Apple's GarageBand, iMovie, Keynote, Numbers, Pages now free for all iOS & macOS users

AppleInsider

Previously only free with purchase of new hardware, Apple's entire suites of iWork and surviving iLife apps on iOS and macOS are now free for all, with no purchase requirement.

On Tuesday afternoon, Apple changed the pricing for the entirety of its iLife productivity suite, and iLife remnants iMovie and GarageBand. The change is notable, but not likely of major impact given that both have been free for five years with hardware purchase.

The apps themselves weren't updated. In the last update to Keynote in March, Apple added the ability for users to import Keynote 1 presentations, post presentations on other websites like Medium and WordPress-hosted sites, easily replace missing forts, and quickly open password-protected presentations using Touch ID on the 2016 MacBook Pro, or any iOS device with the fingerprint sensor.

Pages improvements from March include better text formatting, bookmarking, mathematical equation entry with LaTeX or MathML notation, RTF import and export, language and region time and currency customization, and also allows for Touch ID authentication for protected documents.

Numbers added the ability to add current or historical stock information to spreadsheets, a new My Stocks template, a new editing process for data and formula entry, improved text formatting, rich text editing within table cells, and the same Touch ID support as found in Keynote and Pages.

While the three productivity apps were released at the same time as iOS 10.3, none of them require it. For iOS, all three apps still require iOS 10.0 or later.

Keynote occupies 695MB of device storage space, with Pages, and Numbers taking 481MB and 361MB respectively.

GarageBand occupies 1.7GB of device storage space, with iMovie taking 697MB. GarageBand hasn't been updated since January for iOS, with iMovie last seeing an update in July 2016.

The macOS versions of the iWork apps all require macOS 10.12 or greater, and once retailed for $19.99. Numbers occupies 173MB, with Pages demanding 230MB, and Keynote taking 472MB.

GarageBand for macOS was updated with Touch Bar compatibility in November 2016, and requires macOS 10.10 or better, and takes 956MB of storage space.

Apple's iMovie for macOS was updated more recently on April 13, and includes some bug fixes. It requires macOS 10.11.2 or better, and occupies 2.15GB of storage space.

joe28753

As the Apple fanboy I am, I keep trying to use Numbers or Pages, but they always feel like child's toys not meant for real work. If I'm at work, I would probably be using Office, and if I don't have that or want a free option, I'd use Google Docs, for more easily sharing and collaborating with all the other people who use Google Docs and Office. Does anyone actually use these iWork apps?

lmac

I have an 8 core 2.8 Ghz Xeon processor Mac Pro with 32 GB RAM, but Apple says I can't run 10.12, so I can't run any of the current versions of iWork apps.

spheric

joe28753 said:

As the Apple fanboy I am, I keep trying to use Numbers or Pages, but they always feel like child's toys not meant for real work. If I'm at work, I would probably be using Office, and if I don't have that or want a free option, I'd use Google Docs, for more easily sharing and collaborating with all the other people who use Google Docs and Office. Does anyone actually use these iWork apps?

I use nothing else. 

Well, actually, I am forced to use Google Docs occasionally for collaborative team organisation stuff (specifically Sheets). But that's just horrible. 

Having recently discovered that the awesome layout mode is still in Pages (you have to convert to a layout document in the File menu), I'm a happy camper. 

macxpress

lmac said:

I have an 8 core 2.8 Ghz Xeon processor Mac Pro with 32 GB RAM, but Apple says I can't run 10.12, so I can't run any of the current versions of iWork apps.

Apple has to draw a line in the sand somewhere...sorry! I'll be in the same boat soon I bet. I have a last gen tower Mid-2012 Mac Pro. 

zroger73

joe28753 said:

As the Apple fanboy I am, I keep trying to use Numbers or Pages, but they always feel like child's toys not meant for real work. If I'm at work, I would probably be using Office, and if I don't have that or want a free option, I'd use Google Docs, for more easily sharing and collaborating with all the other people who use Google Docs and Office. Does anyone actually use these iWork apps?

I've used Pages and Numbers for all my personal word processing and spreadsheet needs for years.

At work, I use Office on Windows, but not by choice.

I started on Tandy's DeskMate followed by WordPerfect, Microsoft Works, then Microsoft Office. I also used OpenOffice and Google Docs before buying my first Mac about 10 years ago. I currently prefer to use the iWork apps.

ireland

Should have been made free years ago.

TomSawyer

joe28753 said:

As the Apple fanboy I am, I keep trying to use Numbers or Pages, but they always feel like child's toys not meant for real work. If I'm at work, I would probably be using Office, and if I don't have that or want a free option, I'd use Google Docs, for more easily sharing and collaborating with all the other people who use Google Docs and Office. Does anyone actually use these iWork apps?

The iWork suite was severely dumbed down around the time they decided to pare everything down to be more iOS-like, even Final Cut PRO, but there wasn't as urgent a backlash as with the Pro apps.

joe28753

lmac said:

I have an 8 core 2.8 Ghz Xeon processor Mac Pro with 32 GB RAM, but Apple says I can't run 10.12, so I can't run any of the current versions of iWork apps.

Do a search for Sierra Patch Tool. There are a lot of Mac models that are not officially still supported, but are capable of running the latest versions with a patch.

eightzero

spheric said:

joe28753 said:

As the Apple fanboy I am, I keep trying to use Numbers or Pages, but they always feel like child's toys not meant for real work. If I'm at work, I would probably be using Office, and if I don't have that or want a free option, I'd use Google Docs, for more easily sharing and collaborating with all the other people who use Google Docs and Office. Does anyone actually use these iWork apps?

