The most important benefits in my opinion are choice and price - people like me who prefer to buy software outright can still do so at a reasonable cost, while others who opt for a subscription can also do so (again, at a reasonable cost).

As someone who's loved Logic Pro since the days before Apple bought Emagic, this is amazing that it will be accessible to a broader audience.

There are many discussions e.g. https://gearspace.com/board/music-computers/1433515-why-does... about the reasons for its popularity, but one stands out to me - its event data model.

There are far too many tools out there (from FL Studio on one end, to MuseScore on the other) that present piano-roll-based rapid prototyping and traditional western score notation as diametric opposites. From day 1, Logic challenged itself "what if we can use the same event-based data model to render both."

None of this complexity is hidden - you can edit the raw event stream directly. If you're a developer familiar with, say, React, it makes music creation quite intuitive - everything from visual to audio output is a function of a transparently formatted data store.

And while that has its challenges, and some of the UX innovations of e.g. MuseScore have been slower to arrive in Logic, because of this "dual life" it's unmatched as a pedogogical tool, and a professional creative tool as well.

That's actually surprisingly cheap compared to other subscriptions in the industry, especially for such a high powered suite.

I thought they basically gave away Keynote/Pages etc to anyone with an Apple device?

Does this mean Keynote and Pages are now paid products? Aren't they included with Mac OS?

Thank god they preserved the one time purchase. I bought all of these apps back in like ~2013 and have been using them for literally 13 years with all updates (fcp, compressor, motion)

good on them

>Comes out January 28th

I wonder why? Why not today but 28th of Jan?

Part of me thinks M5 MacBook Air and M5 Pro MacBook Pro will also be released on January 28th.

But Keynote, Pages and Numbers are already free

the other benefit is that subs can be a sort of extended trial. Ive been wanting to try out final cut pro but I don't want to do a full video project if i'm going to be evaluating it. better to have 1-3 months to really know before I plunk down 299 bucks.

Not related to your comment exactly but I feel like I need to get this out in this thread somewhere:

As someone who defended FCPX and used it professionally for years even when it was at its most hated (2011 or so), it’s been woefully supported the last few years and no one should be on it anymore. Resolve Studio outclasses it top to bottom for the same one-time cost and runs great on both MacOS and Windows. Linux it’s bumpy unfortunately but it does technically run lol

time to dust off that 20 year old edu email address. with these discounts, college has paid for itself!

That's actually a hell of a deal considering I already pay $5 a month just for Logic on the iPad.

My concern here is are they going to start locking features for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote behind a paywall? Yes, it’s free—but will they still have all of the newer features without a subscription?

The inclusion of Pixelmator Pro is simply so they no longer have a hole in the software lineup as a competitor vs Affinity (I think the real competitor to this bundle) and Adobe

I think they view Photos as a viable replacement for Lightroom and equivalents.

Thanks for the info, I was looking for this. I have the "Pro Apps Bundle for Education" that I bought years ago and it is an fantastic deal.

They don't have much of a choice. They bet the house on liquid glass and need to keep up appearances.

I read it less as obliviousness and more as internal language leaking into marketing. What’s “Liquid Glass” to Apple reads like an aesthetic system though but to outsiders it sounds like jargon inflation. I feel the gap between internal coherence and external clarity shows up in these releases a lot.

It sounds like internally it’s a checklist item they have to mention everywhere.

You’ve never worked at BigCorp have you? At Amazon, part of the initial indoctrination when I was hired there was competitive messaging when talking to clients (I worked in ProServe) and what you were never allowed to say. I remember we could never say we had a “moat”.

I’m sure there is approved marketing copy.

I guess it's enforced top-down. Yesterday I picked up my MacBook from a logicboard repair and they forced Tahoe on it despite running Sonoma originally so I spent most of yesterday getting rid of Tahoe and reverting back to Sonoma.

someone in PR is trolling

the beatings with liquid glass will continue till morale improves

Have you never had to toe a company line before?

Apple no longer supports GL, so Liquid Glass - GL = Liquid Ass.

Tried Darktable?

I’ve been waiting to see what happens with Photomator, and the fact that it’s not being included in anyway here makes me think it might not survive? Either that, or it’s gonna be heavily integrated into Photos…

I wish there was something like GOG but for old general software

No, all apps are available for purchase for a one time payment.

I don't care about video, so I'll be buying Pixelmator now, and maybe music stuff later, and Video part never.

