Is Apple Creator Studio Worth It?

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Is an Apple Creator Studio subscription worth it to you? Let's break it down. 

So the big question on a lot of Mac user's minds right now is, is it worth it to spend the money to get the Apple Creator Studio subscription. It's $13.00 a month or $130 a year. Students can get it for $3.00 a month or $30.00 a year. It seems like a pretty good price for a long list of ten different apps. But, in fact, only six of the apps are ones that you get with Apple Creator Studio. Four of them, Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and Freeform, you can get for free. It is just extra features you get with those. You've really got to analyze each part of what you get with Apple Creator Studio to figure out whether it is worth it for you. Then it is still very subjective. It's going to be worth it to some people and not to some other people. So let's break it down by looking at each one of the things that you get with Apple Creator Studio. I'm going to assign a point value from 1-5 for each of those. This is going to count for if you use this feature, how much is it really worth. Then we're going to shoot for a value of 3. If we get to 3 it is worth it to buy Apple Creator Studios. So let's start off by looking at the big apps that you get with Apple Creator Studio. 

The first one, of course, is Final Cut Pro. This is a big app. It costs $300 standalone. If you use it professionally you probably also have Motion and Compressor which are $50 companion apps for it. So, $400 and it's probably your workhorse using it all the time. So right away we've got a big winner here. I'm going to assign this a value of 4. So if you use Final Cut Pro all the time or you're planning to, then this alone makes the price of the Apple Creator Studio worth it. 

But there is another big app, Logic Pro. So if you do music and audio you may be using Logic Pro all the time or perhaps that's in your future. Then I'd say this is also 4 points. So either one of these two apps by itself is much more than you would need to justify the cost of Apple Creator Studio. 

But there's actually a third big app. It's Pixelmator Pro. So this is new in that it is kind of joining all these other Apple apps. Apple bought it a little more than a year ago. It's basically a Photoshop competitor. If you haven't used it, it's not Photoshop. Photoshop is huge and old and has lots of legacy stuff in it. Pixelmator Pro is a good alternative for most, but not all, people. As a matter of fact at $50 for the standalone version I think that is so undervalued. I'm actually going to rate this a 3 here. I'd say that that will justify the cost just barely of Apple Creator Studio by itself. But you have to look at all of these point values with an eye on how you use the apps. 

For instance, if you don't use Final Cut Pro all the time but think you may use it occasionally, maybe it is only worth 1 or 2 points to you. Same with Logic Pro. Pixelmator Pro I think is a little different. I think the 3 points there is for people that just from time to time, maybe once a week, a few times a month need to work with images. Then I think it is worth 3 points right away. If you're graphic artist chances are you don't just use one tool. So Pixelmator Pro is going to be part of that. So you have to figure out for each of these apps what it's really worth to you.

Now it's not just about the big apps. Let's look at the big features that you get with Apple Creator Studio. Image Content is a big part of that. Apple has introduced the Content Hub. This is basically stock photos, stock illustrations. This is very disappointing. Looking through what you get in the Content Hub, it may seem like a lot if you've never used a service like this before. But it's actually a really tiny set of photos and illustrations. No way near the size of what you may be used to if you already use a service like this. Like Adobe Stock or Shutterstock or iStock Photo. Those kinds of things. It's very tiny and in fact a lot of things I searched for either had no results or had results that weren't the thing I was searching for. Just something close to it. So extremely disappointed in this. Nobody should be getting Apple Creator Studio because of Content Hub. I'm going to rate this not at a zero because of course it has value. Everything has value. Content Hub is actually worth less than 1 point. So I'm just going to say that here. Less than 1. Basically we'll count it as a zero. 

Now it is not just Content Hub. There's also a bunch of AI image generation and alteration tools. So you can generate images and it's just like Image Playground which we already have for free. There's a ton of other services out there that you can use to generate images. A lot of them have free tiers that will fit most people's needs. If you need more you can pay for more and you'll get probably a better AI Image Generation service than what Apple has got here. I wouldn't say it's worth anything for considering Apple Creator Studio. I'm also going to put this at a less than 1.There's a few other things like Upscaling. If you need that you're probably going to go elsewhere anyway and it's got, like, automatic cropping which is like you can just crop it yourself. It's not like a big sell. 

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Apple Creator Studio promises a lot of templates that you can use in Pages, in Numbers, in Keynote. There are all these really cool templates. But they are just templates. There's only a few dozen of them for each. There were only a few dozen before and now there's a few dozen more. They are nice looking templates for sure. But I wouldn't say that's a reason at all to get this. Maybe if Apple did something over the top where there were thousands of templates for anything you could possibly imagine. But they're not. There's just a bunch of really interesting useful templates. I don't really feel they add any value to a regular subscription like this. So all three of these I'm going to put at basically a relative zero there. 

