You want one more reason to upgrade to Mavericks? How about you throw in iWorks for free? If that's reason enough, skip to the bottom of this article. Yep, I blab a lot sometimes. You should see some bullet points. That's where the procedure starts.
A friend informed me a few days ago (during the Apple event) that the fruit company was dropping the price of the iWork and iLife suites... to nothing. I'm sure this wouldn't have happened in the day of Steve Jobs. They more likely would have touted all the upgraded features, justified a massive increase in price and maybe even pulled a 'and we're not even increasing the price!'.
Frankly, I haven't heard too much about iWork. I didn't think of it as a contender in the ring with MS Office. I'd downloaded a trial for version 9 quite a while ago, but didn't bother to install it at all. Was I to be getting it for free now? This seemed like added incentive to install it to check it out. I jumped onto the app store and found... the exact same prices. At first I thought it might not have changed on the UK app store just yet. This feeling was echoed by my friend when I told her it hadn't changed. She sent me a couple of links and I followed them up with a few more, only to find that they were setting these suites free on any NEWLY PURCHASED product.
Hmmm... hey, I'm cheap. The only reason I got a Mac in the first place was to write some apps for the iPhone - nope... a year and a bit later that hasn't happened. I don't want to spend money on a bunch of apps that I'm probably not going to use. I've been more of a Windows person since... well since Windows 2 in the mid 80s when it was just something that looked flashy. I think MS Office is a little better than Wordperfect and VisiCalc with Aldus Pagemaker for slides. I don't have too much in way of expectations from Apple on the software side of things, so if it's not free, I'm not trying it.
Enter the app store. If you've got a program installed which is outdated, the app store will let you update it... generally for free. Trials for iWork (as far as I know) stopped after version 9.3 - which was uploaded to download.com a year and a day ago. I thought it logical that if I had it installed before checking for an update, apple would upgrade me to the latest version of the trial... only since there was no trial anymore, they would most likely upgrade it to the full version.
Having paid way too much (in my opinion) for the machine I'm using (the hardware is the only way I'd consider justifying the cost of this laptop), any freebie this fruit company wanted to throw in my direction was too much to pass up. I installed the trial version, ran each app, selected trial, shut the apps and started my upgrade to Mavericks.
When the machine booted after the upgrade, I was shown a list of all the apps that had upgrades available. Pages, Numbers and Keynote were included. I ran the apps to check to see if the 30 day trial was still on - it turns out it was. I then went ahead and updated all three apps. I ran them, and sure enough... since there is no trial version anymore I now have the full versions. This might have been possible without the upgrade to Mavericks, but frankly, I didn't check.
Here's the process:
A friend informed me a few days ago (during the Apple event) that the fruit company was dropping the price of the iWork and iLife suites... to nothing. I'm sure this wouldn't have happened in the day of Steve Jobs. They more likely would have touted all the upgraded features, justified a massive increase in price and maybe even pulled a 'and we're not even increasing the price!'.
Frankly, I haven't heard too much about iWork. I didn't think of it as a contender in the ring with MS Office. I'd downloaded a trial for version 9 quite a while ago, but didn't bother to install it at all. Was I to be getting it for free now? This seemed like added incentive to install it to check it out. I jumped onto the app store and found... the exact same prices. At first I thought it might not have changed on the UK app store just yet. This feeling was echoed by my friend when I told her it hadn't changed. She sent me a couple of links and I followed them up with a few more, only to find that they were setting these suites free on any NEWLY PURCHASED product.
Hmmm... hey, I'm cheap. The only reason I got a Mac in the first place was to write some apps for the iPhone - nope... a year and a bit later that hasn't happened. I don't want to spend money on a bunch of apps that I'm probably not going to use. I've been more of a Windows person since... well since Windows 2 in the mid 80s when it was just something that looked flashy. I think MS Office is a little better than Wordperfect and VisiCalc with Aldus Pagemaker for slides. I don't have too much in way of expectations from Apple on the software side of things, so if it's not free, I'm not trying it.
Enter the app store. If you've got a program installed which is outdated, the app store will let you update it... generally for free. Trials for iWork (as far as I know) stopped after version 9.3 - which was uploaded to download.com a year and a day ago. I thought it logical that if I had it installed before checking for an update, apple would upgrade me to the latest version of the trial... only since there was no trial anymore, they would most likely upgrade it to the full version.
Having paid way too much (in my opinion) for the machine I'm using (the hardware is the only way I'd consider justifying the cost of this laptop), any freebie this fruit company wanted to throw in my direction was too much to pass up. I installed the trial version, ran each app, selected trial, shut the apps and started my upgrade to Mavericks.
When the machine booted after the upgrade, I was shown a list of all the apps that had upgrades available. Pages, Numbers and Keynote were included. I ran the apps to check to see if the 30 day trial was still on - it turns out it was. I then went ahead and updated all three apps. I ran them, and sure enough... since there is no trial version anymore I now have the full versions. This might have been possible without the upgrade to Mavericks, but frankly, I didn't check.
Here's the process:
- Download the iWorks trial from a reputed site.
- Install this on a pre-Mavericks machine - if you've already installed Mavericks it tells you it's an upgrade rather than a trial. I tried it on Mountain Lion, but it might work on earlier versions of OSX as well.
- Run each application (Pages, Numbers and Keynote), accept the license and select trial when you're prompted.
- Close the apps (at this point you can check to see if the update is available for free, but I went ahead with the steps below)
- Upgrade the machine to Mavericks.
- Run the apps - select trial again (this may not be necessary, but I did it in case there's anything that the app needs written under the new OS before checking for an update).
- Check for updates and update the three applications.
- You now have the latest version of iWorks.
I checked my account (one of the most irritating things about the iTunes store is that you have to go) through iTunes (you can't do this through just a browser, your mobile phone or a tablet - at least I couldn't find a way to do it) and it told me that I'd purchased these three apps individually for free.
Now I'm checking these apps out... and I'm not impressed. It might take a while to figure if there's anything I like about any of them - I haven't looked at keynote at all yet, but the other two seem really way back in time so far.