So it works like before, if you want.

Well really they are copying the original Microsofts suite packaging which everyone has copied over the years! But yes specific they are trying to take market share on Adobe.

Its actually like taking on MS and Adobe together... but they aren't really taking on MS office.

How so? Apple's subscription cancellation is one click away, and you don't get overcharged when canceling.

Subscription model so it’s adobes model. But you can buy “one time”. Though they have a tendency to just end product support (aperture software was canceled leaving a lot of bad taste for photographers that used it)

Wonder what Adobe thinks of this. Their support for Mac was pretty important in getting OS X off the ground, now they’re competing with a unified stack.

When I was a Mac user I remember buying Logic express 9 (I still have the disk). The price is a good deal, but you really are all in forever..

Depends on if you are stuck with the subscription for life, or if there's actually a reasonable way to unsubscribe.

FTA: “Alternatively, users can also choose to purchase the Mac versions of Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage individually as a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store.”

Yeah but this is $129/yr, that's significantly cheaper

Adobe invented subscription bundles? In that sense did the Creative Cloud copy iCloud?

When there are no more new buyers to sell devices, or new versions of existing software packages, the only way to keep the curve growing for shareholders and MBAs is to sell subscriptions.

It is also the only way to convince developers to pay for software.

Having a part hosted on some server is so much better than whatever anti-piracy schemes one can think of, and provides the continuous growth curve for printing money.

Thus subscriptions aren't going away in the modern software world.

Affinity never made mac-assed Mac apps. Pixelmator is more a Mac app than Messages or Music. That's why they bought them instead of Affinity.

Unless Apple gets off several high horses regarding code signing and, more importantly, app containerization; any Xcode for iPadOS is going to be useless. Like, imagine Xcode without custom build steps or third-party compilers.

The larger problem is that the iPad has a dual nature. At the launch of the product, Apple positioned it as a netbook killer - i.e. a simplified computer for specific tasks, one where the locked down nature of the device might actually be considered a feature. That's why they built everything on iPhone OS[0]. However, there's always been the implication that this is supposed to Someday™ replace the Mac. It keeps getting new features to make it more useful as a computer replacement, which just makes the deliberate restrictions placed on the device more and more glaring. And Apple seems to think they can just keep adding features until they can make you do every computing task wearing a strait-jacket in a padded room.

This particular duality came to a head with the Apple Vision Pro. Any app that would actually be useful on a VR headset is either:

- Incompatible with Apple's code-signing and containerization requirements (i.e. developer tools)

- Not economic to offer at the small scale of the visionOS app market (at least, not while Apple is demanding 30%)

- A game (Apple really doesn't wanna talk about the Vision Pro as a games machine)

On a related note, Swift Playgrounds stopped getting updates almost a year ago. I updated my HTML editor demo project for iPadOS 26 and now I can't even compile it because Apple has yet to ship the version 26 SDK. And there's really nothing any third party can do to fix Swift Playgrounds to make it actually usable again.

[0] Strictly speaking, Apple's first internal demos of capacitive touch were for a tablet project specifically to spite Windows XP tablets. Although by the time they were writing actual shipping code it was intended for iPhone and iPad came later.

I played once with hosting a VSCode server on a raspberry pi for general development and it was actually quite powerful, when used from an iPad. Just not strictly for Swift unfortunately

TBF, you can say the same thing for adobe creative cloud - the intersection between After Effects and Indesign users is also effectively nil!

But having one simple opex line item for "software I buy for the creative types" is appealing for a lot of orgs.

I'm that kind of user but I would rather not use Logic, Final Cut, or PixelMator unless Apple really improves those. On top of that there's also the platform lock-in concern.

Subs like this are great for people who can’t afford the full versions yet

I don’t think they look awful, and they’re more interesting and opinionated than most boring icons you see these days.

Now they acquired Photomator with Pixelmator, but it's still an independent subscription... not even included in this bundle. Maybe they just forgot.

Sounds plausible. Someone internally likely has AI sales numbers to meet, so creating new subscriptions and adding "AI" to them can help juice AI-related numbers toward that quota.

Logic Pro gets regular updates. I believe most of it is AI driven nonsense but they are making changes. Flashback capture was a nice fairly recent addition and surprising this wasn't implemented sooner. There are also regular bug fixes and performance improvements. I can't speak for the other apps.

https://support.apple.com/en-afri/109503

Forget that. TikTokers are the revenue stream now.

