Apple Just Copied Adobe’s Homework and Somehow Made It Worse (Except the Price)
Creator Studio is the same apps you already ignored, now with subscription pricing and horrifically ugly icons.
Apple just declared war on Adobe. Apple announced the release of Creator Studio, a creativity software suite that has been repackaged with new pricing, new icons, and a significant amount of marketing hype.
Let me cut through the bullshit immediately: this isn’t really a war. It’s more like Apple showed up to the battlefield with weapons they’ve owned for years, slapped a fresh coat of paint on them, and called it a revolution.
But here’s the thing, it might still matter. It’s not about Apple’s marketing, but how Adobe reacts.
What Creator Studio Actually Is
Apple Creator Studio launches January 28th on the Mac App Store and iPad App Store. Here’s the pricing: €13 per month or €130 per year. For students and teachers, the cost is €3 per month or €30 per year.
Before you get excited, let me explain what you’re actually getting.
The software included in this suite: Freeform, Keynote, Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Logic Pro, Pages for word processing, Compressor for export, MainStage, Numbers, and Motion. These are applications that already existed and were previously available as one-time purchases. You had €240 options, €120 alternatives, and sometimes bundles that came free with your Mac.
Apple Creator Studio
With an Apple Creator Studio subscription, get intelligent tools in Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro, plus…www.apple.com
Now we’re getting monthly subscriptions. Wait, hold on. They’re announcing monthly subscriptions.
Is this good or bad news? My take: it’s bad news because we’re entering yet another monthly subscription system designed to extract money from us recurrently every month and lock us into their software ecosystem.
The one-time payment model could be interesting, but with this move, Apple is adding AI features. We saw prompts in the teaser and upscaling capabilities. Unfortunately, with AI tools, a one-time payment economic model isn’t viable. When using automation tools, a monthly subscription is necessary.
The positive point: free versions of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers still exist. You can still use these applications for free. Subscription activation is required for advanced features.
We’re on the same economic model as Canva, Figma, and Adobe. The professional apps remain purchasable individually, but without the advanced AI features I mentioned, and the productivity apps remain free without the extras.
Why This Isn’t Actually Revolutionary
What troubles me most is that Apple is simply repackaging its software suite as Creator Studio to sell with an AI subscription.
There’s no tremendous breakthrough here. These are the same applications that have existed for years.
Let me break down what’s actually in this suite:
Pages, Keynote, Numbers, and Freeform are more Microsoft Office competitors than true creative suite tools. In this sense, it doesn’t really compete with Adobe.
Then we have Final Cut Pro, which is very cool for video editing. Logic Pro for music is incredible. Pixelmator Pro is becoming an increasingly serious alternative for image editing for Apple users, especially now that there’s an iPad version.
But let’s not lie to ourselves. Keynote is Keynote, Pages is Pages, Numbers is Numbers. We like them because they’re installed on the machine, you know. But they don’t have enormous added value either.
Freeform is cool for note-taking on a tablet and such, but it’s not revolutionary. Motion, which is supposedly the After Effects competitor, isn’t really a serious After Effects competitor. It’s a small animation tool for making graphics that’s very cool for typographic animation and all, but that’s it.
Compressor is for exporting, and MainStage, I think, is for live volume settings.
So for me, this isn’t comparable to Adobe, which has a much broader suite. It’s not similar to Figma either. Not parallel to Microsoft. It’s a bit of a hybrid, but actually, they just packaged their already existing suite into a Creator Studio to sell it with an AI subscription. There’s no huge breakthrough beyond that.
The Pricing Strategy That Might Actually Work
Here’s where Apple gets clever, even if the product isn’t revolutionary: they’ve positioned themselves just below all their competitors.
Adobe charges between €50 and €60 per month. Figma is getting very expensive, too. Apple positions itself at just below €13 per month. They price it at €2–3 for students.
Why? So when you’re studying, you decide to learn this software. Then, when you arrive in the working world, you say, “Well, I want a license for this.” Mission accomplished.
But beyond that, they’ve just repackaged already existing software that was purchasable individually into a suite. And this suite was accessible to everyone at prices of €200–300, similar to those for individual software. But how does this renew interest in this thing? In no way at all.
That’s why I’m quite skeptical, and I’m more in the mood for it being a flop, in quotes.
I haven’t extensively tested Creator Studio yet because it literally just launched. What matters most isn’t my view; it’s competitive pressure.
Adobe has gotten complacent. Their prices keep rising, their software gets bloated, their AI features are half-baked, and they know most professionals are locked in by workflow compatibility and industry standards.
Premiere Pro is falling behind on basic features. You can make better subtitles on Instagram Edits than on Premiere Pro. It’s still using TV subtitles from the 1990s. You can’t make those little texts that appear one by one with changing colors. Premiere needs to move.
