It was hard to know what to make of Clips at launch. Sure, Apple launches its own standalone apps from time to time, but it’s never offered up anything quite like this. For Apple, Clips is another play at mobile video editing — a dead simple solution for those who don’t have the time, skill set or desire to fiddle with Final Cut or even iMovie.
From the outside, there are some unavoidable shades of Snapchat and Instagram stories. Clips lets users cut together short videos and photos, add filters, emojis and music and send them out into the world — albeit without a standalone social network attached. That’s by design, both to keep the app from being locked to a proprietary platform and because, let’s be honest, who wants to build yet another Snapchat/Instagram-style social network in 2017?