I use nothing else. 

Well, actually, I am forced to use Google Docs occasionally for collaborative team organisation stuff (specifically Sheets). But that's just horrible. 

Having recently discovered that the awesome layout mode is still in Pages (you have to convert to a layout document in the File menu), I'm a happy camper. 

Me too. My macs are MS free and flash free. Fairly, I am a very causal user. In fact, much of my word processing can be (and in fact is) done on TextEdit. Now and then, I run across a stumper in Pages or Numbers, and a quick search will turn it up for me. If I had a gripe, it is simply that: you know a feature exists, but can't make it go.

Free is about the right price for this.I suspect rather strongly this has been a plan from long ago, and is tied to offering the for-pay iCloud disk space.

jabohn

macxpress said:

lmac said:

I have an 8 core 2.8 Ghz Xeon processor Mac Pro with 32 GB RAM, but Apple says I can't run 10.12, so I can't run any of the current versions of iWork apps.

Apple has to draw a line in the sand somewhere...sorry! I'll be in the same boat soon I bet. I have a last gen tower Mid-2012 Mac Pro. 

I don't see why Apple can't also make iWork work with El Capitan. It doesn't require the latest iOS so why the latest macOS? My Mac Pro keeps bugging me to update, but Apple won't let me.

rogifan_new

I feel bad for 3rd party developers trying to make money off of pro software (or any software for that matter) these days. The App Store has basically made people think software should be free or no more than $1.99.

StrangeDays

joe28753 said:

As the Apple fanboy I am, I keep trying to use Numbers or Pages, but they always feel like child's toys not meant for real work. If I'm at work, I would probably be using Office, and if I don't have that or want a free option, I'd use Google Docs, for more easily sharing and collaborating with all the other people who use Google Docs and Office. Does anyone actually use these iWork apps?

Yup. Documents and spreadsheets and presentations for my business. I don't need the often-cited "pivot tables" nor "column flowing" or whatever. I love having web clients with feature parity as well. For general productivity they're great. If you need specialist tools then so be it, enjoy paying for Office.

StrangeDays

zroger73 said:

joe28753 said:

As the Apple fanboy I am, I keep trying to use Numbers or Pages, but they always feel like child's toys not meant for real work. If I'm at work, I would probably be using Office, and if I don't have that or want a free option, I'd use Google Docs, for more easily sharing and collaborating with all the other people who use Google Docs and Office. Does anyone actually use these iWork apps?

I started on Tandy's DeskMate followed by WordPerfect, Microsoft Works, then Microsoft Office. I also used OpenOffice and Google Docs before buying my first Mac about 10 years ago. I currently prefer to use the iWork apps.

Ah yeah, the good ole days. Don't forget GeoWorks, which was a pleasant GUI and set of personal productivity tools from the '90s that holds a soft spot in my heart:

StrangeDays

ireland said:

Should have been made free years ago.

I always love this trope -- when Apple does something good, you can always count on someone to "But they should have done it sooner!"

jkichline

joe28753 said:

As the Apple fanboy I am, I keep trying to use Numbers or Pages, but they always feel like child's toys not meant for real work. If I'm at work, I would probably be using Office, and if I don't have that or want a free option, I'd use Google Docs, for more easily sharing and collaborating with all the other people who use Google Docs and Office. Does anyone actually use these iWork apps?

I use Pages and Numbers all the time for actual work.  They are both quite powerful, but it's a shame they removed mail merge from Pages.

macseeker

lmac said:

I have an 8 core 2.8 Ghz Xeon processor Mac Pro with 32 GB RAM, but Apple says I can't run 10.12, so I can't run any of the current versions of iWork apps.

Here is your friend:  http://dosdude1.com/sierrapatch.html

mike1

I use Pages and Numbers for personal use all the time. Never needed anything more. I use MS Office at work. No need or desire to use any Google product.

SpamSandwich

Should definitely convince fence-sitters to jump in to iOS.

tzeshan

joe28753 said:

As the Apple fanboy I am, I keep trying to use Numbers or Pages, but they always feel like child's toys not meant for real work. If I'm at work, I would probably be using Office, and if I don't have that or want a free option, I'd use Google Docs, for more easily sharing and collaborating with all the other people who use Google Docs and Office. Does anyone actually use these iWork apps?

I am writing a book with Pages.  It is 74 pages long will figures.  

zoetmb

StrangeDays said:

ireland said:

Should have been made free years ago.y 

I always love this trope -- when Apple does something good, you can always count on someone to "But they should have done it sooner!"

I'm not sure that "free" is always good.  It means that Apple has no incentive to improve these apps.    I'd rather pay $100, even $200, for a great suite of apps that are going to be consistently improved and supported than use crappy free apps.  

When I started working primarily from home, I thought I would switch to Pages and Numbers, etc., but it hasn't worked out that way.   I never use them.  They're simply not as powerful as Office in spite of all the terrible things about Office.   Numbers does have that nice feature where you can overlay spreadsheets on top of each other that Office doesn't have, but it's lacking in almost every other respect.    Apple takes their obsession with Zen too far and they over-simplify the apps to such an extent that they're actually harder to use because of what they lack.