alt.hn

7/21/2026 at 6:30:53 PM

Apple has decided to compete for creativity app users

 https://alex4d.com/notes/item/apple-competing-for-creativity-app-users

by speckx

7/21/2026 at 7:41:44 PM

A single job posting for an engagement team doesn't really tell you if its a company strategy or not.

Directors hire on random ideas all the time and then pivot as needed

by azeemba

7/21/2026 at 7:48:46 PM

>A single job posting for an engagement team

A single job posting for an engagement team in Poland.

by roboror

7/21/2026 at 8:12:59 PM

A person from Poland here: why does the country matter here? What are the implications you're implying?

by TeMPOraL

7/21/2026 at 8:15:55 PM

I'm not the person you asked, but I don't think where it is matters as much as where it isn't. It isn't at Apples headquarters.

by joemi

7/21/2026 at 10:12:49 PM

I don’t think the author meant it as an insult to Poland.

Apple is unusually centralized (they don’t even have different business units; the company has a single balance sheet at P&L) and corporate level decision making is pretty much all done by the same small team at the mother ship.

So while all sorts of decisions are made locally, a hire outside Cupertino (which all of Poland happens to be) is extremely unlikely to signal a corporate shift.

Even a job ad for a role in Los Angeles would be equally unlikely to signal such a shift.

by gumby

7/21/2026 at 8:17:40 PM

It's a long way from their headquarters, a massive time zone difference at least. I don't think they're working on something that needs the direct attention of leadership.

by tencentshill

7/21/2026 at 8:37:19 PM

> This role is based in our new office in Bielsko-Biala, Poland.

Out of all the places in Poland, this choice is pretty strange. :)

by cyclopeanutopia

7/21/2026 at 9:00:54 PM

Apple’s head office for all of Europe is located in Cork, Ireland. They are not averse to building offices in places you might not expect.

It’s not some “paper HQ” for tax purposes, either - they have over 6000 employees there and are easily the largest private employer in Cork.

by Reason077

7/21/2026 at 9:07:55 PM

It’s not a paper HQ, but it is for tax purposes.

by lll-o-lll

7/21/2026 at 9:19:01 PM

Ok, it is comparable.

by cyclopeanutopia

7/21/2026 at 8:54:23 PM

Isn't it right next to the largest agglomeration in Poland? Also close to two (maybe three) other countries connected via highways?

by storus

7/21/2026 at 9:19:58 PM

True, but still, not the city one has in mind when thinking about tech companies in Poland.

by cyclopeanutopia

7/21/2026 at 8:16:32 PM

I think the OP is trying to say if it was in Cupertino, it would be more of an event.

Just like Amazon posting for this position in Phoenix wouldn't be seen the same way as Seattle.

by reaperducer

7/21/2026 at 8:51:39 PM

[flagged]

by Andrex

7/21/2026 at 9:18:07 PM

Please don't post unstubstantive comments like this on HN. You've been here long enough to know we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by tomhow

7/21/2026 at 9:48:54 PM

I disagree. It was relevant, succinct, and meant to inspire introspection leading to positive change.

by Andrex

7/21/2026 at 8:42:11 PM

Bring. Back. Aperture!!! Yes there are alternative to Lightroom out there (Capture One, for example), but Aperture was so Mac native and was such a joy to use on OS X.

by whyenot

7/21/2026 at 8:34:55 PM

The Creator Studio is a pretty big miss for Apple. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote have always been productivity apps, not creativity apps (and there is a difference). Of the remaining apps, Pixelmator Pro is the only one that is remotely relevant to my needs, and I'm not subscribing to a $12.99/mo plan just for Pixelmator. Compared to $19.99/mo cost for a much more coherent set of Adobe photography and imagery tools, it's a no brainer to go with Adobe. Not the outcome I would prefer, but a bunch of audio and animation tools will be functionally useless to me, so I'm being asked to pay $12.99/mo for a photo editing app and some productivity tools I already have. I'm sure there are some people who will benefit from the breadth of the Apple bundle, but I don't expect there are THAT many.

