Apple today updated several of its Mac and iOS apps, making them available for all Mac and iOS users for free. Previously, all of these apps were provided for free to customers who purchased a new MAC or iOS device, but now that purchase is not required to get the software. Enjoy :)
Pages for macOS
Keynote for macOS
Numbers for macOS
GarageBand for macOS
iMovie for macOSPages for iOS
Keynote for iOS
Numbers for iOS
GarageBand for iOS
iMovie for iOS
Yawn
Wakey wakey, Tightarse is here.
Sorry we are keeping you awake. You may not be interested but others are. Stop being rude.
my uni gets office for free
did it include the furniture?
Word on the street is your can Excel at your studies when One of your Notebook computers is plugged into the PowerPoint
Thats an optimistic Outlook.
can your "Publisher" provide "Access" to your "Project"
lame
lol… Do you feel better now?
I always put them in glorious CRAP folder and deleted them first thing with iOS 10.
May be useful to others so +.
You could always delete them, they've never been system applications. They're just third party user applications.
awkward silence from akd
Yeah. I think if you deleted them before, to get them back you'd have to pay for it.
Nah. They're added to your account when the device is initially activated with these applications preinstalled. There's probably a limit to how many (maybe just one) accounts that can have these items added to them upon associating an Apple ID with a new device, activated after 2013.
So the old devices that can't even update their operating systems still won't get the apps.
what devices do you speak of?
trying to run the majority of these apps on devices that can't run the latest OS wouldn't be worth your time anyway
Absolute rubbish. I have a 2009 Macbook Pro with upgraded ram (4gb) and ssd (60gb) and it runs faster than the day I bought it. It is now used as plex server and runs qbit, rclone, resiliosync, openvpn, a vnc server, chromium plus various other cron jobs. Missus used Office 2016 the other day and said it was much snappier than the 2011 version also. And yet, Apple will not let me update to MacOS Sierra.
Yeah but it is 8 years old. Like sure it sucks that it's no longer supported but it's not exactly unreasonable.
@tp0: It's an artificial limitation.
With Windows, do you have 2-4GB RAM, 40GB storage, some kinda display, and an x86 CPU? Congrats, you can run Win10.
most likely your mac uses a graphics card with a 32 bit driver . Nobody ever wrote the 64 bit driver so you are SOL
@tp0: Sure, I agree - it's 8 years old but it works very well and as I see it Apple made the Macbook Pros from 2009 to 2013 so well that they last years and this is the only way to 'encourage' people to upgrade. Especially as this was one of the last lines that could be user upgraded.
The 2009 Macbook Pro will last another year or two with OSX. Which is a solid decade… That's incredible quality.
My other Macbook Pro is a 2012 and, whilst still supported, I can see no reason within the next 3-5 years to upgrade it.
@Xiongmao: No I highly doubt it's some big conspiracy. Contrary to popular belief Apple almost always has a genuine reason for cutting off software support. In this case it could be a whole variety of things due to the complex nature of PC hardware and macOS driver support however kaos offers a pretty reasonable suggestion.
I use a 2012 Retina and have absolutely no intention to replace it within any conceivable time frame.
I just used a script from dosdude1 to upgradr a Macbook Pro 2009 to Sierra and it worked wonderfully.
Also runs Windows 10 in Bootcamp by editing the blacklist.
I installed El Capitan on 2009 Macbook unibody, and the WiFi adapter stopped working. Had to go back to Snow Leopard due to slow El Capitan and still WiFi didn't work. Looks like a permanent damage. :(
@newington07: You should be able to open the laptop and replace the wifi chip with a compatible one and you will have no issues running El Capitan.
If you download the apps via iTunes they will be makes as purchased on your account. From here, you can download them on an iOS device. If you're not on the latest system version, it'll simply download the latest version that supports your iOS version.
I'm not sure what the argument here is? Does it make it less of a deal?
iMovie for mac is pretty good. It's quite full featured so getting it for free is a good deal.
My son uses garage band and OTG cable on iPad for his midi keyboard ……Good for free…..Didn't k is people actually paid for it as these apps just seem to be there whenever an is upgrade is installed.
Didn't k is people actually paid for it as these apps just seem to be there whenever an is upgrade is installed.
I got mine for free too, not sure how…
Free on iOS and mac for any iOS device or mac device purchased after (I think) September 2013. It was a date that coincided with the release of an iPhone or iPad in early 2014 or before.
