Apple buries the fact that its Apple Creator Studio bundle's generative AI features come with any usage limits, but the limits are real and now appear to be significantly less than expected.
Apple Creator Studio is a bundle of apps such as Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, plus updated versions of the iWork ones such as Pages and Keynote. In each case, Apple heavily promotes how the apps all come with new Apple Intelligence features.
Apple also promotes the bundle as meaning "endless creativity... unlimited possibilities," but those AI features are in fact limited. Users have to read the Apple Creator Studio support page before they would even know about them — or they have to hit the limits.
Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has now shared on Mastodon how the usage limit is affecting him far sooner than it should.
Apple Creator Studio's AI features use OpenAI, and Troughton-Smith has compared their usage with that of OpenAI-based vibe coding in Xcode. First he used it to write an app in Xcode, saying "I don't think I wrote one line manually."
The app comprises 1,650 lines of code and Troughton-Smith talks about seeing Xcode "happily trundle away for half an hour." He reports that doing all of this used 7% of his weekly Codex AI usage limit.
But then he made a single Keynote presentation in Apple Creator Studio — and that used up 47% of his monthly usage allowance in that. He doesn't say how long the presentation was, he just refers to it as being "awful."
However, according to Apple's rather hidden usage limit information, at a minimum, users should be able to:
- Generate 50 images
- Generate 50 presentations (with approximately 8-10 slides each)
- Generate presenter notes for 700 slides
There's an inconsistency there in that Apple Intelligence will theoretically produce presenter notes for 200 more slides than it can generate. Plus Apple's presumption that a presentation will have between 8 and 10 slides in total is simply wrong.
Without knowing how many slides or images were in Troughton-Smith's presentation, it's not possible to assess how close he came to these published limits. But it is possible to say that 47% is practically half the entire monthly usage allowance.
So instead of 50 presentations, he could have made at most 2.
Slides versus coding
Half an hour's vibe coding took 7% of a weekly allowance, while one Keynote presentation took 47% of Apple Creator Studio's monthly limit. That suggests, contrary to what one might expect, that what soaks up usage is the generation of images.
Coding is just text, at heart, so maybe that's not as surprising as it first seems. Complex images, of unknown sizes, could well take more AI effort than writing out an Xcode project.
Pages, Keynote, and Numbers, can all show AI usage statistics
But if a user is even aware that the limits exist, they would reasonably expect Apple to state them correctly. And instead, it appears in this case that the usage actually amounts to 1/25th of what Apple says is normal.
Checking your usage
The usage limit for AI features in Apple Creator Studio is specifically over generating images, slides, and presenter notes. So users can see their usage in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote — but not Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, or Pixelmator Pro.
In any of those iWork apps, to see the current usage, then on the Mac:
- Open Pages, Numbers, or Keynote
- Click on the app's named menu (so "Pages", for instance)
- Choose Intelligence Features
- Select Show Usage Status
- Open Pages, Numbers, or Keynote
- Open or start a new document
- Tap on the ellipses icon at top right
- Choose Intelligence Features
- Select Show Usage Status
In AppleInsider's testing, generating one image in Pages took up 5% of the usage limit for the month. That means a possible total of 20 images could be generated, which is substantially less than the 50 Apple quotes.
Note that regardless of the app or platform, the usage figure displayed is for the whole of Apple Creator Studio.
Apple has not yet commented publicly on the disparity between its published limits and real-world use.
