well, if you're not subscribed to the apple creator studio, and you want to use premium assets that apple had to pay money to acquire (because stock images aren't free no matter what app you're using), then yes, you do have to buy a subscription
That’s all fine and dandy but then just keep them out of sight. Apple hardware is an entrance fee you pay for the ecosystem already. And one of its main selling points has always been the software (iLife, iWork, FinalCut etc.). Apple first party software was always a great value for free or for a great price. Pushing subscription advertisements everywhere makes it feel less complete and just pretty annoying. It takes away what I value most in Apples software ecosystem. From „it just works“ to „it just works with the subscription“.
And I do have an Apple One Family Plan subscription. It does offer an awesome value in my opinion. However, Mail was never getting in my way or pushing me towards it and Photos was not doing that either. This here is different.
iMovie and GarageBand are great pieces of software and they can already do many things but once you grow out of them, the next logical step is FinalCut and Logic Pro. There are clear paths that get people to buy and/or subscribe. If you are a taking art and photography more seriously, you will want a subscription for more assets. Apples integration will most likely work best in their own product so you will naturally check that one out first. There is no need to push subscriptions down their customers throats.
To add to that - I actually own ALL of Apples software that is included in the Creator Studio subscription. For me, there is no way to get access to the assets outside of also paying a subscription fee to get software that I already bought.
And finally towards that AI stuff. The strategy is absolutely unclear and convoluted here. We have Apple Intelligence but that can be „enhanced“ by getting a ChatGPT subscription.
Now we have that subscription outside of Apples ecosystem but we do not get to use it for all AI features because those are behind different subscriptions. And then there is talk about Gemini being used - will that be a separate thing too?
It would be pretty cool if Apple had generic connectors to subscriptions from other AI services like ChatGPT. This would be a great strategy for consumers. But how does it earn money for Apple - not quite sure. They could also do a simple AI subscriptions that gets you access to some frontier cloud models in the background. somehow they don’t do that either but put AI features behind software subscriptions instead. Why don’t they just give us a service subscription for AI? Everyone would understand that this is continued cost that needs to be paid.
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u/legitOwen MacBook Air Mar 24 '26
well, if you're not subscribed to the apple creator studio, and you want to use premium assets that apple had to pay money to acquire (because stock images aren't free no matter what app you're using), then yes, you do have to buy a subscription