Do most consumers actually use iLife?

[adder7712]

I just mess around with Garage Band when I'm bored. To me I use iPhoto a lot because I have a ton of images. I rarely used the following with the reason:

iMovie - Rarely, I don't know how to use it.
iDVD - Rarely.
iWeb - I don't make my own websites.
MobileMe - Should be free or at least offer a "Gold" or "Silver" accounts. It's integrated with iLife.

 

[IJ Reilly]

One of the Mac classes I teach is half iPhoto and half iTunes (three hours total). I've been told by students that if I taught an entire three hours just on iPhoto that they'd sign up for that class. So I think iPhoto is probably far-and-away the most used of the iLife applications. I am asked about iLife applications roughly in this order: iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie and iDVD. I have never been asked a question about Garage Band or iWeb.

FWIW, the biggest problem I have in teaching these classes is the huge number of versions of the iLife applications in current circulation.

 

[carlosbutler]

i agree with iphoto being the most used one. although i would not say that mobile me should be free, at least the server space and excellent web based email system. what should be free though is the syncing of iphone/ipod touch contacts/calenders etc with your mac, considering what google are releasing it will most likely come to that eventually.

for the apps, well iPhoto is most used because everyone has pictures and cameras no (pretty obvious). but i think quite a few people that go on holiday and take a video camera will use iMovie. Ive only had mac computers since september (cant believe it took me so long to buy one!!! i think they are great) so ive only been able to edit a few movies. one actual big one about 30 mins of footage and it was very easy to pick and learn. not really that hard to do everything in the program.

for iDVD i can only presume that it will only be used if you use iMovie, since they link in well together. that is also easy to use and if people relised how simple it is to make a fairly decent home movie and then add the excellent effects of iDVD, more would use it.

GarageBand, well this has been fun to mess around with, although i have only really done magic garage band and not the real deal. mainly dont really have much time... but still very good easy program - not sure about the teach your self thing. planning to start guitar next year so i shall see then (from a proper teacher)

iWeb, well im part freelance web designer (part because i am studying at uni) and dont really see the point in using iWeb, so this is the least used app out of all of iLife. although if you have just had a special moment in your life (child being born, marriage, won the lottery - anything) its a very quick, efficient way of getting your message across that allows more flexibility than a blogging site. considering that you dont need to have a mobile me account either, ie you could actually host it on your own machine if you set up server access and point your domain name registrar to your machines IP.

all in all i think ilife is a very good set of apps, much better than what windows offers (essentially windows movie maker, windows media player (sort of) and front page (not sure if thats standard with the OS, dont really care either)

but of course you can get better apps based around things from iLife, and Adobe apps are probably some of the best (photoshop/lightroom (for editing better IMO, but not for storing and viewing), dreamweaver, sound booth and from other companies as well.)

 

[trip1ex]

iPHoto here.

A distant second is iMovie.

So I fit right in with Apple's ilife user usage data.


(I use iTunes alot too of course, but not exactly an iLife program since its a free separate download.)

 

[Nicogarcia]

I kinda use it.

Dude, maybe its just me but i use ILife quite a bit. I photo i use all the time and I movie is the easiest way to present a school proyect. but idvd i just recently started using it. Iweb has never been opened in my computer and garage band just a couple of times just for fun.

 

[robanga]

Quite active user of most of iLife;

iPhoto is our main photo managing application at home ( i even use it for some business purposes)

iMovie - Home movies, lots of them of my family

iDVD - I burn the above to DVD's for archive purposes. Actually burn two DVDs one for viewing and one for keeping at a safe location outside the home.

Garageband is used quite a bit with my son, and I suspect he will soon be recording tracks into etc. We also use it to create ringtones.

 

[Diaresi]

iPhoto - In an opposite to the general concenus it's THE application that converted me to the Apple way of doing things. Before using iPhoto i'd just organise photos into folders on my PC manually. Not that easy to go through and view really and a bit of a chore. Maybe using Picasa or Irfanview to view them.

