2026-01-29 04:52:13
Will we use Apple’s new Creator Suite, smart home tips for a new homeowner, the utility of Apple’s Continuity Camera feature, and the last time a smartphone release impressed us.
2026-01-29 00:00:00
We discuss how Tim Cook spent his fun weekend, the new AirTags and Moltbot.
2026-01-28 22:00:15
Apple’s Creator Studio has arrived, a new subscription bundle that includes some venerable Apple pro creative apps, a new acquisition, a content library, and a surprising integration with the company’s productivity apps. I’ve spent the last week or so noodling around with these apps, and here are my impressions.
Just to be clear, while I am a “professional creator,” I am also not the kind of person who spends all day making mission-critical edits in Final Cut Pro or music in Logic. (I do generate some podcasts in Final Cut Pro and Logic both, and have used them for years, but I’m definitely one of those people who uses a tenth of their features.)
Still, I’m a big fan of both apps. These are substantial apps that Apple continues to invest development resources in, and moving them to a subscription model makes me optimistic that they’ll continue to grow and evolve.
The debut of this bundle includes Final Cut Pro version 12, with a bunch of new features. Audio of footage is now transcribed and searchable, so you can find the location in a particular clip where someone says a particular phrase or even covers a specific topic. Similarly, video is indexed so that you can search for items and actions that appear in the video. If you’re managing lots of footage across a lot of clips, this will be a productivity boost. There’s also support for Beat Detection, which makes it easier to snap clips to the rhythm of any music track. (Final Cut Pro scans music and detects where the beats are.)
Specifically on the iPad version of Final Cut, Apple has added support for multiple selections (great for batch adjustments, which in the past I’ve had to do one at a time) and support for using an external monitor for preview. The app also supports iPadOS 26’s background API, so that you can leave Final Cut Pro while it’s exporting.
I freely admit that I am a person who professionally misuses Logic to edit podcasts rather than create music. (I have created the occasional song, as well, but they’re entirely limited to Robot or Not theme songs.) So I can’t really address the new features in Logic Pro 12 very well.
There’s a new Session Player, focused on synth keyboard and bass, and I have used these AI-driven “artificial musicians” in past projects, and they’re kind of magical. There’s a new Chord ID feature that uses AI to analyze audio and detect what chords are being played. The Mac app now has access to the same downloadable stock packages previously available only in the iPad version. And on the iPad, there’s support for a wild new feature that lets you swipe multiple takes together in order to build the perfect final track.
It also still edits podcasts.
A little more than a year ago, Apple bought Pixelmator. Clearly, that purchase was designed to add a photo-and-illustration editor to Apple’s creative professional offerings.
I am, alas, a person broken by Photoshop in the 1990s and not yet reformed. (I pay Adobe roughly the same for that privilege as you would for this entire bundle, by the way.) But even I, as a Photoshop Sicko, can appreciate how good Pixelmator Pro is—not just on the Mac, but now on the iPad for the very first time.
For its Apple debut, Pixelmator Pro 4 for Mac adds a new version of the Warp tool. But the real big news is that the whole thing is on the iPad for the first time, complete with Apple Pencil support and full document compatibility with the Mac version.
As Joe Rosensteel pointed out earlier this month, this suite is missing a photography component equivalent to Adobe’s Lightroom. Will that ultimately be Photomator Pro? A freemium update to Photos? Something else? There’s room for more stuff in this bundle, is what I’m saying.
I dislike Apple’s choice to roll its “iWork” suite of apps into this bundle, not just because it turns a set of free products into freemium products with upsell, but because there are plenty of users of Pages, Keynote, Numbers, and Freeform who do not need the powerful features of Final Cut, Logic, and Pixelmator.
With that said, the new features in the three classic iWork apps are all pretty impressive. (Apple says Freeform will gain suite integration at a later time.) All three apps get access to Content Hub, a media library full of photos and illustrations that can be integrated into projects for all three apps. There are also a bunch of new “premium” templates that add more options for people who don’t want to create that flyer or presentation all by themselves.
I like the Content Hub, which is accessible from the toolbar and is searchable and filterable by media type. I was able to very quickly pick out a background image for a slide and an illustration to use on a birthday card, for example. I pay an annual subscription for access to a limited number of stock media images from a library; it’s very nice that Apple is rolling this library into the Creator Studio subscription.
I’m a little less excited about the templates, which feel “premium” more in the sense that they’re not available to the people who aren’t paying. They didn’t really feel that much more creator-focused than any other Keynote or Pages template would. Shouldn’t Apple be making an effort to make nicer templates for all users of those apps? Does the introduction of premium templates mean that Apple’s no longer motivated to create new templates for everyone else? The whole thing just hits me wrong.
