KUALA LUMPUR, May 10 — Apple made a surprise announcement this week, namely announcing the iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro.

What’s also interesting is that instead of making them one-time purchases like their desktop versions, Apple has instead made them subscription-based.

How much for a month? For Malaysia, the localised pricing is RM22.90 per month or RM199 annually.

If you don’t already know about the apps, here’s a short explainer. Final Cut Pro is Apple’s own professional level video editing software that was originally part of Macromedia’s offerings before Apple bought over the title.

Logic Pro was also acquired, this time from German developer Emagic (formerly named C-Lab). It is a digital audio workstation (DAW) that also works as MIDI sequencer software.

Both Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro have proven to be fairly popular and used by professionals in the creative industry, while being accessible enough in pricing for amateurs and hobbyists.

The apps will only be available from May 24 and there will be a one-month free trial that I personally will be excited to try out.

Users of older iPads will unfortunately not be able to use Final Cut Pro as it requires iPads running the M1 chip or later but the Logic Pro app will be able to run on iPads using at least the A12 Bionic chip.

That means anything from the iPad Air (3rd generation) and iPad Mini (5th generation) onwards.

Now there is the argument that creatives could just use a MacBook instead of an iPad. Why have two versions of the software and pay extra for it?

There is the use case for traveling as it’s much easier to take out a tablet and start doing a draft of an edit or composition when on a plane or other moving vehicle.

Though perhaps you could argue that Apple is trying to offer more utility to the iPad Pro by offering iPad versions of its more popular apps on iPad.

Here’s looking forward to that one-month trial once both apps make it to the App Store this May 24.