0:00 Apple just launched Creator Studio, a $1299 subscription that bundles Final Cut, Logic Pro, Pixelator Pro, and a bunch of other apps for Mac and iPad. And honestly, this is the most hopeful Apple's Pro software has felt in years. But it's also not for everyone. Before we jump in, if you want to keep up to date with all the latest Apple news, reviews, and creator tools, hit that subscribe button. Creator Studio is Apple's newest subscription offering aimed at creatives. You get 10 total apps. Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelator Pro, Motion, Compressor, MaidStage, and all of Apple's productivity apps on Mac and
0:46 iPad. It's that last part that is most important here. Well, Apple is continuing to offer one-time purchases for the core Mac apps. The iPad versions are only available via subscription. Now, that tells you where Apple is going. It's not Apple catering to or chasing old Hollywood, but rather it's betting on a new generation of mobile first creators. Users largely have the option of creating images, music, and videos now on either iPad or Mac, whichever devices suit your workflow, and you can just move between them. Then you can polish your content on the Mac with a few more
1:31 apps. And thankfully, it all mostly works. There's also a conscious effort to infuse AI features into these apps, but in a respectful way, where these AI tools are used to aid creators and never to replace them. I live in Final Cut Pro. I'm editing daily between long- form and short form content. For the last many years, the app has gotten relatively minor updates. Creator Studio is, I hope, a start to fixing that. On the Mac, the new feature I'm going to be using most is the new intelligent search. You can now search your library based on exactly what you're looking for. You can search based on visuals in the clips or you can search based on what is said in the videos. It'll
2:18 automatically transcribe these like all your footage you import and then you can search for exact words or phrases or you can do a fuzzy search that's just related to your query. I just finished up with CES and wow, this would have been really great. a month ago to search through like hundreds of clips and interviews. And this runs locally. No cloud or internet required to pull this off. As you can tell by this video, I don't usually add any backing tracks to my stuff. I guess maybe I maybe I should. Let me know down below in the comments if you think that would help or not. Just sound off. But the updated Final Cut Pro aims to make that easier with beats sync. You add a music track and it'll automatically show you
3:04 visually where the beat is. Then you can line your cut to the music. This used to be a very manual process and this just really speeds it up. Final Cut Pro though on iPad is finally usable to me. The updated iPad app has better support for external displays. I can edit on my iPad while previewing my project on an external monitor. I mean, I have the 13-in, but if you have the 11in Air or Pros, this is going to boost your usability by a ton. You're no longer going to have to squint at that tiny window next to your media and timeline. Then, there are background exports finally. So, I can finish my editing,
3:52 bounce a project, and then continue to work on other things while it is shared in the background. and you can monitor it via a live activity. It was seriously ridiculous that before I'd have to just stay in that window and leave it and wait while my video is exporting. For longer projects, it could take forever. I can move over to Pixelmator Pro and work on a thumbnail or just something else completely. Honestly, the biggest thing I'm missing right now on Final Cut is still roundtrip support. I can go from the iPad to the Mac, but I really want to go Mac to iPad and back. Like I use this great docking station for storing my medias. And it would be amazing to like start a project here in
4:38 the studio, pull out the SSD, grab my iPad, and just finish editing on the road. I get back to the studio, you know, put this into its, you know, its home wherever, and then that same drive can get slotted right into my docking station, and I can keep working. Hopefully this eventually happens. I mentioned Pixelmator Pro and that was the surprise hit feature for me here with Creator Studio. While Final Cut Pro has been around on iPad, same as Logic, Pixelator Pro is entirely new here. It's basically feature complete with launch. layers, masks, ML tools, background removal, even the allnew advanced warp tools are there. With the automatic background removal and iCloud sync, I'm