Content Hub also prominently features a prompt to create images using generative AI. I get why they’re doing it, and I have friends who heavily use AI image generation to build art for presentations. I don’t really appreciate most of the AI-generated imagery I’ve seen, and when I asked Apple to modify a photo from the Content Hub, the result was (predictably) a little uncanny and modified other areas of the photo in ways I found unsettling. So… your mileage may vary.
Also, I should point out that most of the AI features Apple is adding to these apps, including the image generation, are using OpenAI as the model source. It’s all properly disclaimed and explained—I just wonder whether this is a long-term partnership or if Apple will switch them all over to new, Google-supplied models as soon as it can. For now, it’s all ChatGPT, and given that every AI query has a cost, I can completely understand why these features are limited to subscribers only. (Apple says that users will get 100 tokens per month to use on AI image generation—essentially, the ability to generate about 100 images.)
Other AI features in Keynote include the ability to generate slides out of text and generate presenter notes out of slides. I tried this out and found it to be, again unsurprisingly, kind of mediocre. It did generate a bunch of slides from my notes for a presentation, but it was all pretty uninspired and had errors due to the AI misunderstanding my notes. I was left with a Keynote deck I’d still need to spend a lot of time getting up to par.
I also found the presenter notes a bit uninspiring, but I can at least see the concept that converting a bunch of bullet points into actual sentences might be helpful for some presenters.
There’s apparently an AI-driven “pattern analysis model” that allows Numbers to magically suggest the contents of table cells, but I haven’t seen that one in action. It feels like something that might actually be useful, but I can’t vouch for it.
I like the fact that Apple has imported the Super Resolution feature from Pixelmator into the iWork apps. This lets you take an image that might be a little too low-resolution for your purposes, and use a local AI algorithm to artificially increase its resolution by up to 300%. You can just right-click on an image in Keynote, for example, and choose Super Resolution. It’s really nice integration.
On the other hand, some integration just isn’t there. In Keynote, for example, you can use an image as a fill for a chart. I decided to see if I could find an illustration of money that I could use in one of my Apple financial-results charts. I could, but I couldn’t use it in the chart. The Numbers interface requires that you pick an image from the filesystem, with no connection to the Content Hub. It gives the distinct feeling that these apps were somewhat hastily added to this Creator Studio bundle.
Is a bundle that costs $13 a month or $129 a year a good deal or a bad deal? It all depends on what your needs are and what the other options are. If you have very little budget, you might be able to get by with free apps like Affinity Studio, DaVinci Resolve and LMMS. You can also subscribe to the Adobe apps for the very high price of $839 a year! (Also, good news for students and teachers: You’re eligible to pay only $3/month or $30/year for these apps.)
If you’re an existing subscriber to Final Cut or Logic for the iPad, you can continue to pay for just those plans, but no new single-app subscriptions will be available. This is a mandatory bundle. If you prefer to buy software and keep it “forever” (until the next full upgrade, anyway), Apple will sell one-time-purchase versions of the Mac apps for $300 (Final Cut), $200 (Logic), $50 (Pixelmator Pro, Motion, and Compressor), and $30 (MainStage). Existing owners of those Mac apps will just get these updates for free.
To sum up, Apple’s apps are really quite good. Pixelmator Pro gives them yet another one, and it’s a fitting companion. These are nice updates, with some thoughtful new features. While it feels inevitable that Apple would switch these apps to a subscription model, it’s so late in the game that it really does feel like the end of an era.
If you rely on even one of these apps, $129/year does not seem unreasonable. As someone who somewhat relies on both Final Cut and Logic, and has spent time learning both of them, that price seems acceptable, so long as the updates and new features keep coming. And I get Pixelmator in the deal? Hmm. It’s so good that I might even be tempted to drop Photoshop eventually, but don’t hold me to that.
So in the end, I am predisposed to view this new bundle positively. It’s only the clumsy inclusion of Pages, Keynote, Numbers (and later Freeform) that gives things a sour taste. Apple could solve this problem by offering a lower-priced productivity suite, and perhaps communicating how it will determine which features of those apps are for everyone and which ones are only available for those who pay. I didn’t expect the iWork apps to catch strays from the launch of an impressive professional creative suite from Apple, but here we are.
2026-01-27 06:40:40
Episode 600 prompts us to revisit predictions from episode 500 and make some new ones for episode 700. We also cover new AirTags and Apple’s plans to fix Apple Intelligence.
2026-01-27 01:15:01
Some of us are old enough to remember using pine and other Unix screen-based email readers. Younger folks might have cut their teeth on Eudora and other Mac apps (back when we called them “software programs”) that could seamlessly log into a mail server, retrieve email locally, and let us interact with it. The first widely successful protocol of that type was Post Office Protocol (POP).1
POP’s job was to download mail. If you left it on the server, it was just a giant mailbox. However, it was all we had, and we liked it!2
POP is now over 40 years old and has been effectively superseded by IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) for decades. The easiest comparison between the two is that POP is like a huge stack of printed messages, while IMAP is a desk organizer with labels in which paper has been sorted for easy retrieval.3
However, because many of us started with POP, we wound up just continuing to use it. (I only switched to IMAP in the late 2010s.) Six Color reader Neil writes is one of those people. He writes:
I have over 20 years of email, and several accounts, on my Mac, all housed in Apple’s Mail.app, categorized in several dozen folders (but my “All Inboxes” has grown to almost 10,000 emails – sigh).…it didn’t matter because I didn’t have a second email client reading the same emails.
