iMovie review

Already on your Mac, and still updated in 2026

iMovie is Apple's free video editor for Mac, iPhone and iPad. You get a timeline, titles, transitions, filters and 29 trailer templates, and projects hand off between devices, so a Magic Movie or Storyboard started on an iPhone opens in the Mac timeline. It is distributed through the App Store rather than as a download from apple.com. Apple has retired the iMovie marketing page entirely, and apple.com/imovie now redirects to a support hub, which is why we link the App Store listing.

The most repeated fact about iMovie is that Apple has left it to rot, and for the Mac that is wrong. Apple's own lookup API dates version 10.4.4 to 28 January 2026. The App Store web page prints it as "Jan 28" with no year, which is where the mistake comes from. The iPhone and iPad build is a different story, and it gets its own section below.

In use it is the least intimidating editor in this category. No node graph, no scopes, no render queue. You trim, you drag, you export.

Mac owners who want to finish a video tonight

• Anyone with a Mac who needs a clean cut of a family video, a lecture or a talking head
• iPhone shooters who want to start on the phone and finish on a bigger screen
• People stepping up from Photos who have no interest in learning a professional interface
• Anyone on Apple hardware working through the free options before considering Final Cut Pro

Free with no in-app purchases, and no price above it

iMovie costs nothing and there is no paid tier to climb into (as of July 2026). Apple's lookup API reports a price of 0.00 and no in-app purchases on both the Mac and the iOS listings, read on 31 July 2026. There is no watermark, no export cap, no project limit and no subscription, and the only account involved is the Apple Account the App Store already asks for.

The old arrangement where iLife apps were free only with a qualifying new Mac no longer applies. Anyone running a supported OS can install it at no cost. Apple's paid step up is Final Cut Pro, which is a separate purchase and a separate application.

macOS 15.6 is the limit, not your wallet

The gate is the operating system. The current Mac build needs macOS 15.6 or later, 4 GB of memory and 3.5 GB of available disk (as of July 2026), and the download itself is about 3.2 GB. In practice a machine that can run macOS 15.6 is a 2019-or-later Mac, so an older Mac is shut out even though the software costs nothing.

The bigger limit is the hardware. iMovie exists only on Apple devices, with no Windows, Linux, Android or browser version, so for most people reading a list of free video editors it is not an option at all.

Export tops out at 4K, which Apple states on the Mac App Store listing alongside 1080p HD at 60 frames per second. We tried three times to read Apple's own enumeration of the export resolution menu and could not, so we are not publishing pixel dimensions or frame rates beyond what the listing says.

One app, two builds, nineteen months apart

The Mac build and the iPhone build are separate App Store listings on very different cadences. Mac is at 10.4.4, dated 28 January 2026, with release notes reading "Includes stability and performance improvements". iOS and iPadOS are at 3.0.5, dated 16 December 2024, roughly nineteen and a half months old as of 31 July 2026 and past the point where we flag a project on this site.

We are reporting dates, not Apple's intentions. The mobile app still installs on iOS or iPadOS 17.6 and later and still works. It simply has not been touched in a year and a half, which is worth knowing before the phone becomes the place you edit.

Start here if you own a Mac, then decide

If you own a Mac, iMovie is the right first thing to open: free, current as of January 2026, and easier than everything else in this category. It stops hard at the edge of Apple hardware, so it is no answer at all on Windows or Linux, and the phone build has not shipped since December 2024. When you outgrow it, the honest next step is a free cross-platform editor rather than a paid upgrade, and our free video editors list ranks those in order.