Educational discount with verification required drops the price to $2.99/mo / $29.99/yr.
The regular-price subscription includes family sharing, education price does not.
One-time purchase versions remain available: Final Cut Pro ($299.99), Logic Pro ($199.99), Pixelmator Pro ($49.99), Motion ($49.99), Compressor ($49.99), and MainStage ($29.99).
Comes out January 28th
At the time, the common wisdom was that they'd go the same route as Adobe: you'd have to buy Final Cut X+1 in a couple years for another $299, and Final Cut X+2 a couple years after that... to their credit, that's not the way it's gone.
So that way, I imagine, all the film folks have a little more money to chuck at their high-powered Mac hardware budgets in the next refresh cycle instead... An evergreen Final Cut Pro license costs almost as much as 1TB of SSD from those guys!
And that's despite Apple having zero interest in doing things that don't ultimately make them money.
I have a theory for how sales of these one-time-purchase yet indefinitely-updated apps happens to work out positively on Apple's balance sheet, while it doesn't for most other large players right now.
And that's that, due to Apple's vertical integration (they make the hardware, they make the OS that runs on the hardware, they make the apps that run on the OS) — and due to these apps only targeting their own OSes+hardware, with no consideration of portability to other platforms — a lot (like 90+%) of the "enablement" work for these apps ends up time-budgeted as OS work, rather than apps work.
Or, I guess, to be more charitable, you could say that Apple's engineers develop first-party apps not just to sell them, but at least in part to drive the development of the OS as a developer platform. You could even describe the OS frameworks as the product, and the apps themselves as the byproduct. (In that lens, the only reason FCP would cost anything at all is to avoid accusations of anti-competitive behavior.)
Now that the iPhone made Apple much more of mainstream company, it's harder to do -- what does it mean to focus on cultural leaders when 90% of American teens have an iPhone? But in the 15 years since Steve Jobs' death they have still been doing a decent job of it.
The company
I'd argue that it is very likely that Final Cut X+1 was Apple's plan. It just did not pan out and they were busy with other things. Now they made the first step correcting that (or cutting the losses, depending how you want to see it).
I’m hand waving there because I’m not a pro but my neighbor is and I don’t recall the details.
But I’m curious how you see FC also lost in semi pro to Davinci specifically.
Microsoft still offers a one time purchase of Office. There is precedent for Bigcorp keeping a one time purchase version and offer a prescription.
Office 2024 has every feature that was added since Office 2021 to the subscription version - while a chunk of loyal customers are unaware of them. Back when Google was competing hard with Google Suite, a big perception problem formed with the perpetual customers believing and convincing others that Google were far ahead, with collab editing and other features - after Office had added equivalent.
So for me, If there's a subscription and one-time option - I wonder if the one-time gets all updates going forward. If it doesn't, I realise that they'll regret that if competition picks up, and try to fix it later. If it does include updates... I worry it will be like many other lifetime updates one-time purchases - when competition is low they'll renege on that promise.
Of course ... ? Before the subscription model, you wouldn't get free Office upgrades.
- the System 7 transition
- the 040 Macs and to get a “32 bit clean version”
- to get the full speed of running natively on PPC Macs
- to get a native OS X version instead of one that ran in the OS 9 sandbox
- the Intel transition to get native performance.
I would much rather pay $150 (?) a year for a five user license where each user gets 1TB of storage and each user can use Office across Macs, Windows, iPhones and iPads.
It’s the same price as Dropbox’s 2TB plan and all you get for that is storage.
On a related note: Steve Jobs was right - Dropbox is a feature not a product.
he writing is on the wall, they will remove it sooner or later.
There's no indication Apple is planning to end the option of paying once for these apps.
Apple introduced subscriptions for Final Cut and Logic nearly three years ago [1]; this isn't new by any means. Pages, Numbers and Keynote remain available at no cost.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/apple-brings-final-cu...
Apple wants its customers to buy/subscribe to these tools so that you’re in the Apple ecosystem and buy more hardware and services.
Unlike Adobe, they have profit-maximizing incentives to let you stay on the buy/rent model that you prefer.
You're making up an individual to get mad at for no reason.
> The other thing that’s going to go away is purchasing only what you need
There is no proof of this. So you're making up a situation to get mad at for no reason.
> I want exactly one of these apps
Perfect, Apple lets you buy the one app you want for a reasonable price! So what's the issue?
