A subscription for Logic is nuts. It's already $300 software for the Mac. I would be fine paying another one-time fee if it meant I had it forever on my iPad. It really is stellar software, as evidenced by it's two-decade presence in the industry, but to move to subscription feels very... un-Apple (at least in this Professional Media Software context).
It's $199. It's only ever been $499 until 2013, when the price suddently dropped to $199, and it has been that ever since.
Logic Pro is ridiculously cheap compared to most other DAW out there. There aren't tiers, there's no upsell to unlock basic features like unlimited tracks, it's just a full featured DAW, the end. Heack, a license for the "full feature, but not bundle-padded, version of X" costs:
- Renoise: $75 (and is the only tracker-style DAW)
- Tracktion Waveform: $149
- FL Studio: $199 (thankfully)
- Reaper: $225 (unlimited commercial license, by the time you need this, you already have seven other DAW already, too)
- Cubase: $329
- Studio One: $399
- Bitwig Studio: $399
- Ableton: $449
- Reason: $499
- Pro Tools: $499
So it's a great deal!
...
...but...
...$199 is also extreme expensive for people who bought a second hand mac, or have a hand-me-down ipad, and don't have two hundred dollars to casually spend on something they never played with because it's been out of reach due to a sky-high price. A subscription for Logic is the complete opposite of nuts. At $5 a month, someone can use Logic for 40 months before it would have been cheaper to buy it up front. That's more than three years, but which time you either know this is what you love, or you stopped using it already and moved on to another hobby. Heck, at $45 a year, that's four or even five years. Plenty of time to get your priorities straight and start saving if audio work brings you joy.
The audio crowd got used to incredibly high prices for software, $100+ for an app or even plugin is considered "normal", and has made it completely impossible for kids or just people without disposable income to get into. Everyone knows this, which is why everyone who actually cares to get those folks into their ecosystem either dropped their prices, or now offers a subscription model in addition to buying a perpetual license for a specific version.
And in an ecosystem where subscriptions are $9.99/mo (which they pretty much all are), $5/mo is a power move.
I've been poor before and $200 one-time is WAY less expensive than $5/mo recurring. If I can't afford to save $200 I sure can't afford to pay $5 recurring. Recurring subscriptions are for the wealthy, not the poor, the poor can do just fine with freeware or some 10 year old version of whatever.
Paying a recurring monthly subscription isn't the only way to get a trial.
Sounds like you're not a kid to me. I didn't have $200 to spend until I was halfway through college. But I sure as hell would have been able to afford $5 a month.
I participated in the long and storied tradition of child labour to buy things I wanted.
If you didn't have any money to spend until halfway though college other than a surplus of $5/month, than by saving for $200 you likely would have doubled your disposable income and you would have left school with a Final Cut Pro license on top of that. I'm sure kids will buy it, and they're going to be worse for it than when they paid $200 for a license.
In any case, I can't emphasise enough how much paying a monthly subscription over a one time fee does not help the poor in general, at best it allows for you to shift expenses a few years down the road with low interest if you're some sort of temporarily embarrassed millionaire, which isn't the same thing as helping poor kids other than maybe some small niche. Being poor doesn't mean you should do more $5/month subscriptions, it means you can't get away with them nearly as much without getting punished by economic reality.
iPads have an archival problem already, and this just exacerbated it.
If I’m a studio and want to throw a project into a vault somewhere with hopes of retrieving it in a decade, the iPadOS/iOS software model makes it impossible to get back to a specific configuration without freezing a specific device.
Now throwing a subscriptionmm no on top of it, this is at best good for throw away projects that are done, pushed out, and never looked at again (from an editing perspective).
Film and TV scores in Logic from the early '00s regularly get opened for sequels, prequels, interquels, reboots, remasters et al. I don't use Logic anymore, but when I did, that's one of the things that impressed me.
Logic on iOS? Could be an entirely different story as it relies on other apps as plugins that may change. Just to err on the side of caution, assume that if it isn't saved as audio or MIDI, you'll probably be screwed.
