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while popular, i can't imagine these apps generate any revenue that apple will sorely miss, however by giving them away free they gain massive karma as well as majorly expanding their user base. not to mention flipping the bird at both MS Office and Google Docs.

i bought pretty much all of these apps years ago and they have been worth every penny over the years. people are impressed when they find out i created documents on my ipad and without using a Microsoft app (only once did someone ask me if I used Docs).

way to go apple!
 
This doesn't have anything to do with the free app giveaway for the app store anniversary, does it?
 
Great move if true. Yet they should _almost_ be included with iOS, but since some people don't need them it saves space on some devices instead of bloating everything like most android manufacturers.

Like iBooks, which doesn't ship on your iOS device, but is a free download.
 
iCloud being "free" is a very limited amount of storage - much of what I suggest in this concept of having a free and a paid version of the iWork apps.

I don't recall iOS updates being paid.

Apple does not have a track record of giving away the farm, whether it be apps (almost always paid), or hardware.

I think this is a move that is reactionary to so many apps out there across multiple developers and platforms that are free. Ad based or not, but still free.

The point is that iCloud was once paid and now it isn't. iOS updates used to cost money (may have been just on the iPod touch now that I think about it).

I wouldn't call iWork "the farm". Apple makes money from hardware. If they start giving that away free then we should worry.

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But it doesn't differentiate as all of Google's drive apps are free

The differentiation is not in being free but in the fact that these apps are free and exclusive to people who buy Apple devices.
 
Hmm. I was just about to purchase Pages. This rumor complicates the decision.

I would just buy it. It's totally worth it for all it does in iOS and OSX. Plus, if this is rumor turns out to be true, you'll have the rest of the suite soon anyways.
 
This is bad, IMO. The iWork suite works incredibly bad for me - it's slow, buggy, somewhat limited. I would rather have an upgraded version (after all this years...) than just adding buggy Cloud functionality and making them free.

Way to find a way to bitch and complain about a free service. Bravo.
 
The point is that iCloud was once paid and now it isn't. iOS updates used to cost money (may have been just on the iPod touch now that I think about it).

I wouldn't call iWork "the farm". Apple makes money from hardware. If they start giving that away free then we should worry.


Then I guess I'm doubly confused. I was not aware of a paid only version of iCloud. Are you referring to how mobile me cost $$$ as the paid predecessor to iCloud? If so, that's a bit of a stretch since they're related, but two different products.

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Way to find a way to bitch and complain about a free service. Bravo.

Just because something is free doesn't mean it is immune to criticism.
 
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This is bad, IMO. The iWork suite works incredibly bad for me - it's slow, buggy, somewhat limited. I would rather have an upgraded version (after all this years...) than just adding buggy Cloud functionality and making them free.

Agreed. Even basic functionality in Keynote like driving an external projector is hugely buggy when displaying a presentation (originally) created by MS PP. (Even if you do convert the file with the desktop OS X Keynote.) Section "1.2 Any Differences Between Source Devices?" at https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1587698/ explains this in depth.

They should fix these major bugs first and, preferably, add more elaborate editing capabilities. Currently, the OS X version of the iWork suite is far-far more advanced when it comes to editing.
 
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If true I think this is really interesting. What it says, though, is that things like word processing, spreadsheets and slide shows are becoming basic and standard functionality that some day we will look at like we look at Mail or Safari or Notepad or Text Edit - these apps provide such basic and standard functionality on a computer they provide these apps for free as part of the OS. What revolutionary changes do we expect in an office suite? Haven't we already achieved pretty much everything they'll ever do, or we'll ever want from them?

For the ones that need that extra functionality, they can get MS Office, but I contend the people that need that extra functionality is a much smaller group than Microsoft would have you believe.

If they do this, it'll be in keeping with Apple providing "stuff" for the devices they sell in order to make them more usable and more valuable to us, the users of them.
 
Funny, but as far as I am concerned, iWork beats Office hands down in real-world use, and has done since the first release. I don't need features for the sake of features, or newness just for the sake of newness. If you are going say that an app is "outdated" then you need to point out how, specifically.

iWork hardly beats Microsoft Office in real world usage. If you have any need of features, then you'd never say that.

The program which I use most is the word processor. And there is a huge difference between Word and Pages.

Word has support for cross-references and indexing, for instance, which are two very useful features for those people who write long and complex documents. Such features save a lot of time and effort. However, Pages has no support for them.

Word has a very efficient grammar check (and it works in Portuguese!), which helped me a lot in avoiding some very serious mistakes. Apple Pages does not.

If all you need is a simple word processor, that can handle styles, footnotes and images, so your son can do its homework, then Pages is a good and elegant solution. But a word processor is much more than that. Full-featured word processors have instruments to make it easy to handle large quantities of text. Pages is not the solution to those needs.

