Apple Enters Brave New Gated World with Creator Studio

Apple Creator Studio has just rolled out, and to be honest it feels a bit jarring as it intrudes on your day even if you're just writing something in Pages.

There are several different points of view about the new Apple Creator Studio subscription software offering, Apple's new, low-cost monthly way to access a whole raft of its creative tools including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, the newly acquired Pixelmator Pro, and more. 

Broadly they fall into two camps. One says that this represents great value for money and a new entry point for creatives to get their hands on some powerful software for a low monthly fee. The other is deeply uneasy that Apple has rounded up some of its everyday productivity software and thrown it into the mix as well. And having the pop-ups asking me to migrate to Pages 15 start appearing when I opened the software this morning, I'm definitely in the latter cohort.

(There is a third, strong point of view as well, which is that $12.99 a month is still too much for Final Cut Pro in the current editing landscape, but we digress.)

That Nagging Feeling

Basically, this feels like the start of a long game to nag me into submission and sign on the dotted line for another subscription service. Currently, the features that are sitting behind the new Creator Studio paywall — templates, AI image assists — are of little interest. But, as the free software and the subscription version start to follow separate development paths, you can easily imagine that will change and some of the more sophisticated core productivity tools will start to be pay-to-play. 

Of course, everyone has their price. A one-click switchable British/US English dictionary might have me reaching for my wallet faster than most people, but it definitely feels like a line is being crossed here. Having to manually delete the old v14.5 of Pages (and Numbers and Keynote) is a definite faultline compared to the seamless, and mostly trouble-free, upgrades of the past. Not to mention the fact that the transition to the new software seems to have broken some of my established shortcuts.

Pages definitely has its quirks. Having to save documents in another format before you send them to the rest of the world, for instance. But it's what I'm used to and a very different experience from the frankly ghastly Word interface or the clunkiness of LibreOffice. So, I'll just try and ignore the pop-ups and the little messages that sit under the menu bar asking me if I want to learn about Creator Studio for as long as I can. But I no longer feel entirely part of the club, and that is the sort of disassociation that doesn't always work out so well for brands nowadays.