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Some Apple Apps Will No Longer Receive Every New Feature Without a Subscription

nebojsak said:
Yeah, I don't get it. I've read comments, and made sure to read the article on the Apple site thoroughly. It's only several paragraphs long, but it seems that people today definitely have attention span of a goldfish, and do not read beyond the headlines. It's literally the same as it was yesterday regarding their software, plus another tier for those who don't have money to pay upfront and/or are in need for additional content.
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The headline of this article was purely made to annoy people, and that’s exactly what it did.
Free users of iWork, and current owners of Apple‘s pro apps, will still receive new features. Just not all of them.
 
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BigJohno said:
I thought pages, keynote, and numbers were still going to be free?
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They are. If you have no need for apples AI features, then you have absolutely no reason to pay because everything else remains free.
The irony of the situation is everyone raging and storming in these comments about their being a subscription option… Are the exact same people who said “if Apple starts putting AI into things, I’ll just turn it off”.
Good news, you can.
 
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jakey rolling said:
Including the tool that most closely competes with Apple's flagship creative tool - Final Cut Pro. Adobe does not make a competitor to Logic, though, so Apple's subscription offering can be well positioned as a bargain from that standpoint.

Also remember that every tool in Apple's multimedia creative offerings outside of Quicktime itself were acquired from some another software publisher. With their current warchest, Apple could absolutely acquire one or more of the many competitors that users may try to flock to to avoid Apple's subscriptions and roll it into their own. Emagic and various Macromedia assets weren't too big for Apple to acquire when they were still in recovery mode, Avid assets are not too big for Apple to acquire now that they are a behemoth.


The closest analog to iWork. Except iWork offers some functionality that is better than two of Office's flagship tools (Word and PowerPoint), and a reasonable alternative to the third (Excel). So Ditto.


Apple has a loyal following, as always, and there are still plenty of users of Apple's flagship creator tools that this would absolutely be able to fly if Apple takes an incremental approach.
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I’m not sure what happened to your reply, but none of it addresses my points.

I’ll spell it out. Adobe and MS have leverage in the areas where they only allow subscriptions. Apple does not. There is no reason to assume ownership is going away given the minuscule share FCP and iWork have. It’s a convenience to provide options no matter how some try to spin it.
 
Lounge vibes 05 said:
They are. If you have no need for apples AI features, then you have absolutely no reason to pay because everything else remains free.
The irony of the situation is everyone raging and storming in these comments about their being a subscription option… Are the exact same people who said “if Apple starts putting AI into things, I’ll just turn it off”.
Good news, you can.
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To be fair, Microsoft allows you to do the same thing with Office. I got the old $99 annual family Office plan by chatting with them and Copilot is disabled in them.

And that is the saving grace with all of this. They have to recoup their AI costs so they have to charge more. So you can vote against those AI features by not buying the “upgraded” product.
 
OptimusGrime said:
I’ll spell it out. Adobe and MS have leverage in the areas where they only allow subscriptions. Apple does not.
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I was explaining some of the ways Apple has more leverage than you seem to think they do, as well as ways in which they can gain some additional leverage. I think it is very naive to think that a company as large as Apple and who creates the single largest hardware platform used by creatives has no leverage over creatives.
 
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jakey rolling said:
I was explaining some of the ways Apple has more leverage than you seem to think they do, as well as ways in which they can gain some additional leverage. I think it is very naive to think that a company as large as Apple and who creates the single largest hardware platform used by creatives has no leverage over creatives.
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Yeah it would be different if Microsoft weren’t even farther down this sad path. There is nowhere for these creatives to really go…
 
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jakey rolling said:
I was explaining some of the ways Apple has more leverage than you seem to think they do, as well as ways in which they can gain some additional leverage. I think it is very naive to think that a company as large as Apple and who creates the single largest hardware platform used by creatives has no leverage over creatives.
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This is mischaracterising my point. I didn’t say they don’t have leverage. I said they don’t have leverage with fcp and iWork. Their hardware popularity is in fact a reason why there is less need to remove purchases.
 
