Apple Creator Studio Review

Apple spent twenty years selling its creative applications outright and then, in January, put them behind one subscription. Creator Studio bundles Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor and MainStage on the Mac, carries the first three across to iPad, adds paid capabilities to Pages, Keynote and Numbers, and lets six family members share the lot. Bought outright on the Mac that set runs past six hundred dollars, so a year of the bundle costs less than half the price of Final Cut Pro on its own, and it undercuts the obvious rival from Adobe by a wide margin.

Setting it up is an account and a download. The reservations reviewers raise are real without being fatal. Nothing here answers Lightroom, which leaves photographers assembling a catalog workflow out of other people's software. On iPad the professional apps can now only be rented, and projects made in the paid apps stop opening once a subscription lapses, so the bundle is easier to enter than to leave.

The perpetual Mac versions stay on sale, so anyone who already paid gains nothing from the switch, and a subscription arriving on tools people used to own outright reads as a direction of travel rather than a one off. Judged on what it costs against what it contains, it is the best offer in professional creative software.