Pages and other iWork apps will remain free. The premium features are for curated images and templates, and AI assisted document creation. If you don't care for those features, you will not be affected by the change.

Good thing they remain free and pre installed. As per the article.

Nothing is ever guaranteed for life...except the promise of death.

But for how long?

I think that's why they call it "Creator" studio. Creators - in the way the term is usually used today - indeed do use many of these tools. Maybe you produce music, create a video about you producing music and also need an engaging thumbnail for YouTube.

In a feature film production, these would certainly be separate roles. But apart from maybe Logic Pro for composers, Apple's tools are not really relevant at those levels of the entertainment business anymore. Post-pro would be Pro Tools for audio, something like Avid Media Composer for editing etc.

I think Apple has realized they are not playing on that level anymore and target their marketing to where they are still in the game. That's not necessarily a bad move.

Many people that use professional tools are genuinely doing hobbyist stuff. Especially if they haven't already bought their tools outright.

But besides, this subscription works with Family Sharing and is only $12, so it looks easy to get your money's worth.

> I don’t get why they think “professional” is a generic tier.

The target market is prosumer, not true professional.

A lot of people round trip through various softwares to create things. As a film editor I use NLE’s, DAW’s, music production tools, various encoders (like compressor), graphic design tools…I’d say it’s the norm not the exception to need 2-3 specialized pieces of software during projects.

> If I’m a music producer, what’s the value of being given a digital art drawing program? If I’m an illustrator, why do I need a cinema post production suite

Are you talking about Adobe here?

Many years ago, before Final Cut Pro x my cousin asked me to help inject some video from tapes and keep the time code. In Final Cut Pro. I couldn’t figure it out.

So in desperation I read the manual. It was seriously well written and I understood the program, what needed to be done and how to do it.

I find it useful as a massive canvas for keeping a bunch of stuff in context, visually. And accessible via Mac and iPhone. But it is sorely lacking a major feature: highlight text to add a hyperlink. I end up with full URLs instead of hyperlinked words and it's pretty messy.

I use it regularly to do rough sketches of objects on my iPad to model in CAD later on the computer. It doesn't feel right for artwork or notes or basically anything else.

Yeah! They were courageous enough to take the step that Microsoft did with the Office suite (announced 1988, launched 1990) and with Microsoft 365 as subscription in 2011.

You can buy the individual tools, if you want.

I'm curious how many people actually use all this stuff themselves. It seems like an extreme niche, and more often than not will have people paying for apps they will never use.

Keynote is so much better for presentations that PowerPoint it's not even funny. But if you're not doing presentations, I can understand dumping it. I do like to have Pages because it means I don't have to bother with Word's annoying ribbon interface and Copilot AI when I'm writing...though sounds like that may be changing?

Numbers is brilliant simply because of independent freely-movable tables

It looks so much better than the grid enforced by Excel.

I'd forgotten Pages and Numbers existed, but Keynote is worth paying for if it means that I don't have to use PowerPoint.

I use Pages once a month for an invoice :)

Not sure why tbh, my other invoices are done in LibreOffice.

> Would people actually pay money for them?

Why would someone need to buy them, they only run on macOS and macOS hardware comes with it by default, doesn't it?

I absolutely would. I've used them for years, alongside MS Office on Windows and Libre Office on Linux, and while they lack a few features they're not ones I've ever needed and the UI and ease of use is far superior to Office. Especially Pages is a pleasure to work with compared with Word.

They want you to pay money for premium AI features in those apps, which is worse.

The apps themselves are fine IMO.

Except that isn’t an alternative title, unless you want to lie by omission thus being wrong.

“Apple offers new option for subscription in addition to existing one-time purchase optinos” might be an alternative though, and reduce the number of cynically inane comments from people that apparently didn’t RTFA before commenting.

RTFA, you can still buy them for a one-time purchase on the App Store

You can. They are offering both options.

Doesn't sound like it > Alternatively, users can also choose to purchase the Mac versions of Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage individually as a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store.5

No, fta:

> Alternatively, users can also choose to purchase the Mac versions of Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage individually as a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store.

Pixelmator Pro is upgraded a couple of times under Apple's wings, and this thing is not being ruined.

You'll still be able to buy it if you want. All apps are still can be bought. It's in the text.

Apple surprised me nicely there.

One-time purchase versions are still available. For Pixelmator Pro it's $49.99 on the App Store

You will (soon) own nothing and be happy.