It's pretty clever that they keep the "pay one time" option still alive while announcing the availability of subscription, so anyone who says "Boo, not you too Apple" can easily be shut down with "You still have the option to buy it!" instead of leaving those critics without answers. Of course, they'll eventually remove the option to buy the software by paying once, I think everyone can see the writing on the wall, but still clever of them to choose to do it later for PR purposes. 1-0 to Apple :)
Final Cut Pro X has been available for purchase (at the same price, IIRC) for well over a decade now. Pro feathers were ruffled at the time they leapt from FCP7 to FCPX: the $299 price point was something like 1/4 of the going rate for its predecessors, was Apple planning to abandon its pros for the consumer market? Well. Here we are almost 15 years later, and if you paid the one-time price back then, you're still getting free updates today (at least on desktop). And you can still buy in with 299 2025 dollars, rather than 299 2011 dollars.
At the time, the common wisdom was that they'd go the same route as Adobe: you'd have to buy Final Cut X+1 in a couple years for another $299, and Final Cut X+2 a couple years after that... to their credit, that's not the way it's gone.
So that way, I imagine, all the film folks have a little more money to chuck at their high-powered Mac hardware budgets in the next refresh cycle instead... An evergreen Final Cut Pro license costs almost as much as 1TB of SSD from those guys!
That is true, but it is also true that FinalCut lost big time against DaVinci for all semi-professional users which are exactly FinalCut's main target group.
I'd argue that it is very likely that Final Cut X+1 was Apple's plan. It just did not pan out and they were busy with other things. Now they made the first step correcting that (or cutting the losses, depending how you want to see it).
Davinci Resolve is free. At least, for the non studio version. (There’s a few studio only features, but almost everything is available in the free version of resolve). And a lot of people want to learn resolve anyway for color grading. Why not just edit in resolve too? Resolve studio is also quite cheap, given you buy it once and own it forever. Including updates.
I spent last week helping out at a short filmmaking course. The DP running it has used Final Cut for his entire career. But not a single student chose to edit their film using Final Cut. The class was split between resolve and premier pro. (Premier was chosen by a lot of people because it’s what they use at school, and they have a free licence to premier from their school while they’re studying.)
+ purchasing any BMD camera and you usually get a "free" license of DaVinci :) That's how I got my license many moons ago.
Now BMD have "prosumer" cameras available too that doesn't cost half a liver, which the second-hand market seems flush with too, so you can grab really good hardware for "cheap", and get excellent software with it too as the license is movable across hosts :)
> At the time, the common wisdom was that they'd go the same route as Adobe: you'd have to buy Final Cut X+1 in a couple years for another $299, and Final Cut X+2 a couple years after that... to their credit, that's not the way it's gone.
And that's despite Apple having zero interest in doing things that don't ultimately make them money.
I have a theory for how sales of these one-time-purchase yet indefinitely-updated apps happens to work out positively on Apple's balance sheet, while it doesn't for most other large players right now.
And that's that, due to Apple's vertical integration (they make the hardware, they make the OS that runs on the hardware, they make the apps that run on the OS) — and due to these apps only targeting their own OSes+hardware, with no consideration of portability to other platforms — a lot (like 90+%) of the "enablement" work for these apps ends up time-budgeted as OS work, rather than apps work.
Or, I guess, to be more charitable, you could say that Apple's engineers develop first-party apps not just to sell them, but at least in part to drive the development of the OS as a developer platform. You could even describe the OS frameworks as the product, and the apps themselves as the byproduct. (In that lens, the only reason FCP would cost anything at all is to avoid accusations of anti-competitive behavior.)
One beancounter way that I think has been used to justify the strategy - FCX and the like are currently also sold as paid upgrades at time of machine purchase. This is another way to bump up the average price of the computers outside BTO.
It also frames the cost of the software differently, as part of a much larger purchase and as enabling other uses for the new machine. I suspect this is a fairly large sales channel for the software.
That makes me wonder how this new suite strategy (as well as other subscription efforts like AppleCare One) play into the purchase experience going forward.
