John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:

MacOS 12 Monterey came out in 2021. So I think that means you can one-time purchase and download an older version of Pixelmator, if you’re running an older version of MacOS. But if you’re running MacOS 26 Tahoe, you’ll get the new Liquid-Glassified version of Pixelmator whether you get it as a one-time purchase or through a Creator Studio subscription. I think? Update: That was wrong. It’s a little simpler than that, in that Pixelmator Pro is an outlier from the other apps in Creator Studio. The new version of Pixelmator Pro — version 4.0 — is only available through the Creator Studio subscription, and requires MacOS 26 (and iPadOS 26). The one-time purchase version of Pixelmator Pro is version 3.7.1 — the existing version, last updated two months ago — and that’s the version you get from MacOS 12 through MacOS 26 if you get it via one-time purchase. Pixelmator Pro is the only app in Creator Studio where the new version is exclusively available through the Creator Studio subscription.

Gruber cites the “About Apple Creator Studio” knowledge base article on Apple’s website to explain the confusion. I definitely think something fishy is afoot here, but I’m not sure whether I fully agree with the conclusion (though time will tell). Here’s the relevant quote from the article:

Final Cut Pro, Motion, Compressor, Logic Pro, MainStage, and Pixelmator Pro are also available as one-time purchases for Mac on the App Store. If you previously purchased one of these apps and you also have an Apple Creator Studio subscription, you can use either version of the apps. You can have both versions of these apps installed on your Mac. To make it easier to distinguish versions, the apps in Apple Creator Studio have unique icons…

Minimum system requirements for each Apple Creator Studio app are as follows: All Mac apps require macOS 15.6 or later, except for Pixelmator Pro, which requires macOS 26 or later.

This part of the article is indeed confusing because it says there’s a difference between the Apple Creator Studio versions and the one-time-purchase ones, yet it doesn’t further elaborate on them later in the article. When Apple says Pixelmator Pro requires macOS 26 Tahoe, does it mean the one-time-purchase version or just the Apple Creator Studio one? Gruber believes it’s the latter, but the wording is ambiguous. Apple could just mean that Pixelmator Pro is an exception to the rule, and that both the one-time-purchase and Creator Studio versions will require macOS Tahoe (but why?). If Gruber is correct, however, this would mean Pixelmator Pro is the only Creator Studio app whose one-time purchase version will no longer receive updates (also, why?). I think the likelihood of this is slim. Again, we’ll find out for sure on January 28, when Apple Creator Studio officially launches.

As I wrote in my initial Apple Creator Studio reaction article, I don’t mind the Liquid Glass design in photo editing apps. I actually think Acorn, by Flying Meat, does this particularly well: photo editors are the unique case where I want the user interface to recede into the background. The photo should be front and center. I would mind it a lot more if Final Cut Pro received the Liquid Glass design, but it doesn’t, which is good. But if the Liquid Glass design — and future updates — are restricted to a Creator Studio-exclusive Pixelmator Pro 4.0, I think that would be enough for me to pay $130 (well, $30 with my student discount) for the bundle. (I’m a sucker for Pixelmator Pro, an app I regard so highly that it’s one of my “essential Mac apps” listed in the colophon of this blog.) Of course, that would also require me to put up with the new asinine Pixelmator Pro icon, so I’m hopeful Apple just continues updating Pixelmator Pro for users who have already purchased it.

On Photomator’s lack of mention in the Creator Studio bundle, Gruber writes:

If Photomator did not have a future as part of Creator Studio, I think Apple would have used this moment to stop selling the existing version. They’d say that it too remains functional but is no longer being updated. But that’s not what they said…

My guess is that Apple and the acquired Pixelmator team are hard at work on a new Creator Studio version of Photomator, including a version for iPad, and it just isn’t finished yet. I’m more unsure whether they’ll keep the Photomator name (which I think is too easily conflated with the Pixelmator name) than whether they’re working on an ambitious update to the app to include in Creator Studio.

I have no little birdie insider information about that, just my own hunch. I just think that if Photomator didn’t have a future, Apple’s statement about it would say so, and they’d stop selling the current version.

Photomator is another one of my most beloved Mac apps. Combined with Pixelmator Pro, the two have become my de facto replacement for Adobe’s products, which I find to be poorly designed and priced predatorily. (Pixelmator Pro is to Photoshop what Photomator is to Lightroom.) Before the Creator Studio announcement earlier in the week, I was most nervous about Pixelmator Pro being sunsetted, to the point where I’d even forgotten that Photomator was perhaps a more likely target for Apple’s ire. And lo and behold, Apple didn’t mention Photomator in its Creator Studio announcement, which led me to believe that it would fade away soon, just like Pixelmator (the iOS photo editor Apple discontinued on Tuesday, not the company). As a Photomator user, this makes me anxious.

It is still quite possible that Apple will discontinue Photomator entirely and roll it into the Photos app on iOS and macOS. But it’s a 50/50 whether or not this happens; Gruber could also be correct that a new version of Photomator is coming later this year, whenever it’s ready. Many years before Photomator, I was an avid Aperture user, which, much like Photomator, was a beautiful, Mac-native Lightroom competitor for editing photos in your iPhoto library. People have wanted Apple to revive Aperture for years now, and Apple, in a way, did: it bought Photomator, a modern-day version of Aperture. It would truly be a shame if Apple flubbed a prime opportunity to make a true competitor suite to Adobe’s products: a video editor (Final Cut Pro), an audio editor (Logic Pro), a Lightroom competitor (Photomator), and a Photoshop competitor (Pixelmator Pro). All for $130 a year — with options to outright purchase the apps separately — and that would truly be the deal of a lifetime. Apple is close, and I really don’t want it to fumble the ball here.