In addition, iWork does not have full compatibility with Office files. And Office files are the standard now, meaning that everyone should be able to open and save in these filetypes. They are open standards now, and Apple could spend some thousand or million dollars to decrypt them and make iWork fully compatible. But Apple didn't.

You may say that it is unfair to require that every office suite has the ability to open and save Microsoft Office files. It may be. But the real world requires that. iWork only runs on Macs, which represent roughly 5% of all computers in the world, and are even less used in corporate environments. If I send a text or a presentation to someone, these people will try to open it with Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office for Windows is the standard and it's useless to fight against it.

These things are the main reasons why I didn't use Pages to write my dissertation thesis. I used Microsoft Word. For Windows. Because it has all the features I needed, and which were necessary so I could finish it on time. Pages didn't have these features.
 
while popular, i can't imagine these apps generate any revenue that apple will sorely miss, however by giving them away free they gain massive karma as well as majorly expanding their user base. not to mention flipping the bird at both MS Office and Google Docs.

i bought pretty much all of these apps years ago and they have been worth every penny over the years. people are impressed when they find out i created documents on my ipad and without using a Microsoft app (only once did someone ask me if I used Docs).

way to go apple!

BTW, it's pretty much understandable Apple tries to offer these local apps for free on iPads. After all, both Google (online office apps) and MS (offline full(!!) MS Office) do the same.

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iWork hardly beats Microsoft Office in real world usage. If you have any need of features, then you'd never say that.

The program which I use most is the word processor. And there is a huge difference between Word and Pages.

Agreed. Also add that the iOS version of Keynote is both buggy (see my prev. post) and much-much inferior to even the OS X version of Keynote, let alone MS Powerpoint.
 
Honestly, I have not idea what is going on with Apple software, their own products are so outdated, the full iWork suit came out in 2009 right? So that is a 6-7 yr old software, and Aperture came in 2010, that is 3-4 years!

Agreed, the software is old and in dire need of an update, but lets not exaggerate the point, 2009 was 4 years ago. :)
 
If these apps become free, then you can safely assume that other Apple users will be able to read files you send them. No more "I don't have Pages, send a Word document." Making these file types ubiquitous will be a good thing for Apple and their users and make it more difficult for a competitor to get a file format foothold on the platform.
 
That is an overstatement. Google Docs are simply useless and nonsense created for the sole purpose of making Android people happy.

Yeah!

We need Apple products where we can't have real-time collaboration! That's so much better than Google Docs where you can work with people in a team.

Who needs collaboration when you have a pretty UI?
 
If they make iWork and iLife free for iPad and Mac owners this will be huge and OS X and iOS will blow the competition. Many people will buy the hardware only for the software and knowing apple margins on hardware there will be enourmous benefits. Right now apple earn money from iOS devices, the hardware and the itunes and the appstore content. The revenue from software is too small.

I always though that text, chart, powerpoint, video and photo editing tools should come as part of the OS. This is basic software that almost everyone use.
 
Each app's value already far exceeds its current cost. Totally unnecessary to make them free. All the more impressive and awesome if this happens.

Seriously, you mustn't work in enterprise world...

Right now, the only thing that save Microsoft ass is that everybody has office. Now imagine a second, that suddendly, all iPads in enterprises (80 to 90 % of all tablets) get the whole iWork suite for free.

What do you think will happens ? People get iWork on iPad with iWork on iCloud for free they can use on mobility situation. While Office is still not available on iPad and will probably never been.

You obtain the Microsoft nightmare: office is challenged in enterprise world. The last wall that resisted at last.

And no the 2/3 people that use advanced excel work (because it's always the people used to proove that office is the only valid suite in enterprise right ?), won't help.

Add to this that ALL STUDENTS that get an iPad for schools get iWork for free. What will they push once they get a job ? Office ? nope iWork.

If they do it, it's finally a serious answer for office suite problem in the Apple world.
 
Seriously, you mustn't work in enterprise world...

Right now, the only thing that save Microsoft ass is that everybody has office. Now imagine a second, that suddendly, all iPads in enterprises (80 to 90 % of all tablets) get the whole iWork suite for free.

What do you think will happens ? People get iWork on iPad with iWork on iCloud for free they can use on mobility situation. While Office is still not available on iPad and will probably never been.

You obtain the Microsoft nightmare: office is challenged in enterprise world. The last wall that resisted at last.

And no the 2/3 people that use advanced excel work (because it's always the people used to proove that office is the only valid suite in enterprise right ?), won't help.

Add to this that ALL STUDENTS that get an iPad for schools get iWork for free. What will they push once they get a job ? Office ? nope iWork.

If they do it, it's finally a serious answer for office suite problem in the Apple world.

Why do you think Microsoft is pushing Azure and the Xbox?
 
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