Didn’t buy iWork through the App store? Not a problem any more, says Apple.
When Apple announced that it was making iWork free yesterday, my ears picked up, largely because I’ve got a copy of iWork that didn’t come from the App store.
Yes, it’s true — there was a period before Apple delivered all of its software over the Internet, when software came on these mysterious shiny circular objects that went into a “drive” on the side of your Mac. SkeuoOnionBeltmorphism was all the rage, and I still had hair.
The thing with disc-based copies of iWork and for that matter iLife was that Apple never made the transition from those who had legitimate copies of the software over to the App Store. It still sold Pages, Numbers and Keynote as apps, but any updates were restricted to those who had purchased them through the App store.
You couldn’t transfer the licence to the App Store, even though it was legitimate software, and there wasn’t (to the best of my recollection) any immediate software difference between App Store iWork and disc iWork.
It appears someone in Cupertino has flipped a switch however; yesterday Pages was telling me all about the new 64 bit version of itself, but links only shifted me to buy the app again. This morning, however, the App Store app decided that I really ought to upgrade Pages for nothing, along with all its brethren.
Nice one, Apple, although obviously I’m left wondering why this wasn’t done way back when the App store launched.