Free on iOS and mac for any iOS device or mac device purchased after (I think) September 2013.
So it's been free for the last 4 years. So what makes this a bargain then ???
They were previously free with a NEW iOS and Mac, so people purchasing used/secondhand devices still had to purchase the software. Now it looks like its free for everyone regardless.
I think this deal post is misleading.
It should make it clear this 'deal' is only relevant if your device is more than 4 years old…
@jv:
It's still relevant for people that purchased secondhand devices though. I have friends that only buy iOS devices that are 1 or 2 years old, so this is relevant to them too.
I have friends that only buy iOS devices that are 1 or 2 years old, so this is relevant to them too.
It should already be free on those devices.
@jv: It's free for the first iTunes account to activate the device. After that, if you use a new iTunes account, it's not free. Purchases (and freebies) are linked to the account, not the device.
@jv: anyone who hasn't bought a new Mac or a new iOS device within 4 years will not have access to this software on macOS or iOS, respectively. Nice for people buying second hand products.
In other news, Google makes their apps free.
And then they yank it away from you when you least expect it.
Google are pretty good at providing plenty of notice/alternates when they are going to kill something off
True. They give you years of notice. But I don't want them killing things off.
I still miss Picasa. Google Photos can't sort things in folders. You can make albums, yes, but if you have some really old photos that you scanned, they all get lumped together into one pile (because they have the same date), and it's hard to go through them and sort them. I already have them nicely sorted in folders on my desktop.
@flaminglemon:
Agree…I had the same issue and also miss Picasa… I was thinking of the issue you having as I faced it myself but never got round to addressing it… however the thought was as follows:
1) Create a Album in Google Photos, 2) Drag/Drop all your images from your PC into Google Photos (newly created folder via web browser)… This will upload your images to that folder as well as adding them to your 'catalogue' per say…
I have not tried this yet but the next time I need to upload a specific 'group' of images I'm going to give it a try and I think it should work rather nicely as most of my every day photos I'm just using the automatic upload app now.
@Jonc: That should work. But then you have the problem of how Google Photos sorts albums. The top albums will be the ones with the latest additions. So if I have loads of folders (I uploaded my entire photo collection last year. All 55,000+ photos.), I find it hard to find a specific one.
I don't know how it works in Google Docs though. I know they're linked. If I were to sort photos in there, maybe that might work… but I've got 55,000 photos sitting in there at the moment.
Not sure if uploading them directly into Google Docs again, in the right folder structure, would give me that unlimited storage bonus.
@flaminglemon: I'm not saying it's optimal, but you can edit the date in Google Photos. Or modify the date (exiftool or equivalent) prior to upload.
I've been updating older DSLR photos and using Picasa to add GPS exif. Then using exiftool to copy the GPS exif back to the original raw file (in case I ever edit again).
Then my workflow is to move a folder of images into a "Published" folder that Google Photos Uploader monitors. It will upload and resize to 16 megapixels. Then you open the recently uploaded images (via Google Photos Uploader), and put the images into their own album.
@Scumbag: Yup. Makes sense. Ideally, I would like to have my old scanned photos time stamped and GPS exif data attached.
People talk about privacy and all that (and I'm all for it), but I find having GPS coordinates on my photos really useful.
EDIT: Maybe I could make my nieces and nephews to do this for me. I'll pay them in hugs and food. That usually works.
You can still use Picasa to manage a photo collection it's just that Picasa isn't updated anymore.
What is Google's version of iMovie and Garage Band?
For a sniper, you really missed the point….
what was the point?
iMove = YouTube movie maker
5 days too late.
I have a Mac and a highend PC. I needed to splice some videos together over the weekend for a funeral.
I thought i would use iMovie only to find it was $23.
I then used some Coral software i had on my PC and i wont be going back as it worked really well and ive learnt it now…
i decided to sell my mac on the weekend as i dont use it…
Downvoting was harsh on this, iPeople..
k thanks
wow so many downvotes
Surprised so many people think Macs are a good idea….on Ozbargain of all places…
These will work great in the iCar…
They're already on my device, pretty sure I've never paid for them.
amazingly by made your font bold, you earn few up votes
If you follow jv's example, you have to do it once in every post. But just once.
Curious, is there an expiry date for these free?