It’s not set in stone, but it’s supported by the times this has happened before and by trends in Apple and in tech. “Nothing will ever change” is a prediction, too, and one much less supported by evidence.
This is like saying that it's clever for Mars to keep Mars Bars while launching a new bar, as it "shuts down" complaints that Mars Bars will no longer exist.
Seriously? This is incredibly reasonable.
Probably not. Those customers are almost completely irrelevant and not people who Apple or anybody else cares about. They won't mind if you kick and scream.
They're doing it because it makes them more money. Corporations are not your friend.
Obviously you're right that PR ultimately translates into money.
The best one to watch at the moment is if Pixelmater Pro license holders from before it was bought by Apple get access to any of the new improvements.
Adobe also started out as a choice between subscription or buying. The only thing maybe keeping Apple honest is that their stuff isn't as popular.
The real competition in this market in 2026 is Canva.
Ah, yes - cross finance your loses by selling compute in your own data centres / hosting service because you can.
Also so many people are paying for Canva, Capcut etc that taking a piece of that cake is quite a low hanging fruit if you have a distribution platform.
It’s even a similar pricing model, though technically with Pages / Numbers / Keynote covers a little more ground but I think the main intent is to get creatives using Apple’s creative software again
Pixelmator being the only 3rd party software because Apple never made a competitor to Photoshop
Though since Canva went full on toward more robust tools I imagine they have started capturing the entire editing chain more than they did 2-3 years ago, hence the Affinity acquisition
Pixelmator isn’t third party. https://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2024/11/01/a-new-home-for-pi...:
“November 1, 2024
A new home for Pixelmator
Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple”
That deal completed almost a year ago.
"software and services" really should be broken out from the App Store cut.
Anyway, this isn’t really a meaningful quibble argument-wise, it is obvious what you mean!
They want marketshare to enhance their other market positions and give them optionality for future strategy.
They'd love the whole market, but they don't need it and they won't employ too many resources chasing that.
They're a powerful giant with hands in so many places. Each enforcing other endeavors.
This encourages people to stay in the Apple hardware ecosystem, for instance. It dog foods their silicon. It keeps people thinking of Apple as the creative brand and operating system. More creatives buying Apple -> more being produced and consumed for and on Apple.
Also the strategy of getting kids young has always been genius. They started that in the eighties, I think.
Best framing I’ve seen of the answer to, “Why is Apple in the streaming service business?”
Apple absolutely has data centres. Where do you think Apple TV, Apple Music, iCloud, Maps, etc compute happens?
Here's a press release straight from the horse's mouth about one in Denmark, in late 2020: https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2020/09/apple-expands-rene...
> Can people purchase compute on Apple's data centers?
Not to my knowledge, but that's not saying much.
But that's the entire crux of their comment: undercut the competition, and make them pay for compute on Apple's data centers.
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.
Considering them as alternate views of the same data model gets problematic when the composer uses the full bag of tricks that score notation allows (notably repeats, but also the problem of representing tuplets correctly when a pianoroll can offer no clues about how to structure them). So for example, the user can create a set of notes in the pianoroll that will never be played correctly by anyone reading the score; the user can create dynamics in the score that cannot be correctly presented in the pianoroll version.
I'm not saying it isn't possible to do an MVC-style system with two different views of the same data model - it clearly is. It's just moving between the two views is not lossless, and moving between the two controllers (i.e. editing) is not equivalent.
Are you saying other sequencers are unable to render the same data as piano roll and score?
good on them
> plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers
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.
Guess it’s time to take some online self-paced courses at a university for no reason in particular …
We're all (mostly/some) software people here, you don't need to use terms established by the "anti-piracy" firms to make your point, no one is "stealing" anything here, even if they were getting it for free from TPB or whatever.
Seen it in media for decades at this point, which makes sense, most people can't tell up from down.
What's sad is hearing those things echoed here of all places, a community for hackers, and people are repeating the words of the MPAA.
So now I'm getting an education too.
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
Best 200-300 EUR I spent some years ago, and still receives free updates, Blackmagic Design is a really nice company. And, not only does Resolve run great on macOS and Windows, they have Linux native builds that run even better than it does with the same hardware using Windows, which is REALLY nice.
It lacks some flashy social media features and modern conveniences for sure, but it's still a very good and widely used editor.