Now I just plug in my camera, import into iPhoto and all the work is done for me into an easily viewable library. I am an extremely big fan of Events. I also like how iPhoto stores photos in the Original & Modified folders inside that big iPhoto Library package. That way I always have a "pure" version of my photos - I see it almost as having the digital equivalent to negatives (yes, RAW would be the actual equivalent, but you get my point 😛 ).

Picasa is also very good, but I actually dislike it not having the option to go all controlling on my photos and I don't like how it sorts photos you've made edits to (putting the original into a hidden folder). That's down to personal preference more than anything else though.

iPhoto was the application that "liberated" my photos from a folder that would just be there to store them really to an application to store, sort, gather and most importantly view and enjoy them 🙂

iMovie - Only tried it once iMovie '08 came out and it picked up all the movies that iPhoto had imported from my digital cameras. Decided to play around with it and have had some very good results from it. Use it more because it's there instead of having some real use for it. Although it can and has come in handy on more than one occasion.

Garageband - Used it once to do a fine-edit of some audio I was putting into iMovie. Other than that I don't have a use for it, unless I start learning guitar or something.

iWeb - I don't use MobileMe so I see this as a bit pointless.

iDVD - I suppose this is still kinda useful but since sharing GB video files isn't a chore on 24Mbps broadband its relevence is slowly being eroded away. I can see why Apple don't feel a need to update it.

 

[Zedsdead185]

In order from most used to least:

iTunes
iPhoto
Garageband
iMovie
iDVD

and i have never used iWeb. I love iLife I think its a great buy for all the things you can do with it.

 

[0098386]

I use iPhoto regularly, Garageband when I'm working on music for my game (which isn't often these days, maybe a new track a month (oh and no loops, just me and a midi keyboard 😛 I'd get Logic if I could afford it)). iWeb, iDVD never get used but I keep feeling they will soon become important. Though this never happens.

Whats the other one? I don't use that but I'm sure there's a 5th app.
Oh. iMovie. It looks useful but I just have no use for it.

 

[robanga]

I should have also added that I use iWeb to maintain a blog and site, and MobileMe to connect three Macs, two Pc's and two iPhones.

I guess I use every part of iLife

 

[r0k]

I use iPhoto the most.

Next comes iWeb but I'm beginning to wean myself off of iWeb as a result of the crappy and unreliable hosting offered by MobileMe. In all the years I've done web publishing, never have I experienced so much downtime and so many unexpected issues. I finally just moved all my content off of MMe to a "real" hosting provider. The only thing left there is photo galleries but I'm migrating those to flickr and picasa.

Third comes iMovie. It came in handy for editing a movie of my daughter's middle school play.

Fourth is Garage Band. I'm interested in the music lessons. My kids play musical instruments but I don't. If I can at least learn to read sheet music without buying lessons, it will be worth it to me.

All of these Apple apps can be somewhat cheesy at times. For instance, iMovie gets "freaked out" because it must load all 20 hours of movies I happen to have sitting in my iPhoto library. For this reason, I must rename my iPhoto library before launching iMovie. Cheesy. Very cheesy. Then there's iweb. It produces html that is only slightly less obfuscated than code produced by Microsoft FrontPage. Cheesy. Very cheesy. Still, since these apps "come with" mac computers, they are basically free. I did pay the upgrade cost to get to the latest versions because I wanted the face recognition feature in iPhoto. It worked very well for me. Sure, it found some bogus faces but it found thousands of legit photos for every bogus face it found.

The iWork apps are very well written and are worth paying for. Sure, you can get openoffice.org for free. It is very good. But it is not as good as Pages, Keynote and Numbers.

I don't agree that Apple needs to give away iWork to make their computers worthwhile. It's not like they are charging Microsoft prices. iWork is only $80. iLife is either free with your machine or $80 for an upgrade.

I don't begrudge Apple their profit for some very well written software. If you go get Office 2007, you spend several times as much and wind up with a bloated, relatively unstable beast full of sloppily written code. Who was the rocket scientist that figured out Office 2007 needed to violate the unifying user interface elements in windows xp? No such crap to put up with in OS X. I've heard that even Office 2008 doesn't run roughshod over the OS X user interface like it's cousin Office 2007 does to windows XP.

