Apple Makes iMovie, GarageBand, and iWork Apps for Mac and iOS Free for All Users

[/V\acpower]

Not really MS Office is a more robust suite of applications.

As for the move, I think its a good move and I think was curious that they were charging for this when they were giving it away for new owners.

I honestly prefer to use iWork instead of Office, by choice.

Obviously, in some areas Office has tools that iWork doesn't (Excel is clearly more powerful than Numbers). However, for a lot of users and what they need from those, Office is completely unnecessary.

Most peoples need a good app to edit text files, make presentations and do basic budget/spreadsheet stuff.
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I tried using Pages and Numbers, but they were not very intuitive so I went back to Microsoft Office. Since Apple has a reputation of not continually improving its apps, I suspect they're still inferior products.

It's not that they are less intuitive, it's that they don't work in the same way that you are used to in MS Office.

And that's precisely the point. Why would you use another app if it worked exactly the same way.

I'm right at home when I use Pages, Numbers or Keynote, and I feel lost when I'm in Office. (I always hated the "throw every button in your face" approach to app design)

Same thing applies to Macs vs Windows in general. They are different, and that's why we love them.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Something like this needs to be done. The other possibility is an advanced mode in Pages that includes the features they deleted in 5.0 to create feature parity with the iOS version. But it also has to be said that some of the lost features of Pages don't make sense even as a parity ploy. Inserting document sections, for example, isn't a page layout feature but a damned useful one for word processing document creation. I realize probably few discovered the ability to create templates wth this feature, but dropping it made no sense, even from a feature parity point of view. I kept expecting it to come back, but no.

Yes, in my subjective opinion, I think the dream of Pages reintegrating the DTP side of Pages '09 is probably a lost cause because- I speculate- the iOS version of Pages is probably more important to Apple than the Mac version. Since those features would probably be hard to make work as well in the iOS version, it seems best hope is a breaking out the much desirable "lost" features of Pages '09 as a new product exclusively for Mac. It seems like Apple could relatively easily make this move since Pages '09 is still mostly functional in the latest incarnation of macOS. And as I referenced before, I for one would certainly pay for an updated of Pages '09 that came with some confidence that it would likely be supported for at least the next couple of iterations of macOS. One can only hope.

 

[Cameront9]

Glad I waited on buying the new iMovie. Finally have something that can read my Photos library (The older version of iMovie didn't know Photos existed).

I already had all the other apps (or at least, the most current version that I can run on El Cap). Garageband was worth every penny.

 

[HBOC]

the reviews (most recent ones) on several of the apps state it crashes constantly. I was going to download, but if these don't work....

 

[8281]

A very strong move against Microsoft Office. I must admit, back when I was still using macOS these programs were a very productive and efficient addition to my workflow.

For the home user maybe, but it won't matter for business, nonprofits, and education all that much probably.

 

[efktd]

Remember iPhoto on iOS? That was a weird piece of software.

They should bring back Cards.

 

[willmtaylor]

Are they still free? AppShopper pushed a notification this morning that they had all returned to their original pricing.

 

[mollyc]

Are they still free? AppShopper pushed a notification this morning that they had all returned to their original pricing.

I DLed Pages and Numbers about two hours ago and am DLing Keynote right now.

 

[macduke]

They should bring back Cards.
View attachment 696809

I still had that installed on my iPhone up until recently, haha, mainly because I'm an app hoarder and like keeping around things that you can't download any more. But once Apple announced they were killing off 32-bit apps, I figured I might as well clean house with a lot of this crap that is doing nothing useful. I actually used that app a fair bit and miss it.

 

[S2TPW]

I had no trouble downloading and installing them.

I do wish they would open them up to older OSes, though; my kids still use my 2008 iMac and it would be nice to put these on their computer. Although, most of their work is done through Google Docs through their school website, so I suppose it doesn't matter. As soon as Apple releases the new iMac, my kids will get this 2012 one as an "upgrade" and I will get a new machine.

Older OS's is right! They don't even support El Capitan, not even last years system!

"Numbers can’t be installed on “Macintosh HD” because OS X version 10.12 or later is required"

- I'm stuck supporting multiple PPTP VPN's which were removed in Sierra (i get the vulnerability, but my customers move slower)

So no possibility to install for me. For those who already are using the iWorks suite there are some very unhappy people whose IOS autoupdate for Numbers has rendered their documents inaccessible on their older Mac's. Just look at the App store reviews on the latest version

MS must be rubbing their hands after this release. It's a shame because I think we are capable of deciding when a newer app is too slow to run on legacy hardware. Sometimes slow is OK ..if you just need it to work! (sic)

 

[AppleMad98004]

Word weights almost 2 GB.

