Apple Updates Creator Studio Apps — But Pixelmator Pro Owners Still Miss Out
Toggle Dark Mode
It’s barely been six months since Apple Creator Studio arrived, and the bundle has just gotten its first major set of updates that could help justify its ongoing subscription costs.
Launched in January, Creator Studio is Apple’s answer to Adobe’s Creative Cloud Suite — and the iPhone maker’s attempt to capture a piece of the more lucrative software subscription pie. After all, a one-time purchase of Final Cut Pro is just that, while a recurring subscription is the gift that keeps on giving — at least for Apple.
Still, one of the major theoretical benefits of a SaaS model — software as a subscription — is that you get new features on a regular basis without the sticker shock of major annual or bi-annual upgrades to whole new versions. It’s unclear how much of a perk that is for users of Apple’s Pro apps, which haven’t required a paid upgrade since the legacy boxed versions were replaced with the “X” versions well over a decade ago, but it has been a valid selling point for Adobe and Microsoft customers.
This is probably why Apple has left the standalone versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro untouched by the new subscription model. These remain available as one-time purchases, and Apple continues to update them alongside the Creator Studio versions. I have to give Apple credit for not expecting folks who paid hundreds of dollars for those apps to eagerly jump on the subscription bandwagon.
In practical terms, this means Creator Studio isn’t really a deal for anyone who already owns these apps for Mac. There’s a bit of overlap as the iPadOS versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro remain locked into the subscription bundle, but the real audience for Creator Studio is those folks who never took the plunge into the standalone apps due to their steeper price tags. $12.99 a month or $129 a year is much easier to stomach compared to laying out $300 up front for a single app.
What’s New in Creator Studio?
Apple announced a series of updates to the Creator Studio apps that provide tighter integration between Pixelmator Pro, Final Cut Pro, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, along with more intelligence tools in Final Cut Pro and a new Producer Project in Logic Pro.
While Apple’s “iWork” apps — Pages, Keynote, and Numbers — now live under the Creator Studio banner, they remain free for non-subscribers with only some new Apple Intelligence features locked behind the subscription paywall. This week’s updates add a few quality-of-life improvements to those apps for everyone, including auto-hyphenation in Pages, the ability to hide or color-code sheets in Numbers, and new transitions and builds in Keynote.
The good news for owners of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for Mac is that nearly all of the Creator Studio improvements Apple announced today are also coming to the standalone versions: Final Cut Pro for Mac 12.3 and Logic Pro for Mac 12.3.
This includes improved automatic caption generation, auto masking, advanced trimming, edit detection, and more in Final Cut Pro, plus the new “Shoulda Never” Producer Project and Beat Breaker and Alchemy enhancements in Logic Pro.
In fact, the release notes are identical for Logic Pro and Logic Pro: Make Music (the Creator Studio version). The same is mostly true forFinal Cut Pro: Create Video, which lists all the same app features as Final Cut Pro, with the only difference being a note that new Creator Themes have been added to the online library — a stock content feature that was introduced as part of Creator Studio earlier this year.
Despite the consistent updates to Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, there’s still one slightly annoying outlier in the mix: the standalone version of Pixelmator Pro has not received an update today to match the Creator Studio version. This means folks who made a one-time purchase are being left out of a whole bunch of new features, such as advanced image creation, shape generation, and tighter integration that allows more seamless round-tripping of images with Keynote, Pages, and Numbers
This may not be too surprising, as many of these revolve around generative AI, which costs Apple money to run. To be fair, Apple hasn’t abandoned its recently-acquired photo editing app entirely — it received some nice format and template updates in April — but there’s a feeling that it’s slowly dropping into a sort of “maintenance mode,” leaving many Pixelmator Pro customers wondering how far they’ll end up being left behind as Creator Studio continues to forge ahead without it.
