Apple’s Creative Subscription

I’ve been a fan of Apple for years. Still am, in certain ways. There are things the company does brilliantly, things that justify the premium you pay for their ecosystem. But there are also reasons to hate them, reasons that have been piling up over time. And now, with the launch of Apple Creator Studio, my reasons to hate just got a lot stronger.

Apple Creator Studio is their new subscription model that gives users access to their creative premium software: Logic Pro, Final Cut, Motion, and apparently even revamped versions of Pages and Keynote. Why they’re including Pages and Keynote in a “creator” bundle, I honestly don’t know. But here’s the thing that keeps me from completely losing it right now: they’ve kept the original paid versions of the full software available. For now. You can still buy Logic Pro or Final Cut outright and own it. For now.

But we all know how this goes. The paid versions won’t last. They never do. Companies introduce subscription models alongside traditional purchases to ease people into the transition, to avoid the immediate backlash. Then, quietly, a year or two down the line, they discontinue the purchase option. Suddenly your only choice is to subscribe or go without. And then you’re trapped.

I hate subscriptions. I genuinely, deeply hate them. I believe in purchasing things. I believe in ownership. You pay for a product or a service, and then it’s yours. You own it. You can use it however you want, whenever you want, for as long as it works. That made sense. That felt fair. But paying monthly for the same thing, forever, and never actually owning it? That feels absurd. That feels like being nickel and dimed into infinity.

Right now, the Apple Creator Studio subscription is cheap. It’s affordable. They’re clearly undercutting Adobe, and I can see why people would be tempted. Adobe’s pricing has become borderline extortionate. Creative Cloud costs a fortune, especially if you need multiple apps. And for many users, Apple’s offerings could be a decent replacement. Logic Pro can go toe to toe with Ableton or Pro Tools for a lot of music production work. Final Cut is a solid alternative to Premiere. Motion can handle what many people use After Effects for. So yeah, I can see people jumping ship from Adobe to this.

And that’s exactly what Apple is counting on. They’re positioning themselves to replace Adobe, and they can absolutely do it. The software is good enough. The ecosystem integration is better. And the price, at least right now, is compelling. But here’s the question nobody seems to be asking: for how long?

How long will these prices stay affordable? How long before Apple realizes they’ve captured enough of the market and starts jacking up the rates? Because that’s what always happens with subscription models. They start cheap to hook you in, and then once you’re dependent, once you’ve built your entire workflow around their tools, they raise the prices. And what are you going to do? Switch again? Start over? You’re locked in.

But this goes beyond just Apple or Adobe or any one company. This is about a larger shift that’s been happening across the entire economy, and it’s deeply troubling. We’re moving toward a world where ownership isn’t even an option anymore. Where possession itself is becoming a relic of the past.

In cities now, you can rent everything. Furniture, clothes, appliances, daily wear items, things that people used to just buy and keep. There’s an entire industry built around convincing you that you don’t need to own anything, that renting is more convenient, more flexible, more modern. And maybe there’s some truth to that for certain things, in certain situations. But when it becomes the default? When ownership stops being an option? That’s when it gets disturbing.

Here’s what really gets me: we’re living in a capitalist system. Capitalism is supposed to be built on the idea of private property, of ownership, of accumulating assets that belong to you. That’s the whole foundation of the ideology. And yet, increasingly, we’re being pushed into a world where we own nothing. Where we rent our software, rent our furniture, rent our clothes, sometimes even rent our homes perpetually without any path to ownership. We keep paying, endlessly, but we never actually possess anything.

If we’re going to have a system where nobody owns anything, where everything is collectively shared and accessed rather than individually possessed, shouldn’t that be communism? Shouldn’t there at least be some social benefit, some collective ownership that means the profits go back into public services or shared resources? But instead we have this bizarre hybrid: the worst of both systems. No ownership like in communism, but you still pay huge amounts like in capitalism. The money flows upward to corporations and shareholders, and you’re left with nothing but an endless stream of bills for things you’ll never actually own.

This tradition of not owning things in a capitalist world is absurd. It’s a perversion of what capitalism was supposed to be. And it’s only going to get worse.

Maybe this is the future. Maybe in twenty years, people will look back at the idea of buying software or owning furniture the way we look back at, I don’t know, owning horses for transportation. Maybe it’ll seem quaint and outdated. Maybe the next generation won’t even understand why anyone would want to own things when you can just subscribe to everything.

But I don’t think that future is a good one. I think it’s a future where we have less autonomy, less stability, less control over our own lives. Where we’re perpetually dependent on corporations to grant us access to the tools and resources we need to work and live. Where one missed payment, one changed policy, one discontinued service means losing access to things that should have been ours.

Apple’s Creator Studio might be cheap now. It might even stay cheap for a while. But it’s part of a pattern, part of a shift toward a world I’m not sure I want to live in. A world where ownership is a luxury only the wealthy can afford, and the rest of us just rent our lives, month by month, forever.

And that’s not a future worth celebrating.