I think he is referring to the iOS apps.
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I tried using Pages and Numbers, but they were not very intuitive so I went back to Microsoft Office. Since Apple has a reputation of not continually improving its apps, I suspect they're still inferior products.

I agree....These apps are never updated with new features/functionality.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Yes, in my subjective opinion, I think the dream of Pages reintegrating the DTP side of Pages '09 is probably a lost cause because- I speculate- the iOS version of Pages is probably more important to Apple than the Mac version. Since those features would probably be hard to make work as well in the iOS version, it seems best hope is a breaking out the much desirable "lost" features of Pages '09 as a new product exclusively for Mac. It seems like Apple could relatively easily make this move since Pages '09 is still mostly functional in the latest incarnation of macOS. And as I referenced before, I for one would certainly pay for an updated of Pages '09 that came with some confidence that it would likely be supported for at least the next couple of iterations of macOS. One can only hope.

One can only hope, because one can hardly expect.

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

Unfortunately, I agree with that.

 

[Soccertess]

The strange thing is that customers (you know, the ones who hand over their hard earned cash to Apple) have no problem with Apple's product lines. It's just the moaners on MacRumors.
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There hasn't been any meaningful revenue for the last three years. Someone who bought a Mac in 2013 and hadn't bought Pages yet wasn't going to buy it in 2017.

I'm a customer, and I think their product line sucks now. I think their Iphones are weak especially with their outdated form factor. I think their 12inch macbook is a joke with one port (still have an amazing Macbook air and wouldn't trade it in for one port for anything), the macbook pros are ok (but only USB-C is lame).

Why don't you use Siri to look up something about some competitors, (wait, it can't) Maybe use Apple Maps to go to the a microsoft store to see some innovation (wait, it's buggy).

Why don't you share your location with an andriod friend (wait, cross platform sharing is only available in google maps).

Keep shelling out your money Mr. Lemmings

 

[Osty]

I still wish pages had a grammar and spell check tool, other than the autocorrecting it does.

They're are built in to macOS - all Cocoa apps have access to them.

For my usage (I'm a professional writer and editor), I've actually found them to be better and more consistent that those provided with Office especially for non-US English dialects. The Office tools only work with Office, the macOS tools work with Pages, Scrivener, Ulysses, Nisus Writer Pro, Mellel, TextEdit, Safari etc, etc...

The built in Oxford English Dictionary is also good enough that I rarely have to use my two-volume Shorter OED.

 

[smoking monkey]

I'm a customer, and I think their product line sucks now. I think their Iphones are weak especially with their outdated form factor. I think their 12inch macbook is a joke with one port (still have an amazing Macbook air and wouldn't trade it in for one port for anything), the macbook pros are ok (but only USB-C is lame).

Why don't you use Siri to look up something about some competitors, (wait, it can't) Maybe use Apple Maps to go to the a microsoft store to see some innovation (wait, it's buggy).

Why don't you share your location with an andriod friend (wait, cross platform sharing is only available in google maps).

Keep shelling out your money Mr. Lemmings

I'd hardly call the iPhone 7 weak. It was a solid, yet uninspiring release. Not sure the competitors did all that well either last year, just ask Samsung.

Their product line doesn't suck, but it certainly is all over the place at the present. I'm guessing that this is going to be a massive year from product alignment across the board but it won't finish until around October 2018.

IF Apple has to put Touch ID on the back of the phone, a lot of people won't be happy. They need to get it on the front of the phone. They need to get it under the glass on the iPhone Special Release or whatever it's going to be called.

But this is all off topic. It's about Pages, Keynote and Numbers. Personally, I love them all. They certainly could be better, but are so much easier to use than the Microsoft equivalents which I have to use for certain situations. I curse MS Word every single time I use it. I hate it.

 

[stephenriw]

honestly, never have used these apps

 

[frankev]

Technically you need to have a newer Mac or newer iOS device running the latest software to use these apps anyway, so charging for it was just an unnecessary inconvenience.

Indeed, I have a Mac mini from late 2009 that I had updated to El Capitan (10.11.6) about two months ago. It would not run MS Office for Mac 2008 after the upgrade, so I installed LibreOffice 5.3.0 as a basic productivity suite. When I saw the recent news concerning the iWork apps, I tried to perform an install via the App Store and found that I must be running OS X 10.12 or later.

It was no real loss to me, as I'm running the latest MS Office on my Windows 10 box (using a license available to employees of large enterprises, which replaced our old HUP scheme) and I run applications such as AbiWord, Gnumeric, and/or LibreOffice on my Linux boxes. The iWork suite would've been a "nice-to-have" for the Mac mini, which isn't my main machine anyway.

