribution has changed so much -- possibly for the worse, although distribution is much better now -- that direct comparisons are hard to do without acknowledging the drastically different sizes and complexities of software over time.

I used Wordstar 1.0 on a CP/M machine with a daisy wheel printer to print all my papers in high school (class of 1991). It ran off floppy disks and I learned all the Wordstar shortcuts and commands. The entire program was only about 30KB. 137,000 lines of code in assembly language, done by 1 person. It still works.

 

[MacBH928]

Except that it really doesn’t, it seems to me.

With upgrade pricing we expect bug fixes and other patches. Managing these is not cost free for developers. Furthermore we expect them in perpetuity, which is more costly still. And at the same time we clamor for new features and even feel entitled to them!

In short we expect a lot more than just the original release that we bought…for free. This isn’t a rational expectation.

any bought software should include price of free up-to-5-years maintenance support. I do not want to pay $150 for an app only to be broken by the next .something macos upgrade.

apps do not need to be "alive" constantly changed. I use a lot of software that 10 years ago does the same thing it does today. bug fixes and compatibility is all that is needed. New features should should be upgrade price.

 

[scouser75]

I work in higher education which makes the $3 a month I'll end up paying inconsequential. I'll be happy with Pixelmator Pro.

Ahhh so those who work in higher education get discounted price too? If so, my wife works for a university. If she buys it, coukd I use this on my Apple account?

 

[MacBH928]

Libre Office is free and runs on Mac. https://www.libreoffice.org/
Kdenlive is free https://kdenlive.org/ and runs on mac
DaVinci Resolve is free and runs on Mac https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

No doub there's many other alternatives.

yup, i didn't know about kdenlive though thought it was linux only

I use OnlyOffice - check them out

Onlyoffice is great more people should use it. I just have a hate for MS docx monopoly (docx standard format for onlyoffice)

You probably think you sound like a revolutionary war hero but to professionals who use Autodesk apps, or Foundry apps, or Zbrush/Cinema 4D, or Adobe apps you sound like a hobbyist or a software pirate trying to shove themselves in our faces. It’s cringy, not revolutionary.

Juniors in our fields cannot afford the one off cost so subscriptions lower the barrier and let them start working straight away. It is elitist to tell them to save up thousands of dollars to buy software and it is cheap and slimey to tell them to pirate.

The world doesn’t revolve around you. It revolves around people who invest in themselves to grow.

A lot of people, especially creators earning money from regular content or freelancers working remotely, have been empowered by the subscription software model. They know how to expense their software and hardware costs. They aren’t ranting on forums and don’t suffer from Adobe Derangement Syndrome.

The Pro has entered the room, using the verbiage of progressives against them.

It is not elitist to tell people they need to save up to buy the best tools. Every trade has always worked like that. People often start with less expensive (or [gasp!] free) tools when they're learning, & graduate to more precision, expensive tools as their skills increase. This is true whether you're a pixel poker, a code slinger, a carpenter, or a seamstress/tailor.

And nobody is empowered by the subscription software model, other than shareholders.

honestly subscription is better for professional apps. paying $90/m for adobe creative cloud is so much more accessible than paying something like $5000-10,000 upfront in software. Further more in the current age of constant OS updates, you need the apps to continue to work with bug fixes and improvements. People who use these apps can easily rake in $10K/month in freelance work using these tools.

On the other hand, simpler apps like calendars, password manager, or even something like office word that you need sometimes to write a letter is not worth subscribing to because the subscriptions are going to accumulate for people who do not really make money off this stuff.

 

[Ctrlos]

Ahhh so those who work in higher education get discounted price too? If so, my wife works for a university. If she buys it, coukd I use this on my Apple account?

Only if it goes through her email address. The $3 discount doesn't have family sharing.

 

[scouser75]

Only if it goes through her email address. The $3 discount doesn't have family sharing.

Thanks ctrlos. I'd somehow need to use her email address on my Mac user account. Would that be possible? Or would it have to be linked to her user account?

 

[Abazigal]

It will be interesting to see whether this cheaper software bundle will be "good enough" for creators who don't need the full capabilities of more expensive offerings like what Adobe is offering.

I know that at a time when Microsoft's office apps were not available on the iPad, I was able to get a fair amount of mileage out of Pages and Keynote, in part because they were mostly for class-related materials that I didn't have to share with anyone else. I frankly wish that Microsoft would move the toolbar from the top to the side, to give me more vertical room to view my documents with.

I also feel that people need to expand their definition of what being a creator entails. There is a growing need to become a jack-of-all-trades in this field. A streamer on twitch finds himself having to edit videos for YouTube, engage in social media, design thumbnails and illustrations, maybe even create podcasts to reach out to a wider audience. On top of finding sponsors and manufacturers for your merchandise.

Finally, well, as upgrade cycles start to lengthen and as people hold on to their Apple devices longer, my guess is to get used to the new normal of higher hardware prices, more accessories and especially, more services to maintain profit margins for Apple. There's cause, and there's effect.

 

[Ctrlos]

Thanks ctrlos. I'd somehow need to use her email address on my Mac user account. Would that be possible? Or would it have to be linked to her user account?

The edu discount is ratified through the institution email address rather than iCloud, so you could get her to go through the verification stages using her work email on your Mac account. She wouldn’t be able to later use the same address on her own though.

 

[chmania]

Free equivalents for Mac, most times better

Final Cut Pro >> Kdenlive
Logic Pro >> Ardour
Pixelmater Pro >> Krita or GIMP
Motion >> Synfig or Friction
Compressor on the Mac >> there's a whole lot of them, Keka comes to mind.
MainStage on the Mac >> Ardour (free), Bitwig Studio (try and buy)

You can, of course, donate to any of these free apps once you've tried them and become familiar with them. I primarily use GIMP, and occasionally Krita as well as Keka.

 

[scouser75]

The edu discount is ratified through the institution email address rather than iCloud, so you could get her to go through the verification stages using her work email on your Mac account. She wouldn’t be able to later use the same address on her own though.

That's brill, thank you

 

[Schismz]

2 years from now:

macOS Pro: $12.99/month, or $99/year.

So it's Back to the Future! OS/X updates used to cost something like that, around $99 or perhaps a bit higher. On the other hand they weren't annual releases just for the sake of releasing 27 new dancing emojis and making the UI uglier 😉

Unsure what this means if you've already purchased Final Cut Pro and Pixelmator (pre-Apple acquisition), in theory I guess you get updates, with all their other stuff ... never used it, often forget it exists. With the afore-mentioned 2 apps, Apple destroyed Final Cut many years ago and drove pretty much all professional users away all by themselves, it's just convenient at times. Pixelmator has some cool features but doesn't realistically compete with Adobe, and wherefore art thou Aperture which I also paid for a few centuries ago and to the best of my recollection arrived before Lightroom and had much better features for a year or three.

 

[dandeco]

I previously purchased all of those apps when I was a college student (save Pixelmator) as part of Apple's Pro Apps for Education bundle, where I got them all for $200 as a single lifetime license purchase. I wonder how long that's going to last?
If I have to end up subscribing, at least $12.99 a month is more affordable than an Adobe Creative Cloud license!

 

[Fiona FTW]

Already own FCP and zero interest in AI but bring back Aperture and I'd subscribe. I'd love the opportunity to leave Adobe but at the moment there is no direct replacement to Lightroom Classic.