Apple's Creator Studio creates a subscription where free apps used to live

Apple fanbois are realizing what the Creator Studio subscription means for its productivity apps, and many are unhappy with the direction of travel. On January 13, Apple introduced the Apple Creator Studio, which it called (with typical Apple modesty) "an inspiring collection of the most powerful creative apps." From January …

[Dan 55]

Came for the premium experience

Stayed for the rentier capitalism.

All major modern-day commercial OSes are now just money extraction vehicles, be it advertising, subscriptions, or your data.

[ForthIsNotDead]

Re: Came for the premium experience

Winblows and MacOS, yes. Linux - not in my experience. My Linux Mint install just sits there quietly and never nags me about anything. Even updates. It just lights up the updates icon. That's it. No nagging, no adverts, no AI agentic bullshit. Just... peace.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Came for the premium experience

Me Sir! Me Sir! Me Sir! Me Sir!

I'm pretty sure that's what Dan meant by "commercial", but you just couldn't wait to mention Linux, could you?

[ForthIsNotDead]

Re: Came for the premium experience

Correct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Came for the premium experience

You have to feel bad for these impoverished companies, they can't even ask for a little bit of money, over and over, without people complaining. Just put a few more ducats in the tin cups and move on already.

[Anonymous Coward]

users wanting premium features, many powered by Apple Intelligence or OpenAI.

Users? You mean there's more than one who wants the infestation?

[adrianww]

Judging by the amount of AI slop I see swilling around the Internet, there’s a lot more than one whether we’re talking about Macs, PCs or even Linux users.

If we ever get to the stage of building the three arks, it’s looking like the B ark will need a lot of bunks…

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Who uses Pages & Numbers anyway?

[Dizzy Dwarf]

Nobody sane.

LibreOffice does everything I need.

[Sandtitz]

As mentioned in the article, Number and Pages are also available for iPad.

Libreoffice isn't.

[RachelG]

In fact Libreoffice is available for iPad in the form of Collabora Office... but honestly it's unusable.

[Charlie Clark]

Might be worth giving OnlyOffice a spin.

[Charlie Clark]

Keynote is, in my experience, the best presentation authoring software and what you should use if you have a Mac, because it allows you to concentrate on what you want to show and say.

[mevets]

Really?

I don't get how that is any use in making presentations.

I thought the main benefit of the infinite-gadget tools was to discourage people from making slides.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: Really?

For a good guide to making presentations, I recommend Nancy Duarte's Slideology. If you read that you'll quickly notice that "good" presentations rarely resemble the kind of corporate gunk that Powerpoint and its clones (including OO/LO) are designed to come up with. They are overloaded, boring and, most importantly, unmemorable. In Keynote it's pretty easy simply to work with titles and position the visual content in the right place – and some of the transitions can be both fun and useful (for example, typewriter lets you control the "Karaoke effect") but should only be used sparingly. The presentation is only half of the job – the person giving it is just as important. All of this should be familiar to anyone used to making or even watching presentations: focus on what you want people to remember. Of course, you can do stuff with plaintext and plug it into something like S5, but I think you then spend more time tweaking styles, etc. than on what you want to say.

I'm not going to make grand claims for my own presentations – there are plenty of them online for you to judge, should you want to inflict it on yourself!

[Sandtitz]

For the same price you can get MS Office 365, which includes license for 5 additional people and 1 TB Onedrive storage for each.

I haven't used Pages and Number, is the software better than MS equivalents?

[werdsmith]

But Pages, Numbers, Keynote etc are free with MacOS and IOS. And although they only come with 5GB of free storage, it's free whether it's 5 additional users or 5 million.

Despite this article attempting to rage-bait or sneer-bait by glossing over it, Pages, Numbers, Keynote and Freeform remain free in the form that they have always been (i.e. devoid of AI features).

[ForthIsNotDead]

They'll probably switch around soon! Make annoying AI slop agentic crap the free version, and force people to pay for the peace and quiet version! :-)

[Steve Davies 3]

Devoid of AI Features

Is a HUGE plus. As a Mac user just about the first thing I do is to turn off Siri and and Apple Dumbness (Intelligence) Once you have tamed them it is fine.