Now we also have some special features in some apps. So, for instance, in Numbers you've got a thing called Magic Fill. Magic Fill is kind of neat. You can take, like, names and addresses and populate other cells with them and stuff. It's not the kind of thing where you're going to get Apple Creator Studio or factor in at all in determining whether or not you get this. Maybe something some people use occasionally. So, I'm also going to put this at a zero, even though it's kind of cool. A lot of the stuff is kind of cool. But it still doesn't really add enough value to make it worthwhile. 

Keynote has a bunch of AI features. You can generate slides based on a list. You can populate slide notes with AI. You can clean up slides with AI. They are nice. They're interesting. I can see somebody that uses Keynote a lot, maybe getting some use out of these. But they shouldn't be part of this. They should just be a regular part of Keynote. It's also going to be a zero for me. 

Finally, we've got Pixelmator Pro Warp. So, a new feature in Pixelmator Pro that you only get if you have Creator Studio, not the stand alone version, and that's the warping feature. Warping is really cool, and I'm going to be doing a video on it for sure, maybe several. But most people are not really going to look at it as like, Oh Wow, this makes it worthwhile. I'm going to still put it as a zero, even though I was really tempted to put it as a 1 here because it's so cool and so nicely done. But wait, there's actually some more. 

One big feature that will only affect some people is iPad Apps. So, previously we had Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro as apps for the iPad. It was part of a subscription service. So you're already doing a subscription service with those and you can continue if you want. Pixelmator Pro is now available on the iPad and that's also bundled in here. So, if previously you were paying for one of those for the iPad, you can now just get all three of them on the iPad as part of Apple Creator Studio and that's a big, big value. So if you're on an iPad it makes it super worth it, which makes this actually a 5 point feature here. Except, of course, if you don't have an iPad then it's a zero. Or if you have an iPad but you don't really use it for much of this, maybe you could see yourself doing some work in Logic Pro or maybe it would be nice to have Pixelmator Pro on your iPad too, then it might just be a 1 for you. Maybe it pushes things over the top for you to get Apple Creator Studio.

There's one other factor. This one doesn't get a point value because it is Family Sharing. So a group of five people, you and your spouse and three kids, you can all have this. So maybe you use Pixelmator Pro but your spouse uses Final Cut Pro. You know you're still only paying one subscription fee. 

Now if you're wondering how this stacks up against other software subscriptions, well, it's hard to find something exactly like Apple Creator Studio. But, for instance, Adobe Creative Cloud is $70 a month. Now, you're going to get a ton of creative apps and that includes PhotoShop and Premiere, which of course compare directly to Pixelmator Pro and Final Cut Pro. But PhotoShop is the big grandfather of all image editing tools. So it is hard to compare with anything. So you're definitely getting a lot more with Adobe Creative Cloud, but you're paying a lot more for it as well. $70 a month is the standard price. There are always sales and like first year discounts and things like that to make it cheaper as well. 

Now the next software subscription that people think of is Microsoft 365. So this is purely office apps. So, it's comparable to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote and you pay $8 a month over the course of a year to get that. But there's nothing in it like Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, or Final Cut Pro. So it is really hard to compare these. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are still free for all the functions that we've been used to. It's only a few new features and things like the Content Hub that you're paying extra for here. 

Canvas is another one to look at. They're $10 a month for the apps and the stock images that they offer. It's not exactly comparable to Apple with the Final Cut Pro as part of this bundle. But it is worth looking at just to get an idea of the price ranges of these things. If you want an idea of what Stock Images cost, a really big collection like Shutterstock goes for about $25 a month. Adobe also has one called Adobe Stock and that's even more. It's $30 or more per month. But these are much much bigger stock image collection than what Apple's offering. Another factor to take into consideration here is if your main reason for getting Apple Creator Studio is Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, but you're already purchased those. So you have them as of now. They still get the updates and they have all the new features. So if you have already spent the money and invested in those, then it makes Apple Creator Studio less of a value to you right now. On the other hand if you haven't invested in those and it's time to jump in then spending just $13 a month to see whether or not you like and actually use the apps is a really good deal instead of spending hundreds right up front whether or not you end up using them a lot. 

That's an important factor here. Subscriptions have their downsides but also their plus sides as well in that it is really cheap to get in and play around with these apps. Maybe you're thinking that you want to do more professional video work. Well, for $13 a month you can try out Final Cut Pro, use it for a while, and you can always cancel the subscription. Before this you had to spend $300 just to buy it, whether or not you were going to continue using it a lot or not. 

Now I know a lot of you are just Pages, Numbers, and Keynote users. You're wondering whether or not you should spend the money. Well, you can use the new versions of those three apps without a subscription and you still have everything that you had before. All the previous templates, all the previous functionality you still have. So, you only need to subscribe if you need one of the new little features or you really want that Content Hub, or AI Image Generation. Otherwise just get the new versions of those three apps and just use them. Ignore the Notifications asking you to subscribe. Keep using them as you did before. At the very least do this for a while and only jump to the subscription if you really feel you need something that's behind the wall. 

So I hope this way of thinking about it helps you decide whether or not to get an Apple Create Studio subscription. I'll also be doing some videos on some of these new features over the coming weeks and months. So seeing tutorials on them may also help you decide. Thank for watching.