Apple Creator Studio users are hitting the limits of AI usage too soon

Apple is burying the fact that the generative AI features in the Apple Creator Studio bundle come with arbitrary usage limits, but the limits are real and now appear to be significantly lower than expected.

Apple Creator Studio is a bundle of apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, plus updated versions of iWork apps like Pages and Keynote. In any case, Apple is heavily promoting how all apps come with new Apple Intelligence features.

Apple also advertises the package as “endless creativity… limitless possibilities”, but these AI features are actually limited. Users must read the Apple Creator Studio support page before even knowing about them – otherwise they will run into limits.

Now on Mastodon, developer Steve Troughton-Smith has shared how the usage limit is affecting him much sooner than it should.

Apple Creator Studio’s artificial intelligence features use OpenAI, and Troughton-Smith compared their use to Xcode’s OpenAI-based vibration coding. He first used it to write an app in Xcode and said, “I don’t think I’ve written a single line by hand.”

The app contains 1,650 lines of code, and Troughton-Smith talks about seeing Xcode “happily sailing away for half an hour”. He states that all of this used up 7% of his weekly Codex AI usage limit.

But then he made a single Keynote presentation in Apple Creator Studio — and it consumed 47% of his monthly usage allowance. He doesn’t say how long the presentation was, just called it “terrible.”

However, according to Apple’s rather hidden usage limit information, users should be able to at least:

• Create 50 images
• Generate 50 presentations (each with around 8-10 slides)
• Generate presenter notes for 700 slides

The inconsistency here is that Apple Intelligence will theoretically create 200 more slides of presenter notes than it can generate. In addition, Apple’s assumption that the presentation will have a total of 8 to 10 slides is simply wrong.

Without knowing how many shots or frames were in Troughton-Smith’s submission, it is impossible to judge how close he came to these published limits. But it can be said that 47% is practically half of the entire monthly subsidy.

So instead of 50 presentations, he could only do 2 at most.

Slides versus coding

Half an hour of vibration coding took up 7% of the weekly allowance, while one Keynote presentation took up 47% of Apple Creator Studio’s monthly limit. This suggests, contrary to what might be expected, that what consumes use is the generation of images.

At its core, coding is just text, so maybe it’s not as surprising as it first seems. Complex images of unknown sizes could require more AI effort than writing an Xcode project.

But if the user is even aware that the limits exist, they would reasonably expect Apple to state them correctly. And instead, in this case, it appears that usage is actually 1/25th of what Apple says is normal.

Usage control

The limit of the use of artificial intelligence functions in Apple Creator Studio is specifically through the generation of images, slides and notes of the presenter. So users can see their usage in Pages, Numbers and Keynote – but not Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro or Pixelmator Pro.

In any of these iWork apps, to see your current usage, on a Mac:

• Open Pages, Numbers, or Keynote
• Click on a named application menu (for example, “Sites”)
• Choose Intelligence functions
• Choose View usage status

On iPad or iPhone:

• Open Pages, Numbers, or Keynote
• Open or start a new document
• Tap the ellipsis icon at the top right
• Choose Intelligence functions
• Choose View usage status

IN AppleInsider‘s testing, generating one image in Pages took 5% of the monthly usage limit. This means that a total of 20 images could be generated, which is significantly less than the 50 cited by Apple.

Note that regardless of app or platform, the usage number shown is for the entire Apple Creator Studio.

Apple has not yet publicly commented on the disparity between its published limits and actual usage.