I had given serious consideration to purchasing Office 2008 until our IT department at the office force-fed Office 2007 to all of our machines. The document load times ballooned tenfold and the user interface is at odds with the rest of the desktop. I became worried that even on OS X, Office 2008 might not bring much value. I was also concerned that macros were not supported. There are people around here who cannot make a simple pie chart without using macros so I knew having 2008 at home would probably be no help when it came to opening documents from work. I'm better off with openoffice or iwork.

 

[muldul]

I think Apple should start including iWork for free.

It's a good group of programs. I still use Microsoft Office, though.

If apple included iWOrk free, i still would use Office, it just integrates better with other Word processors than Pages does, Mac and PC alike

 

[slothrob]

I don't think this is the norm.

I exaggerate when I say most everyone I know plays some instrument, but at least half have some deep technical involvement with music. It's actually less common that a household would not have a musician than that it would.

"According to a 2003 survey conducted by The Gallup Organization and commissioned by the International Music Products Association, slightly more than half of all U.S. households surveyed (54 percent), had a member who played an instrument." 48% of those households had more than one musician.

 

[bobr1952]

To be honest, I never paid any attention to what iLife was until a software update showed up a week or so ago. I don't plan on installing it since I still have no idea really what iLife is. I don't use any of the programs mentioned in this thread so I guess the answer to this thread is NO.

For web I use Coda, for photos I use View it, Image Well, and Pixelmator. I don't do movies and just listen to music so I guess I don't have much use for the iLife programs.

 

[jzuena]

I understand why Apple include iLife on all their new systems, for example it makes it easy for them to advertise the Mac as a perfect multimedia machine, kind of like a plug-and-play. On the other hand I use iWork extensively, and I would love if Apple gave me as a customer the option to choose if I wanted iWork or iLife to be included for free with every purchase (it wouldn't need to come pre-installed, but like a license for free so you just have to download it).

In the end, this isn't a huge problem in any way, seeing how cheap both iLife and iWork is (compared to let's say MS Office).

I like this idea. They both cost the same, so why not let the user pick which one they want included free. Having said that I actually do use all of the iLife applications as well as Pages and Numbers from iWork, so I'd end up buying the other one anyway! Only Keynote hasn't been able to replace PowerPoint for my use.

iPhoto - my wife and I use it all the time for our digital pictures.
iWeb - I keep my homepage in iWeb and have a .Mac account to push it online automatically. I got sick of maintaining HTML code for a single-use page.
iMovie/iDVD - I use them twice a year like clockwork to edit vacation footage into a DVD.
Garage Band - I use it with my guitar attached via an M-AUDIO USB connection.
Pages - I use it at home to make small documents. I still use Word at work, though.
Numbers - I use it at home to make small spreadsheets. I still use Excel at work, though.

I think iWeb is a great place to start for people to first get onto the web. If they want to get into html, css, javascript etc, afterwards to break down the limitations iWeb holds, then all well and good. Not everyone has the patience or ability to just jump straight into html etc.

I went backwards... I got sick of maintaining HTML code by hand and never sprung for a development system like Dream Weaver. For my homepage it was just easier to just use iWeb since access to the source wasn't important.

 

[themoonisdown09]

My wife and I use iPhoto all the time. We have all our digital photos from the past 5 years stored in it... all being backed up with Time Machine.

I've used iMovie and iDVD a couple of times to put our home videos on DVD. We'll be using that a whole lot more when we have kids.

I did use GarageBand all the time to record projects, but we've since moved to Logic Pro.

I've never used iWeb... I use Dreamweaver and Microsoft Visual Studio for my web applications.

 

[andiwm2003]

i delete garageband as soon as i start the mac first time. it's beyond me why people make music without getting paid a lot of money. i can't see how that is fun. but it seems in my family the genes for music creativity have been lost three generations ago😱. but obviously a lot of people like the program so apple should continue it of course.

i used iweb a while and i like it because its so easy to set up a personal website. i think it's great but gets more and more competition from online webcreation sites.

iphoto is great but picasa is a strong contender now. if i hadn't 7000 piocs in my library i would use picasa because it's cross platform.

imovie/idvd is great for short videos for the family. but i guess there are shareware solutions that serve the purpose as well.

all in all ilfe is a good value for $79 but i don't see a long term future for it. there are simply more and more cheap or free online offerings and free apps that are not as good but good enough. so less and less people will pay $79 to upgrade every year. i only upgrade when i buy a new mac and get it for free (except this time with the mac box bundle).

i work however is a good alternative to excel for many (not yet for me) so I see a future for that. that also means it will never be free.