The fact that it is impossible to get Pixelmator Pro outside the bundle just makes the situation more ridiculous, unless you want the legacy version.

Create serious pro/prosumer tools for creative verticals again (Aperture, you are dearly missed) and you'll have my attention.

by flkiwi

7/21/2026 at 9:12:12 PM

It's not bad value at AUD$4.99 per month (education pricing). I only really use it for Final Cut Pro though.

by ctippett

7/21/2026 at 7:38:58 PM

I much prefer the interface of Pixelmator and Pages to Photoshop and InDesign, and paying once (for the non-AI-augmented version of Pixelmator, which Apple indicate will continue to receive some manner of updates going forward) is a nice plus.

It’s unfortunate there’s not a real Illustrator equivalent; Pixelmator has okay enough vector editing and export support for my needs, but notably will render the canvas rasterized at whatever the nominal resolution is even when zoomed in editing an SVG. Vector exports work as expected, just the editing is rasterized. Still, a small price to pay for not paying monthly for Adobe’s mountain of crufty malware.

by wwalexander

7/21/2026 at 8:07:22 PM

I feel like there had to have been some appetite within Apple to acquire serif (the Affinity suite of apps, Affinity Designer being a great Illustrator alternative) before Canva did because they were making non-kneecapped iPad apps, getting demos/mentions at Apple events, and just generally seeming like a good fit from the outside. (Other than being a non-Apple-technology cross-platform suite)

I can’t say that would’ve been a perfect outcome all things considered, but Apple certainly would’ve had a well rounded creative suite.

by graypegg

7/21/2026 at 7:41:06 PM

Probably safer to assume that they always had someone serving in this position and they recently left.

by badrequest

7/21/2026 at 9:04:46 PM

It's a pity that Apple neglects its creative apps. I've been working on a video project using Motion recently, and while not as capable as After Effects, it's pretty serviceable and with some love could be excellent.

by squidsoup

7/21/2026 at 7:41:44 PM

Side note to author: the web renders really bad on mobile

by josefrichter

7/21/2026 at 7:49:58 PM

Renders poorly on desktop too.

by roboror

7/21/2026 at 8:10:10 PM

Also, the content is uninteresting on both.

by khazhoux

7/21/2026 at 8:07:05 PM

There’s no escaping that whatever money Apple makes from this will be a rounding error compared to iPhone / iOS revenue. I honestly think the apps would be better served to be sold to a smaller company where such revenue was a bigger piece of their pie and they were therefore incentivized to care about them.

by dabinat

7/21/2026 at 8:17:40 PM

There’s no escaping that whatever money Apple makes from this will be a rounding error compared to iPhone / iOS revenue.

I can't even imagine what it would be like to work in an Apple-sized rounding error.

by reaperducer

7/21/2026 at 7:54:32 PM

Well it's a good thing they killed Aperture, then. Makes perfect sense.

(I was badly affected by that and decided not to trust them to maintain anything over the long term anymore)

Update: I now re-read the job posting and also realized that none of the responsibilities listed there are good for the users. This is bad news.

by jwr

7/21/2026 at 7:51:42 PM

They released a bunch of apps for creatives last year. That was the signal, no?

by schainks

7/21/2026 at 8:39:04 PM

They bundled existing apps in a subscription.

by dd8601fn

7/21/2026 at 8:06:27 PM

Why is this on front page HN? There is no concrete information here

by darth_avocado

7/21/2026 at 7:25:59 PM

Apple should buy Sketch

by madebysnacks

7/21/2026 at 7:47:04 PM

I'm on the fence on this idea. I think it depends on how well it's doing financially, basically to what extent has Figma eaten its lunch.

I never boarded the Figma train because I prefer the UI of Sketch, as well as its local-first approach and how its file format is publicly documented so I actually own my data. I do worry about it going under though, and if Apple buying it up is the only way for that to happen so be it.

