What does Apple’s Pixelmator purchase mean for your iPhone, iPad, or Mac? This is the most likely scenario

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• Apple recently bought the popular photo editing app Pixelmator
• A new theory suggests it may ultimately become Apple ‘Photos Pro’
• Pixemator’s apps will continue in their current form “at this time”

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Last week, Apple used some of its spare change to buy one of the Mac’s best photo editors, Pixelmator – and since then, theories have been flying about what the deal means for iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

For now, the answer is not a lot, because the app’s maker says there won’t be “material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time”. But now Bloomberg’s respected Apple commentator Mark Gurman has shared what he thinks the plan is in his Power On newsletter – and it’s not quite as wallet-friendly as we’d hoped.

Gurman’s Pixelmator prediction is that it will become “something like “Photos Pro” and gets offered as a subscription on the App Store alongside new iPad programs like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro”.

That move would dash hopes that Pixelmator’s many appealing talents, including a powerful repair tool, AI background masks, and more, might be folded into Apple’s free Photos app. However, it would also make perfect sense in the context of Apple’s other creative apps.

As Gurman notes, creating a ‘Photos Pro’ would mean that Apple would “once again have both consumer and higher-end iterations of its video, music, and photo-editing apps (with Photos, GarageBand, and iMovie serving as the free downscale versions)”. The Pro versions of the latter are Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro.

Lastly, he adds that “given Apple’s push to boost services revenue, I think you can rule out it giving away Pixelmator features for free in its current Photos app”. We think some features may still end up in Photos as a taster for whatever Pixelmator becomes, but that theory does currently seem the most likely scenario.

The return of Aperture?

Apple killed its pro photo editing app, Aperture, back in 2015. It was so popular that some fans still run the app on older Macs using open-source tools like Retroactive. So why has Apple bought Pixelmator almost ten years on from deciding to pull the plug on Aperture?

Services and subscriptions are now a big push for Apple and towards the end of Aperture’s life it didn’t seem keen to integrate the app with its iCloud Photo Library. Back then, apps tended to be one-time cost rather than subscription offerings (Aperture originally cost an eye-watering $499 in 2005), and that also throttled Aperture’s popularity.

With the potential for charging a subscription cost for a new pro photo app and also using Pixelmator’s existing iCloud integration to boost its cloud subscriber base, Apple clearly sees a financial opportunity to once again offer a pro-level photo app alongside its existing ones for music and video.

Still, for those of us who simply want to see Apple improve the editing features in the existing Photos app, the move could still bring some benefits in the form of free taster features. Apple certainly needs to continue offering tools like Clean Up if it’s to keep up with the impressive pace set by Google and the likes of the Pixel 9 Pro when it comes to AI-powered editing features.

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