Apple has been putting more onus on its services for the past several years — the company makes tens of billions of dollars in revenue from that side of the business, which it claimed had a record year in 2025. Apple is nudging a little more in that direction with a new subscription bundle called Apple Creator Studio.
This allows creators to pay a single fee ($13 per month or $129 per year) to use Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor and MainStage. Subscribers will get access to “premium content” in Pages, Keynote and Numbers (as well as in Freeform later this year). Of course, there are AI features too. Apple Creator Studio will be available starting on January 28 and you can try it out at no cost through a one-month free trial.
College students and educators can subscribe to Apple Creator Studio for $3 per month or $30 per year. Up to six people can access all of the plan’s features if one person in a Family Sharing group subscribes.
Apple noted that Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor and MainStage will still be available as one-time purchases for Mac through the Mac App Store. Given that those can be pretty pricy (going up to $300 for Final Cut Pro), the subscription could be enticing to many burgeoning creators.
This seems like Apple’s attempt to muscle in on Adobe’s territory, especially now that it’s bringing AI features to many of these apps. Adding new features to productivity apps like Numbers and Keynote means Apple’s taking a shot at the likes of Microsoft 365 Copilot (yeeeeah, that’s what Office is called now) and Google Workspace as well.
On Mac and iPad, Final Cut Pro has a new feature called Beat Detection. Apple suggests this makes “editing video to the rhythm of music fast and fun.” It uses an AI model from Logic Pro to analyze music tracks and display a Beat Grid. The idea here is to visualize song parts, beats and bars to help editors align their cuts with the music.
The Montage Maker tool in Final Cut Pro on an iPad. (Apple)
An AI-powered Montage Maker tool can stitch together “a dynamic video based on the best visual moments within the footage.” You’ll be able to tweak these montages and use an Auto Crop tool to reframe the clip into a vertical format to make it a better fit for social media. Final Cut Pro has transcript and visual search functions too.
Logic Pro, MainStage, Pixelmator Pro (which is coming to iPad with Apple Pencil support) and Motion will all have AI-powered features as well. As you might expect, you’ll need an Apple Intelligence-capable device to use some of these.
Apple is also introducing something called the Content Hub. This media library includes “curated, high-quality photos, graphics and illustrations.”
As for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, you’ll be able to access premium templates and themes in those otherwise-free apps with a Apple Creator Studio plan. Subscribers will be able to try beta versions of new features, such as a way to generate a draft of a Keynote presentation text based on an outline, and a Magic Fill tool to generate formulas and fill in tables in Numbers.