[Lazlo Woodbine]

Pages is pretty, but the files are enormously bloated in my (admittedly limit) experience.

I've never used Numbers.

At the moment I get Office 365 free with work, when that changes I will switch to Softmaker Office, which has 99% of the features, no AI unless you pay for it, and works on my Mac and Chromebook...

[Charlie Clark]

Softmaker really is an excellent alternative for many people, though the move to a subscription model will annoy many.

[katrinab]

The way I use Microsoft Word, pretty much anything that isn't vi or similar would do the job for me.

Excel, no, the alternatives definitely would not work for me.

Keynote is probably better than Powerpoint, but I don't use either, so I don't care.

[Random Handle]

Was thinking that - even free they were overpriced - I spend more on Parallels to run MSO (and linux to be fair) than I do on MSO.

[masaccio]

Numbers is great and free. Well, it is for now. LibreOffice is very obviously a Windows wannabe app and use Apple fans don’t like that.

Dunno about Pages as I never write newsletters or letters.

[Tim99]

Pages is OK-ish. For complex/long documents on a Mac, plain-text TextEdit is OK. I can tidy-up and prettify them if needed.

Numbers, for me, is good - even for complex spreadsheets. I find it much simpler and quicker to create something in Numbers and then convert it to Excel. There are a few things to consider. Numbers only allows table locking, not cell-locking; although if you don’t need Excel, one advantage is that you can have several tables in the same sheet, and lock them appropriately. A very small number of obscure functions may not export properly; conditional formatting colours can vary; and rule processing orders may be different. I never use macros or VBA - if I can’t do it with cell formulae, it probably means that whatever it is shouldn’t be in a spreadsheet.

[elsergiovolador]

Intelligent

So if it is really intelligent, surely user could tell Notes, hey Notes write me a Notes application that I can use for free. Use XCode etc. Go go go!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good while it lasted

Ah, well. Currently in the process of getting out of iCloud, iCloud Mail, iCloud Photos, Apple Music, Apple Pay … And the first time I see an ad in Apple Maps'll be when I stop volunteering corrections.

Ivana kowtowing and Creator Studio helped to overcame my inertia.

[mevets]

Silly Apple.....

You would have thought they might have learned from Siri & Maps -- the trick is to force its use by default, and make people pay to disable it.

They lost so much when Jobs went....

[Blackjack]

Appleslop is here.

[JPCavendish]

I saw one pop-up pushing an upgrade when I installed Pages and Keynote. Haven’t seen it since.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Joe Gurman]

Um….

….I installed the “15” versions on my Mac last week (they appeared automagically on my iThings after an OS patch. I’ve gotten exactly one “Subscribe” pop-up since (and I’ve used all three apps). Is this article panicking much, or is this just the normal slag Apple reflex showing?

[werdsmith]

Re: Um….

More and more of these kind of things appearing in Register these days. The kind of thing that I used to expect to avoid by reading the Register.

[JPCavendish]

Re: Um….

Same experience here. One single popup post-installation, nothing since.

Another example of the usual anti-Apple slop from the Register unfortunately. They really need to work on that or risk losing their credibility.

[TheFifth]

Re: Um….

Yeah me too. One popup on first run and nothing since. I can live with that.

I know people stick their noses up at it, but I kinda like Pages for when I just need to write. It's simple and has all the features I require. Numbers is also useful for when I need to wrangle a CSV. It works quickly with very large CSV files and hasn't caused me any headaches.

Horses for courses, but they have their place in my workflow. And they're free!

[sarusa]

This is half great

Honestly it's great that all the AI shite is locked behind a paywall. I can fully support that I will never get AI unless I'm a dumbass and pay for it!

The ads, however, are not copacetic.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is half great

Came here just to say that.

I think knowing I won't now accidentally enable AI 'features' or miss turning one off just might be worth the trade off of the occasional popup.

[tip pc]

Unsavoury updates

When they start adding unsavoury items into what should be big fixes & feature bumps, it stands as a warning against upgrading in general.

My stuff is good as it is thanks.

Not upgrading until I absolutely must.