The core of Apple's success has always been to capture the cultural leaders. Artists, musicians, journalists, etc. have used Apple at much higher percentages than the general public.
Now that the iPhone made Apple much more of mainstream company, it's harder to do -- what does it mean to focus on cultural leaders when 90% of American teens have an iPhone? But in the 15 years since Steve Jobs' death they have still been doing a decent job of it.
The one-time purchase version of Microsoft Office is not available worldwide. Where offered, it is reduced to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, with Outlook as a Business edition extra. Individual apps can sometimes be bought separately, but pricing usually makes this impractical. This is to push buyers to Microsoft 365 subscriptions which is the primary product.
Microsoft is renaming the company to copilot, all of its software to copilot, and CEO satya nadella is changing his name to copilot copilot copilot which is also his favourite feature, software, operating system, and the names of his dog, cat, children, and spouse.
Soon the company formerly known as Microsoft will turn into a garbage slop Pokémon capable of emoting only with its name, copilot.
Yes - but perpetual purchases have an interesting gotcha that Microsoft didn't realise at first. To encourage subscription over perpetual, ongoing or evergreen updates are limited to subscription version.
Office 2024 has every feature that was added since Office 2021 to the subscription version - while a chunk of loyal customers are unaware of them.
Back when Google was competing hard with Google Suite, a big perception problem formed with the perpetual customers believing and convincing others that Google were far ahead, with collab editing and other features - after Office had added equivalent.
So for me, If there's a subscription and one-time option - I wonder if the one-time gets all updates going forward. If it doesn't, I realise that they'll regret that if competition picks up, and try to fix it later.
If it does include updates... I worry it will be like many other lifetime updates one-time purchases - when competition is low they'll renege on that promise.
You would definitely not get free upgrades for Office. You would get minor point release updates. You also had to upgrade the Mac version often for:
- the System 7 transition
- the 040 Macs and to get a “32 bit clean version”
- to get the full speed of running natively on PPC Macs
- to get a native OS X version instead of one that ran in the OS 9 sandbox
- the Intel transition to get native performance.
I would much rather pay $150 (?) a year for a five user license where each user gets 1TB of storage and each user can use Office across Macs, Windows, iPhones and iPads.
It’s the same price as Dropbox’s 2TB plan and all you get for that is storage.
On a related note: Steve Jobs was right - Dropbox is a feature not a product.
Yes. That sentence is setup for the speculation in the third paragraph. Folks in this sub-thread are wondering how the one-time price option plays out with Apple Creator Studio.
If you look at Office 365, OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint and Exchange Online as well as AI services and coauthoring are not included in the one time purchase price, as these require ongoing infrastructure supplied by Microsoft.
If you look at Adobe Creative Cloud, you see cloud storage and cloud libraries for maintaining files and assets and sharing them for collaboration, Behance, asset licensing such as Adobe Fonts, and generative AI tooling, as well as a pile of additional apps which were never sold separately. There's also tutorials to help you learn that smattering of apps and plugins.
Apple Creator Studio is a service, so there will likely be at least some product development going to create exclusive functionality - likely in the form of new apps which cannot be bought separately, content packs, AI integrations, additional collaboration features relying on hosted infrastructure, and so on. Since a lot of the storage features and base collaboration are instead part of the iCloud infrastructure, that last point may be a tricky line to walk though.
So far from what I can tell, Final Cut Pro has gotten perpetual updates. Since you can only buy it via the Mac App Store, ther can’t do upgrade pricing.
They could - and some of the 3rd party vendors did: There is a 1Password 7 and a 1Password 8. There was also a Things 1/2, which is now a Things 3. it usually works by creating a new app, and not updating the old one anymore.
Because there is no such product as Office 2025, much like there was no Windows 96. There is Office 2004, 2008, 2011, 2016, 2019, 2021 and 2024. They usually release roughly every three years so there might be an Office 2027. 365 is a separate (but closely related) product.
> Of course, they'll eventually remove the option to buy the software by paying once, I think everyone can see the writing on the wall
There's no indication Apple is planning to end the option of paying once for these apps.
