2026-01-16 02:54:25
It might be weird to describe myself as an “authentication enthusiast,” but I guess I’ve never claimed to not be weird. I’ve written a whole lot about passwords and passkeys, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m a big fan of Apple’s Passwords app. It lets you easily store your authentication details, share them with others, and even view the history of changes to your accounts.
Previous to Apple offering features like iCloud Keychain and Password Autofill, I relied on 1Password to store a lot of this information, but in recent years I’ve transitioned in large part to Passwords. But you’ll note I said “largely.” There are still a few things that I use 1Password for and while Apple is generally good about ticking off the lowest hanging fruit and leaving third parties to offer more niche products, I’d argue that authentication and security are important enough to our everyday lives that the Passwords app can afford to take on more responsibility.
So, maybe it’s time for a power user feature. cracks knuckles SSH keys! You know them, you love them. If you don’t know them, you should love them. Like passkeys, SSH keys are credentials that rely on public-key cryptography to simplify connecting to remote servers and computers without the use of passwords.
And before you dismiss this as something that’s just for those of us who enjoy diving into Terminal, lots of services and sites let you use SSH keys, from GitHub to apps like Edovia’s screen-sharing app Screens and many more. Again, like passkeys, their use helps make our lives more secure and more convenient.
Managing these credentials, however, can be a headache. In part because they can be stored or viewed in many places: in your user’s home directory on macOS, synced via iCloud Keychain, in macOS’s Keychain Access app, the command-line ssh-agent tool, and even some third-party apps like, yes, 1Password can handle them.1
A veritable surfeit of solutions. Too many, really. I’d love to be able to have all my keys stored in a user-friendly interface like Passwords, which would hopefully work under the hood with the command-line tools as well as providing a system for more easily using the keys. 1Password seems to provide the best implementation here, where you can set it up to have requests for your key pop up a dialog box where you can use biometrics or your main password to authenticate.
Just as Apple eventually supported (or at least didn’t actively hinder) Touch ID for sudo on the command line, it’d be great to see Passwords embrace SSH key management for those of us who need it. Which, honestly, is all of us.
2026-01-16 00:48:21
The Apple Creator Studio subscription bundle announced earlier this week makes sense. We live in a world where Adobe’s Creative Suite and Microsoft Office have been subscription plays for more than a decade. When Apple bought Pixelmator in 2024, it seemed like Apple really was building its own take on the Creative suite, and later this month it’ll finally arrive.
At $129 a year, it’s a lot cheaper than Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription and roughly what I pay for just Photoshop and Lightroom… but it’s obviously more expensive than Canva’s Affinity suite, which threatens a new business model of “free software, but pay for AI features.” Still, I’m old enough to remember when Logic and Final Cut cost many, many hundreds of dollars—putting them entirely out of the reach of most people. Now you can just spend $13 for a month in Final Cut or Logic to work on a project or even see if it’s the right tool for you. I think that’s a pretty good deal.
Truth be told, Final Cut and Logic are among Apple’s two most updated apps. I’ve been using them both for ages, and there are always new updates with new features—and I’ve very rarely been asked to pay for an upgrade. (The Logic Pro release notes are a sight to behold.) When a developer is committed to consistently improving its subscription product, I think it’s a fair exchange that benefits customer and developer alike.
The addition of Pixelmator also gives Apple a piece it was missing before. Pixemator combines many features found in Photoshop and Illustrator, giving Apple the design tool that it was missing previously. It’s hard for me not to look at this bundle and think that, for the people it’s designed to serve, it’s a pretty compelling offering.
But something about this announcement really doesn’t sit right with me.
Apple has chosen to roll its “iWork” apps—Numbers, Keynote, Pages, and Freeform—into this bundle. While the company has gone out of its way to assure everyone that those apps, which come free when you buy Apple hardware, will remain free… it’s also essentially converting them into “freemium” apps that have features that will only be unlocked if you pay $129 a year for the Creator Studio.
Some of the additional items do make sense as subscription offerings. Apple is offering loads of templates and themes for those apps, limited to subscribers. It’s not unreasonable to ask for money in order to access a content library, and the templates and themes seem geared at the target audience for the bundle: creators.
But it’s some of the other stuff that gives me pause. Apple is adding features to the iWork apps, and locking them behind a paywall. There’s a feature that generates a Keynote presentation from a text outline, and another that creates presenter notes from an existing slide deck. Users of Numbers will be able to have access to Magic Fill, which lets them “generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition.”
On the one hand, these read like they’re AI-powered features that might have actual costs attached to them. But they still don’t seem like features designed for the creative customers targeted by the bundle. They seem like regular features of Keynote and Numbers, ones that those apps’ much more general user base might want… but rather than being broadly released, they’re being withheld.
I don’t generally like the idea that Apple’s taking the free software that has added to the value of its premium hardware for a couple of decades and turning it into an upsell designed to generate more services revenue. But at least I can understand that if there’s an actual cost to running AI-powered functionality, giving it away entirely for free might not be a wise thing to do.