If nothing else it'd keep it out of Adobe's hands which is worth a lot on its own.

by cosmic_cheese

7/21/2026 at 7:48:10 PM

Sketch lost the market to Figma, and now Figma is losing the market to vibe coding.

I'm not sure what the value proposition of Sketch is these days apart from local, non-cloud editing (although you can even get that with a pretty decent UI these days with Lunacy).

by mortenjorck

7/21/2026 at 7:51:37 PM

Vector screen-destined assets. Illustrator is print-centric and awkward for the use case, and while Photoshop is technically capable of it that's not what it's made for (also, Adobe CC is just way too bloated for its own good). Figma is oriented around mockups and not as good for assets.

There are also platforms which are less vibe-friendly, and old style mockups can still be useful when nailing down a design system across platforms.

by cosmic_cheese

7/21/2026 at 8:57:31 PM

Surely you've got Photoshop (raster) and Illustrator (vector) mixed up?

by ctippett

7/21/2026 at 9:00:45 PM

Nope. A lot of people use Photoshop for vector screen-destined graphics, because even though it's raster-dominant, it's reasonably capable of vector too. Illustrator is vector-dominant, but as noted, it's aimed mainly at print-destined vector graphics.

by cosmic_cheese

7/21/2026 at 9:06:30 PM

I stand corrected then. It's been over a decade since I last used Photoshop, so my familiarity with its capabilities are obviously well out of date, I never would've considered it for any sort of vector-based work.

by ctippett

7/21/2026 at 8:09:51 PM

Doesn't Apple already have a loose competitor to Figma? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeform_%28Apple%29

by tombert

7/21/2026 at 8:12:28 PM

Not really. Freeform is more of a whiteboarding/brainstorming app. It might be ok for rough wireframes but isn't suitable for high fidelity mockups, asset creation, etc.

by cosmic_cheese

7/21/2026 at 7:49:53 PM

Sketch has always been the app I use for quick throwing-together of things. Figma seems designed for specifically corporate design documents which is icky.

by LoganDark

7/21/2026 at 8:37:25 PM

They bought "Play" recently, it was an UI design app dedicated to SwiftUI.

by rramon

7/21/2026 at 7:36:56 PM

What the world needs. Less competition.

by kwanbix

7/21/2026 at 8:04:08 PM

That tells us nothing, nothingburger speculation. However, Apple had that major incident in its history when they made Adobe mad when they went out and shopped for final cut pro, color, and a handful of compositing apps. Didn't turn out well for Apple at the time.

by Keyframe

7/21/2026 at 8:36:30 PM

Folks - don't work for Evil. Any startup or smaller or even some medium-sized companies should be better work-places than the big greedy corporations. Granted, greed is an addiction and most people will fall to whoever pays most (that's understandable), but think of the ethics factor as well whenever the income is considered. Working for Evil comes with a karma penalty; Google taught us thus whenever an ad is infiltrating your computer.

by shevy-java

7/21/2026 at 8:51:10 PM

Evil comes in all sizes

by thenthenthen

7/21/2026 at 7:43:49 PM

Really not interested in this one. There is no data portability as none of the file formats they use for anything are documented and they are shovelling you into an eternal subscription model. At least Adobe file formats are well documented and have importers on pretty everything else so you can escape if you need to. I can open illustrator and photoshop files in a load of other apps, including open source. Pixelmator and their office stuff, nope.

I’ve been in this trap before and I’m only interested in portable, documented, non subscription stuff.

I’ve moved to Darktable, Inkscape and libreoffice here mostly for my needs. I don’t really need photoshop equivalent.

by cryo32

7/21/2026 at 7:48:26 PM

this has nothing to do with creativity app users, and everything to do with enshittification -- locking features that used to be free behind a monthly subscription, and ensuring new features are not offered to owners, but rather only available through renting. it has nothing to do with competition either

by LoganDark

7/21/2026 at 8:52:31 PM

[dead]

by quaddoggy