Apple introduced subscriptions for Final Cut and Logic nearly three years ago [1]; this isn't new by any means. Pages, Numbers and Keynote remain available at no cost.
Why do you think they will remove the option to buy the software?
They’ve kept the model for years. They’re targeting different audiences with the move.
There are features they are planning to make exclusive to the subscriptions. I don’t know if they’re planning to make the one-time purchase go away completely, but it seems like it’s going to be approached as the “lesser” option.
Not Apple, but iMazing switched to subscription model and they simply lost me as a customer.
JetBrains tried something similar a while ago too, and almost screwed it up - but managed to listen to their customers and nailed it with the perpetual fallback licensing. Making me not just pay the subscription but feel respect to the company.
> so anyone who says "Boo, not you too Apple" can easily be shut down with "You still have the option to buy it!" instead of leaving those critics without answers
This is like saying that it's clever for Mars to keep Mars Bars while launching a new bar, as it "shuts down" complaints that Mars Bars will no longer exist.
I don’t really understand the point you’re trying to get at but your analogy doesn’t really work here because a new chocolate bar would be a new product. Not a different way of buying the same product.
Every choice a company does is a strategy in some way, for some reason, which has been calculated to make them more money than another choice. This is how 99% of businesses work, and Apple as well.
You have any email I could reach out to you on once Apple finally removes the purchase ability for this, and only lets people subscribe?
> You have any email I could reach out to you on once Apple finally removes the purchase ability for this, and only lets people subscribe?
If they do this, then still no one will ever have to say something as silly as "they only kept the other option so people won't complain about them removing the other option".
This is such a strange way to think about what was done. Rather than just being happy they kept the pay once option and saying that's good you're imagining critics who how Apple can "shut them down."
The other thing that’s going to go away is purchasing only what you need. I want exactly one of these apps, I bet virtually nobody uses all of them, and yet the suckers are going to be telling us that being made to buy stuff we don’t want or use is “more value”.
Of course predictions about the future are not present reality.
It’s not set in stone, but it’s supported by the times this has happened before and by trends in Apple and in tech. “Nothing will ever change” is a prediction, too, and one much less supported by evidence.
I think it's okay, or even better probably, if they move to subscription only. All Apple's paid apps have languished for years and if its actually a revenue stream for them maybe they'll actually make them industry-leading again.
Yea I've already purchased some of these apps so I was not going to thrilled if they pulled an Adobe and made me pay for an overpriced subscription on top of it >:(
Exactly what I was thinking. I bought Pixelmator Pro 3 days ago… But I am happy, as I have absolutely no need for the others, except for the free ones.
It's not outrageous, for sure, specially if you happen to have a use case for all the bundled apps. But things change if you consider that the one time payment for Logic Pro equals about 18 months of the subscription. In my case, I bought Logic Pro in 2013 for 180€. Obviously a subscription seems expensive no matter what the price is.
If a students needs Logic Pro for 3 months for a class then they can get it (with the other apps) for $9 total ($6 if you count the free month). That makes more sense than a one time fee of $200. On the other hand, if you're planning to use the software for over a decade like yourself then $200 is very cheap.
Indeed, and considering the 14 years of free Logic upgrades I'm surprised they bothered charging the initial $199! (I do remember being a bit miffed that it was $199 regardless of my existing license for the giant $999 box that was Logic Studio.)
> It's pretty clever that they keep the "pay one time" option still alive while announcing the availability of subscription, so anyone who says "Boo, not you too Apple" can easily be shut down with "You still have the option to buy it!"
Probably not. Those customers are almost completely irrelevant and not people who Apple or anybody else cares about. They won't mind if you kick and scream.
Yes, of course, ultimately every choice they ever do is for money, because they're a for-profit company. But maybe we can be slightly more granular about exactly how that choice makes them more money, which is because it gives them good PR. I was just being more specific, but we're saying the same thing :)
Parent isn’t insinuating otherwise. They’re saying the subscription model is more lucrative, so eventually they’ll remove the one time payment option, but keeping it as an option for the announcement keeps the bad PR at bay.
