Meta Releases Mac Version of Edits

From Instagram’s Edits blog:

I’m Brett Westervelt, and I lead the Edits app.

In just over a year, 50 million people have made Edits part of how they bring ideas to life, and we’re excited to expand what Edits can do for creators. Today we’re bringing Edits to the big screen. The first version of our desktop editor is now available for macOS. We’ve designed it to support more involved projects, where a larger screen and the precision of a mouse and keyboard really matter. Just like Edits on mobile, we’ll be updating our desktop app every week, so let us know what you think and what you’d like to see next.

Edits isn’t an app I need but I’m glad to see the resurgence in native Mac app development continue. I mean Instagram waited 15 years before they supported the iPad with their main app. Now they’ve got a native Mac video editor. That’s cool, and the app seems good. Looks like it’s SwiftUI? Someone on the team needs to go through the entire menu bar and properly title-case all the menu item commands, but overall it passes the sniff test. (It supports MacOS 15 Sequoia, but the icon looks lame — a sharp-cornered square.)

But I can’t help but think this just shows how Apple has ceded this market. Final Cut Pro is overkill for quick video editing, but iMovie ought to be optimized for this use case. It’s not. Who is iMovie for today?

And a decade ago Apple launched Clips, the entire point of which was to create social media-style videos. Clips was a really good app that never found an audience because it never had a clear use case. When it was new in 2017, I described it as “the single best example of a productivity app designed for iOS”. Apple officially end-of-life’d Clips in October last year, but before that, in January 2025, I wrote:

A mobile-first video editor isn’t a “money pit”. It’s an app. Apple makes a lot of apps, and they could easily afford to assign a team to make Clips truly great. It’s no different than 20–25 years ago, when Apple dedicated itself to making iMovie and Final Cut both great apps. It’s no different than the motivation to create GarageBand. The monetization wouldn’t be direct; it would be downstream of the general idea that if you’re editing videos for social media on your phone, the best app to do it with is from Apple and it’s exclusively available on iPhone. The idea is that Apple doesn’t just make the best computing devices for artists, writers, and creators, but they also make some of the best apps for those fields too. [...]

I don’t know if Edits is a rip-off of CapCut or not, but it’s definitely not a rip-off of Clips. It’s a good rule of thumb that when Apple succeeds at something, it gets ripped off. The better the Apple product, the more shamelessly it gets copied. Apple should make Clips into an iOS video editing app that everyone rips off shamelessly.

The other problem with Clips that comes to mind is that Apple never made a Mac version. I don’t know if the Mac version of Edits is actually a good Mac app, but it’s certainly a better Mac app than the no-app-at-all support for the Mac that Clips had. Maybe that was a byproduct of Clips being developed in 2016 and debuting in 2017, which coincided with the nadir of Mac hardware and the height of the-iPad-is-the-future within Apple. But a decade later, the Mac is back — and I’d say is in the strongest position as a platform that it has ever been. It seems rather embarrassing in hindsight that Apple itself never made a Mac version of Clips.

Now that Clips is dead (and largely forgotten), iMovie is the brand that Apple should reinvigorate. Apple ought to make a rethought-from-the-ground-up iMovie that is a great app on iPhone, iPad, and the Mac. The point of it should be to show CapCut and Edits how it’s done.

★ Thursday, 5 November 2026