I used it professionally from 2011-2020 or so. Around 2020 the gaps in feature parity became wider and more apparent, it’s clearly not a priority anymore. Once I went to resolve I basically abandoned it. I use maybe every 6mo tops now for quick stuff for friends and family or to open an old project.
The one thing I will say is for speed cutting, it’s probably the best. And that’s no small thing! But that’s about it.
Even if I had to purchase an occasional update (assuming they were reasonably priced), I'd still be coming out ahead.
I hate "renting" software.
I could see using an iPad for automation, triggered by midi, but I use an Air for that (and even if I used an my Pro, I still have to use a USB C hub because for some reason Apple things 1 (or 2) USB ports is enough. Sigh.
Not available for one time purchase are the AI features and templates available for the free apps (Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Freeform).
Personally, I'm glad that one time purchases are still options for the core pro suite: long term they do hold value compared to paying Adobe a subscription (or dealing with the high seas on macOS). However, I don't see things like the education bundle sticking around much longer, so purchase it sooner rather than later.
[1]: https://www.apple.com/us-edu/shop/product/bmge2z/a/pro-apps-...
[2]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pixelmator-pro/id1289583905
I think they view Photos as a viable replacement for Lightroom and equivalents.
I've learned my lesson — all my archives will now be maintained by me, in file structures, with metadata in text files.
This is a useful tool: https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive
However, you still need to run an older OS. I've still got on my todo list the process of fixing all of this.
Are the Apple people really this oblivious, or is someone in PR trolling us?
Apple wasting years of everyones time on bad faith UX design
I’m sure there is approved marketing copy.
the beatings with liquid glass will continue till morale improves
So, if you are a student, you can get logic, final cut, motion, compressor and mainStage for $199.99 for ever.
Function | Apple | Adobe | Adobe price / month
--------------------|----------------------|---------------------|--------------------
Image editing | Pixelmator Pro | Photoshop | ~USD 20
Video editing | Final Cut Pro | Premiere Pro | ~USD 23
Motion graphics | Motion | After Effects | ~USD 23
Audio production | Logic Pro | Audition | ~USD 23
Video encoding | Compressor | Media Encoder | Included with Premiere Pro
Live audio | MainStage | No direct equivalent| N/A
Docs/presentations | Keynote/Pages/Numbers| Express/Acrobat | ~USD 10 to 24
--------------------|----------------------|---------------------|--------------------
TOTAL | USD 12.99 / month | ~USD 100+ / month |
| (7 apps bundle) | (5 apps separately)|
| | USD 69.99 / month |
| | (bundle 20+ apps) |
Lightroom never matched Aperture's organizational abilities for libraries with tens of thousands of RAW photos.
On the other hand, Final Cut / iMovie will exist side by side because it’s truly a basic vs Pro situation.
Not a product manager at Apple, of course, but this is what logically seems to make sense.
Why though isn’t such a significant announcement on the Apple.com homepage?
They look AWEFUL.
So Apple is copying Adobe's business model?
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.
For video, the free version of DavinciResolve goes a very long way, and their Studio is a single-payment-life-time license.
...and they integrated some of the Aperture to new Photos app, which is again was a transition to free.
Name me something a product, not a service which you can only subscribe in Apple's ecosystem.
The shows on Apple TV are only available via a subscription; there's no way to have a perpetual purchase (at least as far as that a la carte style of purchase is perpetual).
Its actually like taking on MS and Adobe together... but they aren't really taking on MS office.
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..
Apple doesn't work that way.
Unlike almost all other tech companies that are organized by divisions, Apple uses a functional organizational structure.
So all of the software teams are under one head of software; there's no senior vp of the Final Cut division, for example.
For accounting purposes, all software is lumped together.
Apple made $391 billion in revenue last fiscal year; when you're making that kind of money, you can afford to do things for reasons other than the amount of money you could make.
Whatever revenue Final Cut generates isn't required to fund the Final Cut team.
If anything, Apple is refreshing their hardware much faster now compared to the Intel days. There's literally a new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air every year. And of course there are 3-4 new iPhones every year.
Not quite “buying on release week” basis but some % of employees always getting new hardware at max specs in the design org
Makes even engineering jealous sometimes
I'm not particularly interested in sustaining the financial growth of software companies. I did that for years and I'm done.
