With its Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Siri progression expected to leap forward in the coming months, Apple’s confident they can make a dent in what were traditionally Adobe and Canva’s strong markets. The announcement of the Apple Creator Studio makes a case for a creative open market, alongside new AI features and premium content in workplace apps Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as a unified subscription should do well to strengthen Apple’s already robust Services portfolio. The Apple Creator Studio includes professional creative apps including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage, and goes live on January 28.
The way the subscription has been structured in India, shapes up this way — you’ll pay ₹399 per month or ₹3,999 per year (this includes a one month free trial at the outset) to access 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, as is the Apple way, get lower prices for these subscriptions— ₹199 per month or ₹1,999 per year. This should do well to compete with Canva’s Education push, that makes the entire suite free for teachers as well as school and college students.
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“Apple Creator Studio is a great value that enables creators of all types to pursue their craft and grow their skills by providing easy access to the most powerful and intuitive tools for video editing, music making, creative imaging, and visual productivity — all levelled up with advanced intelligent tools to augment and accelerate workflows. There’s never been a more flexible and accessible way to get started with such a powerful collection of creative apps for professionals, emerging artists, entrepreneurs, students, and educators to do their best work and explore their creative interests from start to finish,” says Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services.
This collective subscription, called Apple Creator Studio, was indeed a long time coming, and will compete with Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription that encompasses Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, Express as well as the powerful Adobe Firefly AI. The latter, the AI aspect, should be taken care of in the coming months, if the rumoured partnership with Google for Gemini as the foundation for Apple’s next AI efforts bears true. It is no surprise that Apple categorises the Creator Studio package as a “groundbreaking collection”, considering how powerful Pixelmator Pro, Final Cut Pro and the other included apps have proved to be time and again, standalone.
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Even now, Apple Intelligence figures prominently in the Creator Studio collection. Final Cut Pro for Mac and iPad, which is an Adobe Premiere and After Effects competitor for instance, has a Beat Detection feature that uses AI to instantly analyse any music track and display the Beat Grid, so users creating fast-paced videos can quickly and visually align their cuts to the music. In Pixelmator Pro, which competes with Adobe’s Lightroom and Photoshop, deep integration of hardware, software, and Apple silicon unlocks features including Super Resolution for upscaling photos, removing compression artefacts, and automatic composition suggestions with Auto Crop.
Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription costs ₹1,499 though they do offer the option of unlocking premium features in individual apps as well — for example, Photoshop costs ₹599 per month, while Acrobat Pro is priced at ₹944 per month while Adobe Premiere costs ₹599 per month, to list some. Canva’s Pro subscription is now priced at ₹500 per month or ₹4,000 per year, including faster creative tools, higher AI access limits and brand focused assets for creators. The Canva subscription also includes the powerful Affinity software, a professional photo editing, layout and vector app.
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The subscription will unlock a new Content Hub in Keynote, Pages and Numbers, as well as using on-device AI models to enable Super Resolution to upscale images. Mind you, Keynote, Pages and Numbers have always been free to use on Apple devices, and that will remain the case if a user wants to skip the subscription for now. Even for the other apps including Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage, one time outright purchase options will remain available, but they’ll not have access to the entirety of the new Apple Intelligence layer.
