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

[WilliamLondon]

what is better to use . MS Office or iwork ?

For me word is a little bit slow ...

MS Office is/was a (feature bloated) racket designed to sell more copies of (or keep more people on) Windows. iWork is about delivering good/basic value to those in the Apple ecosystem. While there are some features in MS Office that iWork simply doesn't provide, the vast majority of users never, ever, ever (!) take advantage of those niche "power user" features and frankly waste good money on a suite of products that are free from many other places, including Apple. Personally, I'd forgo ever handing M$ any money for something you don't need and just use one of the many free options available.

iWork is good (better than good actually). If your needs are oriented toward basic functionality (which 95+% of users are), iWork will perform perfectly. If you need something more, other more functional suites of products exist, which are also free. Since Apple just made theirs free for all, I'd give them a whirl and see how you like them. The decision is neither irreversible nor destructive to your wallet. ;-)

 

[sbeaber4]

I love word on windows. Powerpoint as well. But they are god awful on macOS which I suspect the reason is its runs, not as a native program, but some weird emulator.

I like powerpoint for the ability to run animations on a click of an object(macOS version lacks this). If keynote ever gets this feature I might be done with powerpoint for good, however.

 

[graphicstation]

Hey Everyone,

Just spotted this news post on macrumors and i thought it would be great idea to share it here to everyone
iWork (Pages,Number,Keynote),iMovie & GarageBand now free for all Users

Source:
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/04/18/apple-imovie-garageband-iwork-free-for-all-users/

Happy Hackintosh-ing to everyone !!

They do this every so often, downloaded mine yesterday and all working fine!

 

[Vyzantion]

No there are threads about doing this some time ago. It was something that Apple allowed on new hardware.

It was not intended, it was a bug that many took advantage of. iLife and iWork were given free to those who owned licenses to previous versions. Installing a trial of a previous version to get the new one for free was the result of a bug, not of an Apple policy, so it was piracy. But now, they are free for all users, it is not piracy anymore to get them, if you have Sierra.

 

[Vyzantion]

I love word on windows. Powerpoint as well. But they are god awful on macOS which I suspect the reason is its runs, not as a native program, but some weird emulator.

I like powerpoint for the ability to run animations on a click of an object(macOS version lacks this). If keynote ever gets this feature I might be done with powerpoint for good, however.

You can try LibreOffice. Free and open source. I have not used MS Office on neither Windows or Mac OS X in years, never looked back, except for some touches on the online version on OneDrive, to make the files created in WordPad/TextEdit/LibreOfficeWriter fully compatible to MS Office as a format. I never looked back. As years go by, MS Office is becoming more and more a bloated monster, that eats up hard drive space and ram. At least 90% of users do not need it. As I said, on macOS, the only drawback I found for LibreOffice is that is cuts down for good (even if you remove LibreOffice) the ability. of the OS to handle Open Document Format (used by OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice) as archives. I recommend this Office suite. iWork does not seem to be too friendly, and it does not handle MS Office formats to easy, you need to make a lot of conversion work to have your work in a proper MS Office format. LibreOffice is a fork of the old OpenOffice.org, that still exists, but most of the developers are now on LibreOffice. OpenOffice.org has the same formats with LibreOffice and the same issue with the archive utility from macOS.

 

[andreboyrock]

Another alternative very nice and compatible with M$ Office is WPS Office, which unfortunately isn't available for macOS yet, just for Windows, GNU/Linux, Android and iOS. I hope they release a version for Mac, because I believe they have a great future ahead of them.

 

[Vyzantion]

Another alternative very nice and compatible with M$ Office is WPS Office, which unfortunately isn't available for macOS yet, just for Windows, GNU/Linux, Android and iOS. I hope they release a version for Mac, because I believe they have a great future ahead of them.

It can used with Wine, on macOS, or in an Android emulator like BlueStacks. But that is a little more complicated. Wine (partial emulation of Windows) is preferable to an Android emulator, due to the fact that Android apps are Java, and Java is a security nightmare.

 

[Vyzantion]

It can used with Wine, on macOS, or in an Android emulator like BlueStacks. But that is a little more complicated. Wine (partial emulation of Windows) is preferable to an Android emulator, due to the fact that Android apps are Java, and Java is a security nightmare.

Wine is available for x86 Unix systems, like Mac OS X, GnuLinux (including Chrome OS), BSD, Solaris. It is an attempt to re-write the Windows APIs starting from Microsoft documentation. It is a partial emulation (although Wine is a acronym that comes from”Windows” „not emulator”), not a full one, of Windows system, it is installed into the Unix OS, not as a virtual machine. Since it is very much guesswork, not all Windows software will work.

 

[littlegreen]

This is all great news! The full suite of software for free is definitely something to waste a weekend on to poke around. I have never fully indulged into it, because I don't like basic versions - but now with full versions for free I would definitely check it out!

BTW: For the "M$" haters around here I have some breaking news - Microsoft's Office suite has not been a port since 1998. It has since been developed for the Mac specifically.

And if you don't take advantage of it's features - well, then - you're not really doing any serious work, now are you? ;-)

I have tried LibreOffice, I have tried OpenOffice.org and I have even tried to survive within Google Docs. It's pretty simple really - it's just not the same. Like it or not Microsoft have actually done a good job on at least one thing.

 

[Gershy]

Hope to get fcpx for free soon

i highly doubt thatll happen anytime soon... they are pro apps, they arent gonna make them free... although there was an offer somewhere going for $200 that will give you FCPX, Logic Pro, Motion, Compressor, Mainstage. thats $650 worth of software for $200....