Apple's Weirdest Subscription Yet.

Apple just dropped Creator Studio. For $12.99 a month, we get access to this bundle of 10 Mac and iPad apps. But here's the thing. Half of these apps used to be completely free. Which begs the question, what features do you actually gain when you pay? And more importantly, what do you lose if you don't? Because the first thing you notice is that this might be Apple's most confusing subscription yet. Not the pricing, because that's refreshingly simple. Creator Studio is $12.99 a month or $129 a year. It drops down to just $30 yearly for students, which honestly is kind of insane. But the confusion kicks in after you pay. Because here's where it gets weird. You see, think of Creator Studio as two app bundles mashed into First, we've got the Productivity or Office bundle. That's Pages, Numbers, Keynote and Freeform. Now, those apps have always been baked in for free when you buy a Mac or iPad. And that's not changing, at least for now. But from this point on, there are basically two versions of these apps. This free version sitting on your Mac right now, plus a premium Creator Studio version. In plain English, that just means that Apple sprinkled some AI features on top. Some gimmicky, but others actually useful. We'll test them all out in a sec. Though for most people, this alone won't make Creator Studio worth it. What Apple actually wants your hard-earned money for are their creative pro apps. Because you might already know this, but Apple has sold more or less professional video, audio and image editing apps on Mac for decades. All as one-time purchases with lifetime updates. And again, that's not gonna change, at least for now. So just for instance, I already own Final Cut, Apple Motion and Compressor for editing these videos. I've bought Pixelmator for creating thumbnails. Plus there's Logic Pro and Mainstage for audio and music production. Which, to be honest, I've never touched in my life. I can still keep using these apps, they will be updated, and you can still buy them as a one-time purchase in the App Store. But again, from this point on, there's also a Creator Studio version, which gets additional premium features. Oh, and then we also get the iPad versions of Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro and now the brand new Pixelmator Pro app for iPad. If you wanna use these iPad apps, Creator Studio is a no-brainer. Because there's simply no one-time purchase option. But if you're on Mac, it's a different story. And there's a few things you might wanna consider. We'll get there. But first, let's check out what you actually get for your money if you subscribe right now. You see, on the App Store, there are now two versions of the same apps. Open the old Numbers app, and it quickly tells you it's out of date and nudges you towards the new one. You can still keep using it for now, but Apple is very clearly steering you somewhere. Now, I won't waste your time going through every new feature of the Creative Pro apps, because right now, there's barely a difference between the one-time purchase and Creator Studio versions. Plus, there's other YouTubers, like my Final Cut Pro Dylan doing a much better job than me. I link his video on the Final Cut update down below. But just to rapid fire a few examples, the only Creator Studio exclusive feature for Final Cut Pro is the premium content library. So title and graphic templates, like just for instance, countdowns and timers. Stuff like the beat grid to align footage to the beat of a track, natural language search of footage and transcript search has also landed in the one-time purchase version of Final Cut. The subscription version of Pixelmator Pro has loads of new premium templates and a new warp tool. Kind of a strange thing to pay for. If you use Logic Pro or MainStage, you're more in luck, because there's no single difference here. Apple confirmed that both versions get the exact same updates as the subscription ones, now and in the future. Okay, we've done the Pro apps and there are some solid upgrades here, but nothing totally mind-blowing. What gets really interesting is with the productivity apps, because Apple quietly added 10 brand new features to Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Like the new premium templates, with a big library of clean pages, numbers and keynote templates. Or the new content hub, which is basically a collection of licensed photos, graphics, backgrounds and shapes. Now, here's also where the AI stuff starts. Inside the content hub, we can also generate an image powered by OpenAI. And this is much more advanced than what we already know from Apple Intelligence. Sure, you can type a prompt and choose a style and aspect ratio, but look what happens once it's generated. We get editing suggestions based on the image created, like changing the mood, meshing it up with another picture or adjusting the background. And you might have already noticed this, but each Creator Studio AI feature is highlighted in purple. Like, check this out. For cropping an image, we can get automatic framing suggestions. Creator Studio can upscale any low-res images, making them look sharper. In Numbers, there's the new Magic Film, which I've been quite desperate to try. I run this birthday party invitation committee for my own birthday and I've pasted in all the YouTubers I want to invite. Now, I've started splitting them up in First Name, Surname and Channel Name. And on-device AI understands what I want to do and can magically fill the remaining cells for me. Now, Keynote takes all this a big step further. For starters, we can now generate entire slide decks from just typing in an overview and key points you want to present. Like, just for instance, I just paste this text about coral reefs. In less than a minute, we're getting all these slides. I mean, it's quite simple, but definitely not bad at all. Plus, what you might have missed is that we can click view and show presenter notes. And we can see that it also generated things you can say about the slides. Which, by the way, we can also do from any presentation we've already created, with one single click. And probably most useful is the cleanup tool. The point being, you can now basically dump everything onto a slide without worrying about formatting. And with one click, Keynote straightens everything out and aligns all your stuff perfectly. Oh, and if you think I forgot to mention Freeform, which is technically also part of Creator Studio, I have the feeling Apple forgot about that too, because there's simply no premium version. At least for now. Now, is Apple Creator Studio actually worth it, you might ask. Well, there's three reasons it's a great deal, and one big reason it's not. On the one hand, $12.99 is a fair price, especially if you're using any of the Creative Pro apps. Because just for instance, a one-time purchase of Final Cut Pro alone is $300. Plus, it's great if you just need one of those apps for a quick project, and you don't want to spend all this money at once. Oh, and also, although that's just speculation, but if you look at the update history of apps like Pages, Numbers, or even Final Cut, those apps weren't updated with big features frequently. So if Apple now charges you monthly, it might nudge them to ramp up the speed of new feature updates and treat those apps less like a sidekick. But on the other hand, there's one big problem here. If you're like most people, and you don't use pro apps like Final Cut, Logic Pro or Pixelmator, and you just want those premium features in Pages, Numbers and Keynote, you're essentially overpaying. Because I'd say $130 a year is a lot for the 10 features you're getting here. And that's what I find weird about Creator Studio. Like I said at the start, it basically meshes together two separate bundles, mostly for two separate groups of Mac and iPad users. But if you're like me, stuck in both groups, Creator Studio is a tremendous deal. Just like this video here, where I show you 52 Apple Notes features, most of which you've probably never seen. Alright, I'll see you there, thank you so much for watching, and have an amazing day!