It’s a good point, and I doubt very much Apple wants to play in that game, playing to their hardware and strengths increases the potential of someone buying a Mac instead of a PC, and then may keep them on that hardware.
The $500 you could save a month is a big incentive if you’re otherwise platform agnostic.
And here’s Jason Snell’s take
And agree with this part:
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’tin 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.
I makes perfect sense to me. While I love Apple’s free or low cost software the incentive for them to sustain development for apps they aren’t charging annually for is going to be naturally low. I’d rather pay for subscriptions that have value and updates rather than see annoying ads proliferating in some Apple properties or pay exorbitant prices for SSD upgrades.
What I like about suites like this is the effect of the "community. The more Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, Pixelmator, iWork installs means more hardware development for the Pro Apps, more 3rd party support for the iWork stuff. It’s a similar effect to the Setapp experience where subscribers are going look at apps they didn’t think about before they had access to a bit closer.
I got in on the educator discount as well. I was considering buying the Final Cut Pro bundle for 199 but saw the bundle and seemed like a good deal. Also the Pixelmator pro component seemed like a steal with family sharing for only 29 a year, but just found out educator bundle doesn’t allow the family sharing feature.
That is understandable, nevertheless, at $29/year; that is still a pretty good deal! 
