Is Apple Creator Studio Backwards Compatible？

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. So you may be wondering if you get an Apple Creator Studio subscription and you start creating Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Pixelmator Pro documents, can you still access those documents if you stop subscribing to Apple Creator Studio? Or you give the document to somebody that has those same apps, the new versions, but they don't have a subscription. And also, what about somebody that doesn't have the new versions of those apps? They have the older Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and standalone version of Pixelmator Pro, like somebody that has an older version of macOS or an older Mac that can't update. So all the files that you see here in this folder have either been created with the new Apple Creator Studio versions of Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Pixelmator Pro, or they've been altered and saved out of those versions. So they're all using, for instance, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote version 15.1. And those apps all were part of an Apple Creator Studio subscription. So they had access to all of the new features and content. But now I'm logged into a separate account, one that does not have an Apple Creator Studio subscription. So let's start simply here. We've got this Pages document here, which uses none of the new features of the Apple Creator Studio. Every feature it's using was available in the previous 14.4, and now the 14.5 version of Pages, the old version in other words. Let's see what happens when we open this with 15.1, the Apple Creator Studio version. I'm going to drag it right here, so you can see them opening it up in Pages 15.1. And the document opens just fine. All of the styles and changes and everything is here. You can make alterations and all of that. Let's try it with this document that uses, so you've got some images and shapes and tables and all of that. And this also opens fine and you can edit and change it. So if you don't use any of the new features, it looks like you've got no problem opening up this document using the new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, but with no Apple Creator Studio subscription. Now here's a document I created using a new premium template that's only available to Apple Creator Studio subscribers. If I open this up again in the new version 15.1 of Pages, but without a subscription, you could see it comes up fine. I can work with it. I can edit it. As long as it was created in Apple Creator Studio, it looks like you can now edit it, even if you no longer have an Apple Creator Studio subscription. Now there are two new ways to get images in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote using Apple Creator Studio. One is using image generation, so AI to generate images. And here is such a document. So these are two generated images, and you could see they look fine. They work fine. You can work with them. It gives you no warnings or anything that you don't have a subscription anymore. You, of course, just can't create new ones. If I click here to create a new one, it's going to tell me I can't do it. But existing ones that were created when I had the subscription are there and they work fine. But what about Content Hub images? This is the stock photography and illustrations that you get with Apple Creator Studio. Let's open up a document that's got two of them. With these, we get something a little different. You get a little license notification that you have to accept here. You've got two different images here, a photo and an illustration, and they seem to work fine even though I don't have the subscription. Here's a document that has shapes. The shapes in Content Hub are the same shapes that you get as the general shapes in the regular version. And you see they work fine. And while I can't go into Content Hub and use all of these images here, I can go to shapes and it does let me use shapes. The shapes that you had before that you had access to, you still have access to now even though it shows them as under Content Hub. Here's a document that has three versions of the same image. This one's from Content Studio. This is an altered version from Content Studio. You can see I added a flower to the desk. And this is an altered version as well where I asked it to change the style to 3D animation. And I can open up and work with this document just fine. And another new feature is super resolution, being able to upscale an image. So if I open up this document here, this is actually my own photo. And this is actually an upscaled version. It's hard to tell. This is the regular version. The upscaling works just fine. If I try to upscale the non-upscaled version, you could see it asks me to subscribe. Also, if I try to use generate from image, same thing. Or if I try to use auto crop, you could see it also tells me that I need a subscription for that feature. If you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash Patreon. So in numbers, the only new features are new templates and magic fill. Here are two documents created with versions 15.1, the new Apple Creator Studio versions, but I didn't use either of those new features. If I open them up here in the same numbers, 15.1, you could see there are no changes. It's exactly as they were on the account that had an Apple Creator Studio subscription. Everything looks and works the same. Here's a numbers document that was created using a premium template. And when I open it up here, you could see I can use that premium template that the document was created with just fine. Everything's there. There doesn't seem to be any restrictions. And here are two examples that use magic fill. But as you would expect, the results of magic fill, like here, are to create formulas. You could see them down here below. So those formulas are there. Magic fill was just something that was temporarily used to create the formulas. And in this example, magic fill was temporarily used to create text here. So of course, there's no remnant of magic fill left here. You just have the results of it. And that's still there, even though I don't have a subscription. Here's Keynote with no new features at all. This is just a regular presentation that was saved using 15.1. And you could see here, it works just fine without the subscription as well. Here's a Keynote document created with a new premium template. But now I don't have the subscription, but I still have access to the template that was used to create the document. So they work just fine. You just can't create new documents using that template without the Apple Creator Studio subscription. Now, what if you use one of the new Apple Creator Studio features to generate a presentation using just a description? Here's the prompt I used in Apple Creator Studio. And if I open it now without a subscription, as you can guess, it's all still there. The presentation is just a normal, plain presentation once the content's been generated. And the same thing for presenter notes. I used the feature in Apple Creator Studio to create the presenter notes for each slide. And the presenter notes are now just presenter notes as if I typed them. You're no longer required to have any Apple Creator Studio subscription to work with this. Of course, if you wanted to regenerate the notes, you would. And here's a Keynote presentation created using images from Content Studio. And this one is an altered image. The coffee cup was added. This one's kind of altered because the background's removed. And this one's generated using the AI feature of Apple Creator Studio. But you can see without the subscription, I can open and work with this just fine. But here's the interesting thing. If I were to copy these slides here like that and create a new document here. So I don't have a subscription you could see here. It's asking me to subscribe, but I'm going to say, no, I just want a basic white presentation. I'll just ignore that. And if I