New offer: Apple Creator Studio

Life Hacking
1

This is a post form a very disappointed Apple fan boy.

When Apple announced their new Apple Creator Studio subscription I did not assume that this would affect me. My use case is Pages, Numbers and Keynotes, the three Apple apps for office productivity.
However, when I opened Keynote I got the message that that version of Keynotes will no longer be updated and was recommended to switch to the new Keynotes. Together with the new Pages and Numbers, it it is part of Creator Studio, a subscription for CHF 12/month. So far, the three apps can still be used without paying the subscription. But the groundwork to completely moving to the subscription is now built.
So far, my implicit understanding with Apple was that I pay a hardware premium plus a monthly fee for their Icloud storage. This would give me their office apps for free. This understanding does seem to have changed. Creator Studio makes the Apple office suite more expensive than its direct competitor from Microsoft. I pay CHF 89 per year for Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I have set up my parents with Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Now I need to teach them how to handle (i.e. ignore) Apple’s nagging for the Creator Studio subscription. When the nagging becomes too dominant, I might have to bite the bullet and pay for the subscription. I really hope that Apple at that point will have more subscription choices. CHF 3/month for the three office apps would be an acceptable price.
You might wonder why I’m not thinking about switching (libre office or similar). Well, for my parents the cost of switching (i.e. getting used to the new UI) would be more effort than paying a subscription fee. But it’s still a big disappointment for me.

keynote_obsolete
keynote_obsolete622Ă—508 40 KB

creator_studio
creator_studio1192Ă—1390 204 KB

2

I use Logic Pro and Final Cut professionally. Both are getting update without the subscription.

And the iWork suite don’t need the subscription to function. I wish that we could hide all the paid features in the settings tho, like we can remove Apple Music in Music.

But I don’t think that you gonna have any issues using the iWork suite without paying.

and for the real life hacking trick : try to figure out how to get the education discount if you need the bundle.

1 Like
3

I’m too cheap for that. I use Google Drive which includes a basic office suite for free. I guess there are also other free options available. You might want to look into Only Office which I hear is very MS Office-like.

1 Like
4

You can find key for microsoft office for mac at around 30$ (lifetime suscription with update)

1 Like
5

I can recomend two things.

Google docs, sheets etc if you don’t mind google

Onlyoffice if you need something that feels,looks, and acts like Microsoft Office, but that is open source and free.

2 Likes