But, what you suggest is literally what the software industry did for decades before subscriptions became the norm.
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.
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.
It isn't about doing and publishing apps without having to buy a mac.
Rather having a more powerful development experience that isn't as constrained as Swift Playgrounds, useful for prototyping ideas.
I do not care if in a similar vein, to a Smalltalk like environment I would always need to run the app from inside the dev env, and then use a Mac, or some cloud build workflow if I ever would like to actually publish it.
Just like I use several other coding on the go environments.
In a past life, I’d have fallen quite squarely in the latter and I still fall in the former.
Given this also extends to my family, it feels like a no-brainer replacement for creative cloud.
But having one simple opex line item for "software I buy for the creative types" is appealing for a lot of orgs.
Photohsop, Illustrator and After Effects are pretty much industry standards.
I am glad the standalone purchases are still available and I assume they will stay updated in sync with the subscription-based ones. I would hate my copy of Logic getting slowly obsolete..
My experience is that while there’s a feature and community gap for both Pixelmator Pro and Affinity, Affinity just tried to copy Photoshop, positioning it as a worse but cheaper Photoshop, while Pixelmator Pro feels like an attempt to make a better photo editor, losing some familiarity points but also being tangibly better than Photoshop at most use cases it can handle, which is many. It’s also an excellent macOS citizen. Between those two factors, it seems much more up Apple’s alley.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/technology/apple-ceo-tim-...
My old job dealt with this quite a lot as they were our target market, so I got some up close views of how for example, creators like MrBeast go about their editing (well the employees anyway)
Though I did note a lot of creators that do graduate to more robust software basically go from lightweight editor via Canva -> iMovie or equivalent -> professional software e.g. FCPX or Premiere
To them what Apple just announced is trash.
It’s a good value for some, especially if you want to use FCP, but seems like a bad value for most users who are expecting more value from their Mac purchase.
I wonder if new Macs will offer a three-month trial for this suite, or if the standard apps will be pre-installed and the AI features are unlocked through a subscription.
If bundled versions of iWork go away, we may see a renaissance for G Suite.
If not, then this would likely go the way of others before where it will eventually be removed.
I'll say this loud for the people in the back: YOU CAN STILL BUY IT OUTRIGHT
They are still offering one-time purchases, calm down.
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?
Some people might happen to do both, but overlap is largely accidental, right? The fact that they think of all professions as a bundle is even insulting as it signals the products are mostly toys/hobbyist stuff.
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.
The target market is prosumer, not true professional.
The real difference is that a "true professional" already has the software—purchased at full price by themselves or by their employer—and doesn't need a subscription in the first place.
But besides, this subscription works with Family Sharing and is only $12, so it looks easy to get your money's worth.
Are you talking about Adobe here?
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.
(For what it's worth, the iWorks apps – Pages/Keynote/Numbers are free and bundled with macOS.)
Like Adobe CC
I love Logic and all but really?
I can’t help but notice Apple in the last decade has kind of been spinning in circles software wise while their hardware division makes breakthroughs with M-series chips.
2026, the year of the Linux Desktop…
I tried it out when it was first announced and found it painfully limited --- did I miss something? Has it gotten better?
I hope I can still use the non subscription version of Pixelmator pro I bought
More seriously, the subscription probably comes out cheaper than buying several (even if not all) of the apps that come in the bundle.
> [...] to make Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite to empower creators of all disciplines while protecting their privacy.
Back in the day I was considered a 'MultiMedia' creative. I don't even know what to call myself these days.
So not only is it a far quicker way to make a PPT than using Powerpoint. I also see it used for making presentation videos, interactive PDFs and even animated GIFs/HTML5 animations.
The number of motion graphics marketing videos I see which are actually just Keynote files exported to video is impressive.
I have a numbers file for my personal finances and it is so nice having some tables at the top with mortgage info and then details below. It makes running what-ifs super easy. Charts in excel and GSheets just kinda float over your content awkwardly.
It looks so much better than the grid enforced by Excel.
Why would someone need to buy them, they only run on macOS and macOS hardware comes with it by default, doesn't it?
Not sure why tbh, my other invoices are done in LibreOffice.
The apps themselves are fine IMO.
“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.
EDIT: I know you can still buy the software... but for how long?
> 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.
I don't want yet another subscription.
I see that they can still be bought (for now) but I wonder how long that will last.
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.