More specifically, this move stinks for anyone who uses Keynote and Numbers and isn’t in the target audience of Pixelmator, Final Cut, and Logic users. If Apple wanted to offer an iWork subscription for $20 a year that enabled AI features, some nice templates, and the rest, I’d… probably still complain.
It junks up the simplicity of the classic iWork concept: Apple devices come, for free, with a suite of software tools that let you get things done. Even though Apple has taken great pains to say that the iWork apps will remain free, they’re now free with an asterisk: free except for the stuff you have to pay for. Asterisks make things less simple.
But at least if Apple chose to offer iWork users a targeted bundle, it would be something understandable and reasonable. This, though? A feature to make building formulas and tables in Numbers is, somehow, limited to people paying $129 a year for Final Cut? A feature to make it easier for someone to build a Keynote presentation out of their notes is only available for someone shelling out $129 for Logic or Pixelmator?
It just doesn’t make sense. It’s as if Apple has decided that there can only be one Apple software bundle, and all of its apps are just going to be dumped into it. And I’m worried about where this potentially might lead, in terms of making the entire Mac, iPad, and iPhone buying experience feel more exploitative and gross. Apple needs to recognize that it’s in the business of selling high-margin hardware that people buy because it’s nice. The more that an expensive phone or computer is just an upsell opportunity for the real thing that requires an annual fee, the less special it is.
I understand charging an annual fee for great professional audio, video, and design tools. But for features in a free bundled spreadsheet app? It just doesn’t pass the sniff test.
2026-01-15 03:21:18
Apple’s new subscription bundle of creative apps, the single-use tech we’re bringing into 2026, how often we erase and reformat our devices, and our hopes for Gemini-powered Siri.
2026-01-15 00:00:00
This week we bundle up and talk about icons, Apple’s big Gemini deal and the company’s cowardice in the face of Grok.
2026-01-13 22:55:38
Wonder no longer about what the future holds for Apple’s pro apps. On Tuesday, the company announced its Apple Creator Studio subscription bundle, including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Compressor, and MainStage as well as additional features for productivity apps Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform. The bundle will be available starting on January 28.
Let’s start with the top line news: the subscription, which is a universal purchase across Apple’s platforms, is sharable across up to six members of an Apple family and will cost $12.99 per month or $129 for a year, with a one-month free trial. There’s also a substantial education discount for the bundle: $2.99 per month or just $29.99 per year. Additionally, customers purchasing a new Mac or a specific model of iPad1 will be able to get three months of the bundle for free.
You can also continue to buy the Mac versions of any these apps as an individual one-time purchase. The productivity apps themselves will stay free—subscribing to the bundle will only unlock additional features for that software.
All the pro apps gain new features as part of this update. Final Cut Pro gets Transcription Search to search through footage and find the right piece of audio; Beat Detection, which lets you time videos to beats in music; and Montage Maker, which uses AI to edit together a dynamic video where you can adjust the settings.
Logic Pro gains a Synth Player for its AI Session Players; Chord ID, which can turn audio into a chord progression; and a new Sound Library. The iPad version also gets the Mac version’s Quick Swipe Comping feature as well as Music Understanding functionality that helps you find a loop by using natural language to describe it.
Pixelmator Pro is perhaps the biggest part of this announcement, as many have wondered what was in store for the graphics app after its parent company’s acquisition by Apple in late 2024. The Mac app comes to the iPad for the first time with Apple Pencil support, and there’s a new Warp tool across all versions.
As for the productivity apps, the Apple Creator Studio adds a Content Hub for what Apple describes as “curated, high-quality photos, graphics, and illustrations.” There are also new premium templates and themes for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers and integration with image-generation tools from OpenAI. Apple is also, in an unusual move, including beta features as part of the bundle: the company mentions one that can create a draft of a Keynote presentation from a text outline and one called “Magic Fill” for Numbers with lets you “generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition.” Freeform’s premium features aren’t yet ready to roll out but will come later this year.
Overall, this ground is well trod. Other companies like Adobe and Affinity have offered creative bundles of their software suites, and recurring subscription revenue is an attractive prospect for the company.
I’m glad that Apple is retaining the individual purchase option for the Mac apps: if you’re a pro who really only needs a single app, an individual purchase seems to make more sense. Any more than that, and you might be better off with the subscription—as long, of course, as you don’t mind paying in perpetuity.
I do wonder a bit about those who’d prefer to have the iPad apps as individual purchases, but I’d speculate that Apple has probably looked at what customers’ buying habits on that platform and see this as a way to juice adoption there.
2026-01-13 07:18:54
Google and Apple join forces to corner the market on smartphone AI models, John Ternus gets a profile in the New York Times, live NBA basketball comes to the Vision Pro, and Apple inconsistently refuses to stop bad App Store behavior.