No
For those who didn't click the link to read the article:
Apple has been offering these apps for free to new Mac and iOS device owners since 2013, but dropping the price to free for all users makes it less confusing and opens up downloads for those who have not recently made a new device purchase.
Ugh - they've dumbed Pages down to the point that it's little more than a text editor. Have had to buy MS Word to get anything useful done.
Yeah, i heard that the iWork-era Pages was more feature rich. But Pages has had some decent features added to it over the last 2-3 years. Older versions of Word for Mac were a bit dodgy too, but Word 2016 is pretty good. If only PowerPoint was as nice, the audio annotation functionality is really quite bad.
Try WPS office. You'll never look back
if you bought an iDevice in the last few years those apps have been free a while now. Good for MacOS though
To those saying that this isn't a 'true deal', I'll point out you're wrong. I had a secondhand MacBook Air and one of the reasons why I recently purchased a new one is because of the free iWork apps (as in, I factored this into the budget).
Having used Word for years, I've found Pages to be much smoother and contain less frustrating little issues, as well as being less 'fiddly' with formatting. I'd recommend giving it a go, especially since you can just export your work as a Word document when you're done.
So can someone explain to me why Apple are spending $$$$ updating apps they give away for free while announcing they are discontinuing support for Aperture? At the time of its demise it was one of the highest earning apps on the App Store.
Because the money they make selling apps is tiny compared to the money they make selling hardware, money really doesn't factor that much into it. :(
I would dispute that. The real money is in the apps - probably not the ones they develop but certainly there cut of all the apps that are sold.
Nope. In the first quarter of 2017 Apple's revenue for the iPhone (excluding Mac and iPad) was $54,378,000,000. For "services" which is their cut of apps, iTunes, iCloud and more they made only $7,172,000,000, or just under 10% of their total revenue of $78,351,000,000.
That's revenue, not profit (I couldn't find a breakdown by product of profit), but still, Apple is a hardware company. Also they make a lot of money.
Source: https://images.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q1FY17DataSummary.pdf
@lupiter: I stand corrected, that really does surprise me. Given the number of phones vs the number of apps people have on them. Just goes to show that, once you fork out the dough for the phone, you are probably getting good value out of it in relation to the app costs.
Tim Cook literally just complained that Apple has too much money. People are talking about Apple buying Disney just to maintain that cash's value in the long term.
iMovie is good.
However the problem with these apps is they are not universal. If Apple wants them to become popular they need to work on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android.
Then they will get market share. However by making them free it seems like Apple is close to shelving them!
Will it work with Hackintosh?
Should, assuming you've got graphics accel. working and a proper SMBIOS
Thanks for the share TA, waiting for them to be free. Would it work if my Hackintosh is still on OSX El Capitan or do I need to update to Sierra for it to do anything?
This isn't any use to anyone…
Those who like Apple would have already bought a device whithin the past 4 years only making it useful to apple haters…
Not necessarily. If you are given a Mac by your organisation, or purchased one second hand which was wiped with a base macOS installation, you do not get the Apps.
I had all of them, but for some reason was missing Keynote from my purchase history and wasn't willing to buy it. So this is great for me.
Is this permanent or for a limited time?
Permanent
They were free already if you bought a Mac in the last few years. This is still nice for everyone else though. Pages is a legit alternative to Word outside of the office environment where Word is pretty much expected, save as a PDF to preserve formatting of your resumes. All this software is good actually.
iOS versions has been free for a while now
I was stupid and in a rush of excitement to use Garageband one night I actually bought it from the mac store just a few weeks ago. This is despite having it on my mac before upgrading software, back when it was free, but I couldn't work out how to get it back since it wasn't in purchases. Should have always been free. Could have bought something else with that giftcard!
Logged into my account after a long time just to upvote this. Apple should have made these free a long time ago, but great to see they're catching up. You can also just use the Appstore App on Mac and download these directly from Apple.
Weren't these free for a while? They were on iPad anyway. Didn't buy any of it and it's been free download for me since I bought an iPad Mini 2 about a year or two ago.
Expired
Too bad I have a flapping Mid 2009 Macbook pro! Cut off is at Late 2009. IDK WHY! MID 2009 MACBOOK PRO STILL WORKS PERFECT.
Thanks OP.
very good find.
+1
Used deal to get iMovie which I was hanging out for.. but the macOS version is not so good and can't import all my images. Ended up using picasa to create slide show.
Nice.