Generative AI apps that create photos, videos, and songs are growing in popularity. With the release of Apple’s new Creator Studio Pro suite, available to the public on Wednesday, the tech giant has approached AI as a tool that aids in the creative process rather than attempting to replace it.
Apple lays out a vision for a future productivity suite focused on the needs of creators—filmmakers, musicians, artists, and others in creative industries—empowering them to be more efficient using AI. Integrating AI into creativity is tricky, given the backlash and legal action from creators angry about AI models training on their works and reproducing similar content.
However, Apple sees AI as a tool that handles basic and tedious tasks. These include generating an editable slideshow from your notes, extracting chord information from a song, searching across hours of video footage for a specific clip, changing camera angles in images, and more.
The tools in Creator Studio Pro are not new, but they have never been packaged as a subscription product before, now available at $12.99 per month or $129 per year. The subscription includes Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Compressor for video editing; Logic Pro and Mainstage for music creation; the image editing tool Pixelmator Pro; and a set of exclusive features in Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform. The suite also includes the newly launched Pixelmator Pro app for iPad.
While Apple’s traditional productivity software hasn’t caught up to offerings from Google and Microsoft, the company has always found more success in creative fields. With new AI features, Apple likely aims to make its creative software more accessible to those who aren’t full professionals, such as indie musicians improving their marketing, people compiling social media videos, or creators editing their artistic output.
Whether Apple’s tools are right for the job compared to Adobe products will depend on the user’s specific needs and familiarity with professional creative tools.
Each tool in the suite has received upgrades timed with this launch. Notable additions include several AI-powered features. In Final Cut Pro, these include transcript search for finding soundbites, a visual search assistant to find objects or actions, and beat detection to edit to music rhythm. The iPad app gains a Montage Maker for highlight videos.
Logic Pro introduces a virtual Session Player for synth and bass parts, an AI-powered Chord ID to extract chord information, and an AI-powered loop library search on iPad. Pixelmator Pro for Mac and iPad, now available on iPad, adds new design tools like Warp for reshaping layers and creating product mockups.
Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform gain new premium templates and a Content Hub image library for subscribers. AI features allow for image generation and remixing, style changes, and composition suggestions. Keynote can create slideshows from text notes and generate presenter notes. Numbers can analyze spreadsheet data to suggest table contents and generate corresponding formulas.
Apple will continue to offer its creativity apps as standalone downloads, and existing users will still receive updates including these new features. Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform will remain free, but the new premium features require a subscription. This choice to allow outright purchase differentiates Apple from companies like Adobe.
Additionally, Apple lets users share apps through Family Sharing with up to five family members, a feature Adobe does not offer. Users can cancel their subscription at any time without penalty. Adobe remains a fierce competitor with its expansive tools, which also run on iOS.
Some AI features are powered by Apple Intelligence, like the visual and transcript search in Final Cut Pro, which runs locally on the device. Others use third parties like OpenAI for advanced image generation and Keynote slides. Creator Studio’s AI features are processed on the device or use a private relay to anonymize traffic. Apple states these protections keep user content private and ensure it is never used for AI training.