Mike_Trivisonno said:
Help, I need an AI agent just to manage all the subscriptions now.

At some point, the politicians are going to get involved. And after legislation, the only thing to happen will be a new tax on subscriptions.
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...and a subscription to the AI subscription manager.
 
Lioness~ said:
There was a discussion about DayOne vs Apple's Journal, free at that time when Apple launched it.
I decided to stay wit DayOne and got a cheaper sub. fee, as I've had it some time.
I love DayOne, and it's so worth it and much better then Apple's.

Apple's Jounal are not even close to DayOne.
With Cookie, Apple will soon go subscriprion anyway with their Journal. No doubt, they're just waiting for enough many downloads/users.
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Yep. I was just getting started with Apple Journal, but this news has put me off of that.
 
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marzfreerider said:
Kind of curious if Apple will now kill off iMovie (been over a year since its last update) and force people to get a subscription to use Final Cut Pro. Haven't heard or seen much on that app.
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To add to this: iMovie is quite popular in education (Nordics) - I doubt that most school or school district will pay for their pupil/student base for it.
 
“These changes will undoubtedly disappoint some Apple customers, while helping to boost the company's services revenue.”

lol. lmao even
 
jakey rolling said:
I've read the article, too. I would also bet that plenty of people who you are referring to as having a Dory-level attention-span have actually also read the article. The objections aren't because of anything Apple has said. It is what Apple hasn't said combined with known history that is the source of these objections. Commenters aren't failing to read the article, nor are they failing to understand it. They are merely connecting the dots. You, on the other hand, are taking Apple's word at face-value. Time will tell which is the more reasonable line of thinking.

While I personally don't object to subscription software (I work with many business clients and the vast majority of them prefer subscription pricing for professional software for some very good reasons that are usually out of scope in conversations like this), I do understand why people do object to it.

Yes, the current versions of FCP, Pages, etc, are not going away, and users can continue to use their current versions of those programs forever*. And we know Apple are saying that there will still be updates to those programs in the future. But we've seen this movie before with both Microsoft and Adobe. In Adobe's case, it only took one major version update to move to a 100% subscription model. In Microsoft's case, Office is still available with a perpetual license, but new major feature updates now take several years to become available to users and require a new purchase (one major feature, for example, is the XLOOKUP function in Excel. Office 365 subscribers got that feature in 2019. Perpetual licensed Excel did not receive that feature until the release of Office 2021). Microsoft has many MS Office-adjacent products and services (for example, Loop and Planner) that are subscription-only, and they've completely stopped offering perpetual licenses for some of their large enterprise systems (ie, Dynamics ERP, CRM, etc.)

Apple want to be a services company. They see the massive profits that other services companies are bringing in, and they see the successful path that those other companies took to get there. I would not say that people who object to subscription software are wrong to be concerned by this.

(*forever actually meaning "until a security flaw, bug, or incompatibility with a future MacOS version renders it no longer safely functional")


Asking commenters to explain why they downvoted you is lame. Don't do this.
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Thank you for the patronizing tone, sir. Highly appreciated 🫡
 
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If AT LEAST these iWork apps could get meaningful updates and solve long-lasting bugs.

I am a Keynote heavy user. I would love to see, at least:
  • Update/add animations
  • Include speed-based rather than time-based animations
  • Ability to add a clock or a timer
  • Liquid glass effects (for those who want them...)

I am among those who suffer from a Pages bug for files on iCloud, which use all the RAM and drain battery life. Still not fixed after at least 2 years. I use Pages less and less because of this.
I'd love to see more options for page layout, footnotes, etc. Many features are not on par with Word.
 
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They dont update FCP enough or with features that are useful to justify this price so I will not be subscribing. Time to learn something new.
 
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It’s so funny how nobody seems to read the text and just has a meltdown. Lol!
 
I don’t see the point to use limited version of Final Cut that I have now. I thought I was buying a lifetime software
 
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