However, because he now reads email on multiple devices, he’s found POP frustrating. He wants to migrate to IMAP, but his host doesn’t offer a migration path while retaining the same mailbox. He has to delete his old POP mailbox and create a new IMAP account. Of course, he doesn’t want to lose any of the email archive that he’s left stowed online in the POP account.
My hunch is that it is doable (maybe even straightforward), but I’m afraid to just try it for fear of losing some or all of my archives.
I can bring good tidings: there’s no technical issue with migrating your email from POP to IMAP, and you won’t lose anything if you take care. The less-good news: it requires some methodical work and a bit of patience.
POP’s appeal was always its simplicity. Your email client downloaded messages from the server with an option to delete them afterward (or after a set period). Because of storage limits, you could typically keep a relatively small number of messages on the server, and regularly had to move everything else to local storage on your Mac. The server was mostly a temporary repository.
This worked well in a mostly single-device era, or when we had a desktop computer in one location and a laptop in the other. I developed a habit of using POP to read email on my laptop by having the email app on that computer download messages without deleting them. I would then download and delete the messages on my desktop computer and sort them into folders.4 That kept my mailbox from getting too huge, but I could read email away from my desktop.
Once you had multiple devices on which you wanted to read email, everything went out the window for POP. IMAP’s first version appeared not that long after POP’s initial release, but it took many more years for companies offering mail services to adopt IMAP. This was almost certainly because mail hosts had constrained storage space—as did we all—and pushed their users to download mail, something POP was well-suited for. As storage costs plummeted and people wanted more access to the same email in different locations, IMAP’s higher computational and storage needs made financial sense. (Or, with Google and Gmail, competitive sense.)
IMAP treats the server as the source of “truth.” Your mail client shows you what’s on the server, and actions you take—reading, deleting, filing into folders—sync back. Multiple devices see the same state. I have more gigabytes of storage than I need on most of my email hosts, so I can leave email there indefinitely. (Leaving your mail on solely on a server comes with huge risks! I’ll write about that sometime.)
The slight catch for longtime POP users is, of course, that all that mail you’ve accumulated over the years is likely just on your Mac, not on a server. You may need to do a few kinds of copying.
Having 10,000 messages on a server, whether POP or IMAP, personally makes me nervous. I’m not sure if Neil—or you, dear reader—has made a local copy of those emails, but his note indicates he’s filed some into folders, which indicates local storage.
The only way to ensure you have retrieved every message locally from a POP email server before deleting them is to perform a clean download. If you set up another account for the same mail host in Mail in your regular macOS account, I’m concerned about the conflicts that could result.
Instead, I suggested setting up a new macOS account, which can be temporary, for the most likely successful outcome. Here’s how:
downloaded POP email.After the messages have downloaded, you can create an archive that you can import later if you need to:
mbox file that can be imported into Mail or any modern email app. mbox file into Mail by choosing File: Import Mailboxes, selecting “Files in mbox format,” clicking Continue, selecting the file, and completing the remaining steps.After you’ve imported those messages, you can delete the new macOS account if you don’t think you’ll need it again. (I like to keep a secondary login for Mac tasks that work best outside my primary account.)
In Neil’s case, there’s a split between locally stored email, which appears in the Mail app under the On My Mac section of the Mail sidebar, and email stored on a server, such as Apple’s iCloud or another mail host.
If you don’t see an On My Mac section, then you don’t have mail stored locally. If you haven’t followed the steps in the previous section, you should return to it and download all your messages via POP, then copy them locally.
As always, start with a backup. Make sure your Mac is backed up (always good advice), and then, in particular, that the Mail folder at ~/Library/Mail is completely up to date. If you’re using a different email app, make sure you know where it keeps its local mail store, and back that up.
Now you can proceed:
If you have gigabytes of email to resync to IMAP, it can take a long time, even with a fast connection, because IMAP servers aren’t particularly efficient. This might be a good overnight operation after you get it started and make sure it’s copying as expected. Double-check your storage limits on the server, too, so you don’t exceed the maximum space, which can interrupt an upload.
Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Apple Mail explains setting up accounts across Mac, iPhone, and iPad, as well as plugins, automation, and solving common problems.
He’s also got a new title out, Take Control of MailMaven, which explains the ins and outs of migrating and using a sophisticated, newly released email app.
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
2026-01-27 01:00:41
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