 

[srl7741]

iLife

I only really use iPhoto out of the iLife bundle but I would like to see iWorks included on any new Mac. It would help all the new users become more familiar with Mac software and make is an even better value for the consumer.

 

[messedkid]

I must admit, I only use iPhoto on a regular basis.


iMovie gets pulled out of the dusty application folder maybe 3 weeks out of the year to make movies with friends.

iDvd has never been used since I don't have a dvd burner.

I have played around with iWeb, but since I have no need to publish my own website or blog, I don't use it anymore.

I really like the Lessons they added to the new Garageband. I started playing the guitar a few years back, and started taking lessons to impress my g/f at the time. Dumped me 2 weeks before the senior prom...hadn't touched the guitar since. The lessons really helped get back into playing/learning. 🙂

 

[yetanotherdave]

Personally I'm the other way round from the OP,
I use iPHoto lots,
For the 5-6 times a year I want to edit a film iMovie is very useful, very capable, and anything more pro would be overkill.
Garageband is great for ringtones, podcasting, playing around
I have used iWeb to get a very basic placeholder website up while I was working on my own code, coupled with mobileme I can see a lot of people getting a lot of milage out of this one.
I think iDVD is the only program I haven't used.

OTOH I very rarely need to write docs. When I do, googleDocs will probalby do it, but I have openoffice downloaded in case. I can't think of a free alternative to iLife that's as capable as openoffice is to iWork.

 

[michael.lauden]

iTunes is not part of iLife. Nor is Front Row. I'm sure some bands will use Garage Band but what percentage of the population are musicians? [...] .

Front row may not be part of iLife - but it does access iPhoto - which is what i was referring to. if there was no iLife, there'd no front row.

and most people i know that own macs are musicians and or use it solely for digital media. the overall population of musicians/artists may not be very high - but in my opinion.. the population of musicians or artists that are also Apple users is very high

 

[Makosuke]

I as well like the idea of getting your choice of iWork or iLife free with a new Mac; it would let people with different needs pick the one that is more valuable to them.

That said, I'd still pick iLife; I get heavy use out of iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD. I agree that iPhoto is the most used--I work with photos daily and for 10K+ iPhoto is comfy for those of us not pro enough to need Aperature/Lightroom--but I've spent countless hours in iMovie and the DVDs produced by iDVD are of near-pro quality with near-zero learning curve.

Garageband I've only used once, but no one in my family plays an instrument and if I get into some audio recording as I'm hoping to I may well do more with it. iWeb I also only used once, but then I'm a part-time web developer so I'm not exactly average.

iWork would be nice to have, but for basic word processing TextEdit actually is quite nice--I've written a novel in it, and the layout is enough to handle the average school paper or such. Pages is really more of a page layout app than a full-featured word processor--the word processing end would be more like Mellel--which I rarely need. Keynote and Numbers are the same--how many "average people" make presentations or work with spreadsheets at home? I do, but I'm not exactly average.

 

[Melrose]

I don't use iPhoto that much, use GarageBand only for kicks and giggles, never touch iWeb, and have fiddled with iMovie only once or twice.

I don't use them that much, but I can see where Apple is coming from in including it on the system - for your average users I think it makes a uniform, familiar way to handle media and share it with friends/family. The only drawback is iWeb doesn't have default support for third-party FTP.

 

[Stridder44]

iWeb is one of the most useless/obscure apps in the iLife suite.

iWork is cool, but I still prefer Office.

 

[MiBerb]

I use IPhoto

I use IPhoto on a regular basis, for other applications, rarely.

But, ILife is the marketing image for MAC "The computer made for multimedia" and on the other hand you give something that has not much value and you sell what is more valuable such as IWork which I bought and does almost everything I need.