 

[ignatius345]

Mate, I agree with you... almost. It's better than PPT in every way except ONE MASSIVE FEATURE.

PPT allows destructive clickable objects/links. KN doesn't allow Jeopardy style presentations where you choose a tile/question/link (or whatever) and go to another screen, come back and said tile/question/link is still turned over, gone etc.

KN has to be done in a specific order or you have to return to a non-destructible screen.
IF there is a work around for this, I'd love to know.

But yeah, KN is great. I'd love better controls on audio though in terms of syncing it to animations.

Huh, never had a need for that, but sounds like a good interactive feature that's missing from Keynote.

 

[bmac89]

Indeed, I have a Mac mini from late 2009 that I had updated to El Capitan (10.11.6) about two months ago. It would not run MS Office for Mac 2008 after the upgrade, so I installed LibreOffice 5.3.0 as a basic productivity suite. When I saw the recent news concerning the iWork apps, I tried to perform an install via the App Store and found that I must be running OS X 10.12 or later.

I have an early 2009 IMac which I updated to El Capitan and MS office for Mac 2008 still works for me.
I also tried a clean install and it also works.

 

[Abazigal]

I'm a customer, and I think their product line sucks now. I think their Iphones are weak especially with their outdated form factor. I think their 12inch macbook is a joke with one port (still have an amazing Macbook air and wouldn't trade it in for one port for anything), the macbook pros are ok (but only USB-C is lame).

Why don't you use Siri to look up something about some competitors, (wait, it can't) Maybe use Apple Maps to go to the a microsoft store to see some innovation (wait, it's buggy).

Why don't you share your location with an andriod friend (wait, cross platform sharing is only available in google maps).

Keep shelling out your money Mr. Lemmings

I fully intend to.

 

[iop]

I prefer pages to MS Word, and MS Excel to Numbers. Numbers is overdue for an update. It is way too simplistic.

 

[pratikindia]

These apps should have been made free from long time. These are no competitor to MS Office.

 

[tubular]

An aside for enthusiasts.

For what it's worth -- one of the things that has always made the Mac better is the quality of the typography you can produce. If you take a look at e.g. the Hoefler Text font, it's got *tons* of features -- predating but becoming OpenType features -- that have gone through waves of being supported and then unsupported and then supported and then unsupported. Including, at one point, having been supported in Pages. They are now sorta semi-supported, but you'd never know it (the font dialog box you get with Cmd-T has a greyed out gear, but it's actually an active but unsupported menu, including a tab called "Typography" for accessing the features).

If you ever look at it in a font editor, the Hoefler Text Regular character set contains more than a eleven hundred glyphs. Even if you ignore the Cyrillic, that's still over nine hundred. Engraved caps, Shakespearesque long-s, obscure ligatures. They were originally created for the QuickDraw GX architecture (anybody remember that?) but died when QuickDraw GX failed because Adobe wouldn't support it, because there was no Windows counterpart. Then it came back to Pages somewhere in the big cats OS thread, and then vanished with the iOS parity push, and is sorta half there and half not there today. The only software I know that fully supports OpenType features (we're talking about things like extra ligatures, small caps that aren't just big caps shrunk, swash italics, lining numbers versus old-style -- the 7 that hangs down like a y -- that sort of thing) is Adobe's InDesign, and I don't do software subscriptions. (Except JetBrains's IDEs, different story).

The good news is that the folks at Affinity (Affinity Designer, etc.) are planning at some point to do a page layout program. And if it's like the other Affinity apps, it's gonna be a real value.

One thing I particularly appreciate with Pages is the recent introduction of a LaTeX-syntax equation editor based on the STIX math faces. That's a real win for people known to occasionally break out in math spots, like me.
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Apple can't compete with Microsoft simply due to how many jobs, schools, organizations etc.. that rely on Microsoft's Office XML format.

I don't think Apple ever intended the suite to be an Office killer, just a friendly inexpensive alternative. They've got a good, free suite lots of people use. If it doesn't kill off Office in the business world, so what? Does that make it a failure, or does it just mean that it didn't do something they never intended it to do in the first place?

 

[mollyc]

The only software I know that fully supports OpenType features (we're talking about things like extra ligatures, small caps that aren't just big caps shrunk, swash italics, lining numbers versus old-style -- the 7 that hangs down like a y -- that sort of thing) is Adobe's InDesign, and I don't do software subscriptions. (Except JetBrains's IDEs, different story).

Photoshop and Illustrator also fully support OpenType and Glyphs with separate menus for seeing all the alternates.