Perhaps Acquiring Pixelmator Is Not About Competing With Photoshop and Lightroom, Per Se, but the Adobe Creative Cloud Bundle

Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac back in May 2023:

Now that Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad are official, let’s talk about pricing. These apps coming out on a random day in May is surprising. Subscription pricing? Not so much. Nevertheless, pricing for these long overdue apps is interesting when you consider their Mac counterparts and the Apple One bundle.

First, let’s address the Mac apps.

How would Apple price Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for Mac if they were released today? In the era of service revenue, Apple would almost certainly charge a subscription fee for access rather than a one-time fee.

Mac users have had years of free updates to Logic and Final Cut Pro after paying once for each app. In fact, Logic Pro X will be a decade old in July, and Final Cut Pro X turns 12 next month. The price of Logic Pro for Mac today ($199.99) is the same as four years of subscribing to Logic Pro for iPad, and Final Cut Pro for Mac ($299.99) will equal six years of paying for the iPad version.

The iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are both priced the same: $5/month or $50/year. There is no bundle to get both at a discount.

I was a little surprised when Apple announced Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac two weeks ago and didn’t announce a switch to subscription pricing. Instead, it remains a $300 one-time purchase, and for existing users version 11 is a free upgrade. Whether you like it or not, subscription pricing is no longer the future, it’s the present, and it’s the dominant model for professional creative tools today.

Adobe made this switch years ago, with a particular emphasis on the Creative Cloud bundle that includes their entire suite of apps — Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Audition, Acrobat Pro, and more. You get access to Adobe’s entire suite for $90/month, or $60/month if you pay annually ($720/year). They currently offer a first-year 50 percent discount if you pay annually. A la carte, subscriptions to each app cost $20–$23/month, so the Creative Cloud bundle is good deal if you use three of them, and a great deal if you use more than three.

Apple clearly understands the appeal of subscription bundles too, with Apple One. Despite the fact that Apple didn’t switch to subscription pricing for Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac, I still expect them to sooner rather than later, and if they do, I further expect a bundle. Apple is never going to offer a swath of creative tools as broad as Adobe’s, but the biggest missing pieces right now would be alternatives to Photoshop and Lightroom. My gut feeling is that’s why they acquired Pixelmator and Photomator. They could sell a bundle for, just spitballing here, $20/month or $200/year that would include the Mac and iPad versions of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator, and possibly Photomator. Maybe throw in some extra iCloud storage.

★ Monday, 25 November 2024