were now to paste the slides in here, you could see that this image that was completely from Creator Studio and not altered now has a watermark on it. So I could use it in the original presentation, but not in a new one. And the one with the background removed also has the watermark on it. You can kind of see it lightly there. But this one that I altered doesn't have a watermark on it. And this one that I generated doesn't. So it looks like if you haven't really altered the image, maybe just remove the background or not altered it at all, you get a watermark. But anything altered or generated doesn't get a watermark. The same thing is true in pages. If I were to select all three of these images and create a new pages document here and paste them in, you could see I get a watermark on the unaltered one. But the altered ones do not have a watermark. In general, this is pretty good news. But note that if you had purchased images from a stock photography site, you wouldn't have this restriction. You could just grab a bunch of images that you needed. And then a year later, when you don't have the description anymore, you could still use those images in other projects. So while it may not come up for a lot of people, for some people, the content hub here is not a good alternative for regular stock photography and illustration sites. Now, this is all fine. But what if you want backwards compatibility with the old versions of the apps? Let's say somebody has an older Mac or hasn't updated their operating system yet and can't get those new versions. Can they open these documents? So I've got the older versions right here. It doesn't delete them when you get the new versions. Apple's keeping them separate. So let's say I want to open up the pages documents with no new features, but in the old version of pages. Remember, both of these were saved out of versions 15.1. So what happens when I try to open them in 14.5? I will drag them to pages 14.5 to make sure it opens them in the right one. I'm going to get this little warning saying that 14.5 is the old version. I need to get 15.1. Say fine, not now. And it's going to open these two documents in 14.5. And I see there that this one and this one open and work just fine. What happens if I try to open a pages document using one of the templates created in 15.1? I will drag that down here and it's not going to open. So you don't have backwards compatibility there. Somebody would have to get 15.1 even without a subscription to open this, but 14.5 isn't going to do it. What about the document with content hub images? If I try to open that in 14.5, it won't open either. What about this document that is generated images only? If I open that up, that does open. Just using the AI generate images feature of Apple Creator Studio doesn't stop it from being opened in pages 14.5. The same thing with the super resolution. This top image has super resolution turned on and it remembered that image there. It doesn't require you to have pages 15.1 to open it. It just treats it like a regular image. Same thing with numbers. Here are the documents that don't have any special new features here. And here are the documents that have magic fill. If I open those with the old version of numbers, all four of them will open just fine. But if I try to open the numbers document created with the premium template, that won't open in 14.5. And the same thing in Keynote, the no new features presentation, the generated presenter notes, generated presentation, and this document where I use the fixed layout feature, all four of these documents open just fine here with the generated notes, the fixed layouts, and the presentation that was completely generated in 15.1 using just a prompt. But the Keynote presentation that uses the premium template, that one will not open in 14.5. So what about Pixelmator Pro? So with the new Pixelmator Pro version 4.0, you can't use it at all without a subscription. It launches, but you can't open a document or create a new document. So if you have somebody that doesn't have an Apple Creator Studio subscription, all they've got is this version here, Pixelmator Pro 3.7.1, the latest version of the standalone Pixelmator Pro. If we try to open a Pixelmator Pro document that was saved out of 4.0 with the older version of Pixelmator Pro, it opens up just fine. I've got a shape in here, some text, a layer here, a photo here with a filter and special effects applied in everything. Every feature has existed for a while and it opens just fine even though this was created with the new Apple Creator Studio version with a subscription. But this document here uses a warp. I warped the logo. So the old Pixelmator Pro doesn't have that feature. If I try to open it up with the old Pixelmator Pro, it'll tell me I need a newer version. This also uses a warp. It's a mock-up. I used one of the mock-up templates. They all use warp. So the same thing here. If I try to open up this one, then it tells me I need a newer version. But what about collaboration? Say you have Apple Creator Studio, you're using the newer versions of the apps and you collaborate with somebody that doesn't have Apple Creator Studio. Can they work with it? Here I have a folder filled with the same pages, numbers, and keynote documents shared using collaboration over iCloud. So let's start with the Pages No New Feature documents. What if I try to open these in the new version of Pages but I don't have the Apple Creator Studio subscription? And as you can see, they seem to work fine. I can use Pages 15.1 to collaborate with somebody if I don't have an Apple Creator Studio account and they do. But what happens if there's a premium template involved? Let's try that. That seems to work fine as well. What about with images taken from Content Hub and altered? And you can see that works fine as well. I get the little licensing notification there but it seems to work the same with collaboration as it does if I just open up the document normally. And of course, I can't create any new images because I don't have a license here but the other person can and then I would see them appear here. So two people, one with an Apple Creator Studio subscription and one person without a subscription can still collaborate. But what happens if you don't have the latest version of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote? Let's take a look at the simplest example here. No new features at all but I'm going to try to open this with the old version of Pages. And I'm really surprised here. It does still work. You can see I am collaborating with somebody and I'm using version 14.5 of Pages even though they're using 15.1. Of course, if you are using, say, Content Hub or Premium Templates then it's not going to work because you wouldn't be able to open those up using the old version of Pages. It gives you the same message you get if you just had the file like we looked at before. What about in the web versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote? Well, here's that Pages document that's been shared using collaboration. If I double-click on that it's going to open up the web version of Pages. So if you're using Pages, Numbers, or Keynote 15.1 with a subscription to Apple Creator Studio somebody without the subscription just on the web can still collaborate with you. You could see this works fine as well. So working with somebody who has an older version of macOS and can get the newer versions of Apple Creator Studio apps can still collaborate with you using the web-based versions if needed. So basically documents created with Apple Creator Studio are mostly backwards compatible to older versions of the apps. If you're using the newer versions of the apps but don't have a subscription seems like you can open and work with any document. And if you have the older versions 14.5 versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote then you can open any document that's using a new template or images from Content Hub. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.