iWork 11? 12?

So, Rob A. at what point does it turn from responsibly pushing off the release date to being downright slow/lazy/unaware of their customer's needs? iWork '12? iWork '13? iWork '14? We are quickly approaching the 2.5 year mark, which seems pretty irresponsible.

Wow, Rob A...you obviously do not use many Apple products. Yes, they are way superior to anything Microsoft has ever produced, but they are certainly not 97% done. Keynote is buggy and crashy, and Final Cut Pro is slow and ancient. At least we've been promised an upgrade to FCP - to drag it slowly into the 21st Century.

It is interesting to note how long (many years) it's taken Apple to develop software to take advantage of its own multi-core machines, while all its competitors such as Adobe and Autodesk released multi-threaded, 64-bit versions of their software years ago. Just take a look at your CPU usage in the activity monitor next time you're waiting for Final Cut (Express or Pro) to render something and marvel at its use of around a quarter of your computer's very expensive processing power. Load up Adobe After Effects or Autodesk Maya, set it doing something and watch that CPU monitor fill right up - every core used to the max. It is insane how Apple's competitors are so far ahead of them when it comes to making software for Apple's machines. Just another indicator of how Apple is moving away from its Mac roots to making high-profit, mass-market silly little fashion trinkets like iPads, iPhones and MacBook Airs.

I use Keynote 09 on a regular basis and hate the way it'll corrupt files and crash repeatedly. Please, Apple, bring us iWork '11!

I don't agree with this statement. I use Keynote all the time to put presentations. It is a way easier to use than PowerPoint and does not crash.

I think I have to agree with Samvel. I use Apple because of Microsoft. Please don't read too much into that statement. I like Microsoft and it has a number of very good products especially in the business arena. But four big things pushed me away from Microsoft as my personal computing vendor.

1. Third party computer (hardware) makers.
2. Vista (and now 7). Vista just didn't work and 7 has senseless automations, is slow, and still has the Vista security model.
3. Microsoft Office - Probably the most abysmally terrible interface ever designed: The "Ribbon" has got to go (I could go on for a while about the waste of screen space, "hide-n-seek', etc. but I won't).
4. Customer support - they so need geniuses. :-)

I have been a software developer for nearly 20 years. I develop software for both Microsoft and Apple systems and each have their strengths. I wish I had the time to get software to the 97% mark but in reality programmers are usually happy to reach 80 - 95%. I think Apple is way ahead of the pack in this regard and I hope they never put a timeline before quality without an extremely compelling reason. I don't mind waiting because their products already do everything I need and the next release I am sure will be better. I use all of iWork all the time and I have not had anything crash yet. At worst I've had some compatibility issues exporting to Microsoft.

"I don't mind waiting because their products already do everything I need and the next release I am sure will be better."

I think the reason any of us are getting all up in arms is becuase for a majority of us, their products do NOT do everything we need. Indeed, there are HUGE gaps in functionality (as quick example, numbers didn't even have error bars until '09 version, making the entire lick of software useless for scientists; there are mounds of other functions currently missing I won't bother you with right now). MS office has terrible interface but at least it CAN performed the aforementioned missing functions. Release an update for iWork'09 to add these functions? Release iWork '12? I really don't care, just the current version becomes next to useless when it takes 5x the amount of time than it does in MS.

Since the OS X Lion has been released, they have updated iWork for Lion. So after that, if they are going to make an 11, it would be pointless. Continue waiting for 2012 people, there might be a new version then.

That's a very good point. Apple's software not only looks better than the Microsoft counterparts, it also works better. I've long held the belief (with nothing to prove it) that iWork '11 was about to release when Microsoft released Office 2011. If this is true, Apple may well have decided to go back to add even better features so they could once again knock the socks off of Office users. I love Pages '09 and have used it to create some fairly complex documents that the Apple Retail Store employees tell me they'd have to use InDesign to accomplish. I couldn't beging to get this complexity out of Word - but not being 64 bit means it starts to run slower as the document gets larger. I'd love to see a new version of Pages that supplies the 64 bit code and adds even better features. I love it as it is ... but that doesn't stop me from wanting it to be even better. 🙂

I think it is imminent now : the whole system is almost complete : even iTunes Match.

They are probably stablizing iCoud for now and waitig the "cloud system" is "totally" reliable to launch iWork 11 or 12 (probably 11, late 11).

For those of you who are happy with Pages "except for some compatibility issues with Word", let me tell you that the picture is different for those of us who collaborate on documents with the members of rest of the business world. The picture is horrendous. I love Pages and use it for all my marketing documents. And then I produce a pdf. But for content, when someone sends me a .docx I'm screwed. Neither Pages, TextEdit, docxconverter, OpenOffice (and its clones) nor any other OS X word processor preserves .docx content and formatting through one read/write cycle. So for Word compatibility, Pages is crap, to put it bluntly. So it's 2 or 3 years old AND crap for Word compatibility. Anything wrong with this picture? IMHO Apple has been so busy conquering the world that they've forgotten their so-called flagship software products. Shades of Appleworks. One thing's for sure... if Apple drives me to the point where I have to buy MS Office, I'm not going to be updating iWork ever again.