Adobe is also trailing on rotoscoping, which should be arriving, but is taking forever. They announce features that don’t ship for months.
This is where Creator Studio matters, not as a product, but as pressure.
If Apple can convince even 5% of Adobe’s user base to switch, especially students and emerging creators, that’s enough to force Adobe to respond with better pricing, faster feature development, and actual competition.
The Icon Disaster Nobody’s Talking About Enough
Now we need to discuss the horrible glow-up of the icons. I’m genuinely sorry, but look at this horror. What a catastrophe.
Look at this magnificent Logic Pro icon. It was legendary, skeuomorphic. You clicked on it to make your little mix. What is this now? What is this sh*t?
Then what can we say about the Compressor glow-down? Magnificent, you open your tool on Mac to compress your files, I loved it. What the f*ck is this now?
And the worst glow-down: Final Cut. You just wanted to open it. It was black and white, a bit steel-like. Boom! Now it’s shining in all colors with a little diffuse light on the contours. You want to be creative? What the sh*t? That’s bad.
Are the icons designed for mobile? I don’t care, those were beautiful on mobile too.
I’m too sad about the Final Cut icon glow-down. You know I don’t like liquid glass and all that. You know I like things that are somewhat homogeneous, a bit simplistic, but here, with this somewhat 3D style, transparent, shiny, which is simplistic but with effects I don’t like, we lose everything.
Either it’s simplistic and hyper-geometric and stylish, or it’s hyper-skeuomorphic and detailed, but here we have the bad sides of both styles. It’s complicated while being ugly and not simplistic.
Look at this beauty. This was the old Motion icon. Incredible. And now? Everyone is sucking the soul out of the icons. Stop.
Who This Is Actually For (Spoiler: Not You)
Let me be brutally honest about the target market here.
If you already have an Adobe workflow, you’re not the target. If someone tells me, “Yeah, I just launched my Instagram page, and I do a story per week, I need quick software to make something, I’m on a Mac. Do you advise it?”
Sometimes I also need to open Excel files, but I don’t have Excel. I also do small edits for the YouTube channel, but not often.
Well, instead of saying, “Take CapCut and take this and you take Figma, and you take Canva,” you know, you say, “No, take the Apple suite, pay €13, give access to your employees. They do the thing; they can do all the little creative stuff. Need to make a presentation, you have one, need to do a small edit, you have something.”
That’s for new people, new users entering the ecosystem.
But no, you won’t tell a 40-year-old art director to switch to this today.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Competition
Here’s what I actually think will happen, and why this announcement matters despite not being revolutionary:
This will be a flop in the sense that it’s just their repackaged suite, and I don’t think enormous numbers of people will migrate to it. They’ll already have their current users who might switch to the slightly boosted formula.
Getting 2–3% of Adobe’s users would be a lot, which is neat, but it won’t disrupt the industry.
However, and this is crucial, what I find good is that it creates movement. For €3 when you’re a student, you have hyper-professional software to edit images, video, and sound. And therefore, Adobe will have to move its ass to continue keeping its users.
For me, this won’t move people who are already installed, but it might move Adobe toward more interesting offers, Canva and Figma toward more interesting offers to seduce the new generation that’s learning.
Because if the new generation learns software that isn’t yours, once they arrive in the working world, they won’t ask for your license.
What Adobe Should Actually Do
If I were Adobe right now, here’s what I’d be doing immediately:
One: Launch a competitive student pricing tier at €5 per month, not €20. Make it so cheap that schools have no reason to switch to Apple.
Two: Actually ship the AI features you’ve been promising for months. The rotoscoping, the intelligent subtitling, the voice isolation that works.
Three: Create an iPad version of Premiere Pro that doesn’t suck. Apple just made Final Cut work beautifully on iPad. You have no excuse.
Four: Stop bloating Creative Cloud with services nobody uses and focus on making the core apps faster, lighter, and more stable.
Five: Offer a genuinely competitive one-time purchase option for individual apps. Not everyone wants subscriptions.
Will they do any of this? Probably not. Adobe’s monopoly has made it lazy. But Creator Studio at least forces the question.
My Actual Prediction
Here’s what I think happens over the next year: Creator Studio is being used modestly, largely by current Apple users for AI and new creatives not yet using Adobe. It doesn’t steal significant market share from Adobe’s professional base.
Adobe responds with minor pricing adjustments and continues promising features that they don’t ship on time. Figma and Canva continue eating into Adobe’s market from different angles. The real competitive pressure comes from multiple directions, not just Apple.
Students increasingly learn on Apple tools because of pricing, creating a long-term threat to Adobe’s dominance that won’t materialize for 5–10 years.
And those icons remain an absolute disaster that makes me not want to open the applications, regardless of how well the software inside might be.
That’s my honest assessment. Creator Studio isn’t revolutionary, but it’s competitively important. The icons are unforgivable. And Adobe should be more worried than they’re acting.