5:25 going to make this my new image editor, hands down. There's a bunch of native Apple stuff here like iPad OS windowing support, um, Apple Pencil support, and even depth data from portrait mode photos shows up here. It's super cool. I think Apple Pencil support could be improved. Right now, it seems somewhat basic. Squeezing the Apple Pencil Pro just shows undo redo. It would be cool to see a tool palette or color picker on that squeeze instead. Or at least maybe make it more tool specific. And hovering is limited, only showing on certain sub menus and while I'm actively editing an image. But the fact a mobile creator could edit a video, bounce, view still frames as thumbnail options, edit those
6:10 images while it is exporting in the background, and then publish it all just from an iPad is amazing to me. Logic Pro is probably the one of this suite that I use the least. Still, Apple is of course showing it some love, too. A new chord ID tool allows users to record music, whether directly from an instrument or saved from a voice memo, and Logic Pro will automatically detect the chords. This has been a frequently requested feature from users, especially with the combined um especially when combined with the session players. Session players are basically AI bandmates that will match your song to provide accompaniment, and it's not as like static and repetitive as your normal loops. You no longer have to manually
6:56 assign those chords. And there's a new synth session player to add along with the others. Plus, unlike with Final Cut, Logic still does have full roundtrip support between Mac and iPad. I won't spend too much time on them, but Apple's productivity apps are included with the subscription, too. To be clear, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Free Form are all still available for free. But with Creator Studio, you get AI features and some extra content. Also, at launch, Free Form, like the new version of Free Form, is not quite available yet. Keynote, for example, though, can create an entire presentation just based off of an outline. Like if I made a presentation for HomeKit Insider, the
7:42 weekly Smartome podcast that I host, I can just choose a theme, give it my notes for the episode, and boom, I have a whole presentation complete with presenter notes. Numbers has a cool magic fill feature that uses AI to analyze data and suggest missing values based on patterns it identified. All the productivity apps, including Free Form, are getting Apple's new content hub. This is a collection of stock images, graphics, illustrations that you can use with your projects. It's really easy to browse and see what's new by category. Apple says this is all expertly curated and honestly, it's a very high quality selection of media. Or uh if you don't want to just browse manually, you can search it. It is perfect. I definitely
8:29 needed a picture of a cat robot robotic vacuum cleaner and content hub delivered. There's a massive library of icons and other graphics, and I expect Apple to keep adding more, too. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually audio and video was added to this catalog. It's just odd to me that these stock items aren't available in more visual apps like Final Cut or Pixel Meter. I feel like I feel like that would be really handy to have some of these things available. We have to talk about the elephant in the room here, subscriptions. I I'm over them, frankly. If you're new, $12.99 a month is a steal. Even better for students. Final Cut and Logic cost
9:14 hundreds on their own. Being able to pony up less than a fast food dinner in 2026 to get access to all of these apps is incredible. That's an amazing value. And you can just stop paying at any point. But if you already own the apps, value proposition gets murky. Apple says that all the features in Creator Studio for apps like Final Cut and Logic will be coming to the existing versions, too. So, if you already paid, you'd essentially be paying $13 a month for the mobile versions of these apps and a few AI features in iWork. If you don't use all the apps, like I don't usually use Logic, the cost feels even harder to justify.
10:01 I'll say it like this. If you're a big mobile creator or new to Apple's Pro apps, this is worth investing in. If you're deep into Adobe plugins, uh, or heavy generative workflows, I don't think that right now Creator Studio will pull you away. But at a minimum, Creator Studio is the biggest sign of life in Apple's Pro apps for years. The mobile workflow is real and powerful. Pixelator Pro finally comes to iPad and we're getting AI infused into these apps in helpful ways. I just really like that Final Cut Pro is getting some love. But now Apple has to
10:49 prove the subscription earns its price with frequent meaningful updates. And I expect Apple to do just that. I'm cautious, but I'm optimistic. Let me know in the comments. Are you subscribing to Apple Creator Studio? You can subscribe and download now from the App Store, whether that's on iPad or Mac. And as always, follow for more Apple news and reviews.
