Apple and The King's Trust launch Creative Labs, a workshop programme for 18 to 30 year olds in LondonApple and The King's Trust launch Creative Labs, a workshop programme for 18 to 30 year olds in London

Apple and The King's Trust, the UK youth charity, announced the Apple x King's Trust Creative Labs on 7 October, an education programme for young people who want careers in the creative industries.

According to Apple's announcement, a first group of up to 20 people aged 18 to 30 will take part in workshops with Apple staff, learning skills Apple describes as industry-aligned on Apple's own hardware and software. The programme began this week with music industry and creative sessions at Apple Music Hall, the venue Apple recently opened at Battersea Power Station in London. Apple says more sessions and further groups will follow over the next year.

Tim Cook, now Apple's executive chairman, and King Charles visited Apple Music Hall to meet the participants, MacRumors reports, and AppleInsider's headline names Elton John among those present. Apple's photographs show Prophet Guillory, Apple Music's head of Artist Services, Tools and Community, speaking with participants.

What Apple and the charity said

Alisha Johnson Wilder, Apple's senior director of Global Community Impact, called education "a powerful force for equity and opportunity" and said the labs connect young people directly with Apple's experts and mentoring. Jonathan Townsend, the charity's UK chief executive, described it as a new chapter in a partnership that has already reached thousands of young people.

The King's Trust was founded by the King, then Prince of Wales, in 1976 and marks its 50th anniversary this year. Apple says the charity has helped 1.3 million young people in the UK. Apple has backed it since 2019, supporting the Achieve programme, which takes science, technology and arts teaching into schools in every UK region using Apple's coding materials. Apple equipment and learning resources also support the charity's 12-week Team programme, which leads to a Personal Development and Employability qualification, and the two are writing AI literacy material for teachers and young people.

How do young people join Creative Labs?

Apple's announcement does not say. It gives no application route, no selection criteria, and nothing on whether participants are paid or on whether later sessions will be held outside London. Apple names music as the first subject but not the ones after it, so for now the charity is the only place to ask.

Our take

Twenty people is a small number for a company of Apple's size, and next to the 1.3 million the charity counts it is a rounding error. The scale is not the point. A first cohort this size is a showcase, and the measure of it will be whether the next ones grow and whether Apple publishes what happened to the first group.

The access is the valuable part. A young musician in a room with the people who run Apple Music's tools for artists learns how the business works from the inside, which is something no course offers. Pairing the programme with Apple Music Hall also gives a new venue a public purpose beyond concerts.

It is also a visibly Tim Cook project. His role as chairman includes relations with governments, and in the same week he was at the European Parliament in Strasbourg talking about child safety online. APPDOOK's reading is that Creative Labs is worthwhile and modest, and that its worth will be judged by what Apple reports a year from now, not by who came to the launch.