Apple updates Clips with a new UI, horizontal support, HDR recording on the iPhone 12, and more
Apple today announced a major update to its video creation app Clips for iPhone and iPad, with key new features including a refreshed interface, support for both vertical and horizontal video, HDR recording with iPhone 12, and more.
Context & Ripple Effects
Clips has been Apple's lightweight mobile video editor since its April 2017 launch, with incremental refreshes like the Disney-themed overlays added that summer. The new update is the first to tie the app directly to current hardware: HDR recording arrives alongside the iPhone 12, one week after iOS 14.1 added 10-bit HDR playback and editing in Photos, completing the capture-to-edit chain.
The timing matters because Apple's free creative apps are being sequenced around the iPhone 12's camera capabilities rather than updated in isolation — and the later iMovie release with automatic movie creation shows where Apple wants casual video work to end up.
First-order effects
- iPhone 12 owners can now record HDR video natively in Clips instead of starting in the Camera app, and the app gains horizontal video support alongside vertical for the first time in this update cycle.
- iPad users get the same refreshed interface, keeping Clips consistent across both devices Apple pre-installs it on.
Second-order effects
- HDR footage captured in Clips feeds directly into the 10-bit HDR editing that iOS 14.1 brought to Photos, so Apple's own apps now form a closed capture-edit loop that third-party editors have to match feature-for-feature on new hardware.
- The redesign positions Clips as the quick-capture front end to iMovie's template-driven editing, reinforcing Apple's bundled stack against standalone mobile video apps.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, every iPhone camera generation will ship with same-day updates across Apple's first-party creative apps, making hardware upgrades stickier by refreshing the free software tier at the same moment.
- Casual video creation increasingly consolidates inside Apple's own toolchain — capture in Clips, edit in Photos or iMovie — narrowing the opening for third-party editors at the entry level.
The trend: Apple is synchronizing its free creative apps with each iPhone camera generation, keeping casual video capture and editing inside its own software stack.