Q: Pages 5 features checklist

KiltedGreen wrote:

 

… Of course this is speculation but so is yours. …   All we can do at the moment, as many including yourself have done, is to ensure that we post our clearly detailed and reasoned dissatisfaction with the direction of Pages 5 here and on the App Store and send Apple feedback too.

I wholeheartedly agree. 

Peter, reading your last two posts reminds me of someone who is in a destructive personal relationship that knows it's not good for them and that their friends can see is not good for them but they continue with it regardless - over 67 pages in fact!

If you want to reduce your pain, I suggest you take some of your own medicine and ditch Apple ASAP.

I wish you the very best in finding an alternative hardware and software supplier relationship that works for you.

Just got my old iWork 09 from my time capsule. I think i am going to be using that untill they fix up the new iWork. There are just to manny functions missing or just implemented bad. Apple you dissapoint me on this one.

I think Apple is going to turn Macs into giant iPads. It is possible that they are learning from the reactions to iWork that we don't want that. Just in case, it would be a good idea to go to apple.com/feedback and tell them that we don't want Macs to turn into iPads, or to be limited by what iPads can do. Don't be cynical. An avalanche of feedback that they will lose sales big time is going to have an aggregate effect.

KiltedGreen, I disagree. A professional business relation is, in some ways, like a marriage: you can't just let your partner find out that, all of a sudden, you want an open marriage or you don't want any kids. ("Since when?" "Since now.")

When you're a pro, you plan ahead. When you're a pro, you never go "yeah, let's change hardware/software suppliers as of now, we're kinda bored".

I agree with you. I'm stating the obvious: all possibilities are possible, so we should avail ourselves of them. Apple is a profit-oriented business. If they get sufficient feedback that a course of action will result in less profit, they may act on it. On the other hand, they may just stay in their echo chamber.

We are getting mixed signals. On the one hand, it seems that they are chasing iPad butterflies to the point where they don't see the value of their Mac line.

Steve Jobs said that PCs were like trucks, and in a world that only has trucks, we used them as cars. Now we have cars. They don't eliminate the need for trucks. There is still profit in trucks.

Is Apple going to slowly abandon the Mac business for iPads? The reason I didn't buy a new iMac last week is because I didn't know the answer to that question and the new iWork for Unicorns threw me for a loop. On the other hand, there hasn't been a new MacPro for so long that sales must have fallen off, and they probably could have made an internal justification for dropping it from their line-up. But they came out with a new MacPro. Not just a MacPro, but one that took considerable investment in R&D.

Apple won't tell us about their future direction, and in some ways that is wise, because if they disclose it, they are bound by it. We need to know, but we can only read tea leaves.

iWork makes it look like Apple wants to substitute its computers with iPads

MacPro makes it look like Apple wants to supplement its computers with iPads.

Is it one, the other, or both?

Hi, my name is Cosmo. I'm a recovering wishful thinker...

There is a catch-22 in all this.

While wishful thinkers may be able to say 'I told you so' in the long run, if and when Apple returns the features, the simple fact of the matter is any corporate decision Apple makes will not be driven by happy wishful thinkers, but by disgrunteled skeptics who threaten their revenue model.

I remember a study that once showed that the person who predicts tomorrow's weather as being 'a continuation of today's' will be more often right than the highly trained meteorologist (of course, when the predictor is wrong, he is really wrong) - until Apple visibly shifts what it has done yesterday, I have nothing on which to base that tomorrow will be any different. Apple has broken a promise to me - that I can trust that their developement won't break my work, my software, and my computer. The only way of responding to a broken promise is a threat.

In other words, I have nothing to lose by being a disgruntled skeptic. If I am really wrong I lose nothing except bragging rights.

@PeterBreis0807

Well, I think we can both agree that Apple has abusive policies towards customers when it comes to adequate communication and consideration of legacy workflows (and also when it comes to deciding and announcing when today's workflow will suddenly become legacy).  I also agree that Apple probably doesn't share information about future plans for many reasons, one of them possibly being the prevention of early exodus of users.  I'm not a fan of how Apple handles these things at all.

Beyond that, I think we just have different speculation about Apple's intentions and roadmap...  I do agree that iOS is getting the lion's share of resources and attention from Apple right now, but I don't really see the evidence that Mac is being abandoned.  As a Mac user, I have gotten new Apple software and updates more frequently in the past year than I have in years previous.  What certainly may be shifting is Apple's design philosophy and goals for their applications, meaning, they may be aiming to drop the bar on what audience their "pro" software is aimed at, to include new and casual users even at the expense of power user features and functionality.

Final Cut Pro X is indeed, as you say, only one example.  But there are numerous examples of Apple apps for the Mac being updated / overhauled in the last couple years in ways that are completely different from their iOS counterparts.  iPhoto and Garage Band come to mind, since they are both much more fully-featured on the Mac than on iOS, despite both versions having significant updates over the last couple years.  Same for small apps like AirPort Utility and massive scale applications like the operating systems themselves.  Although Apple has brought sandboxing and iOS-like iCloud APIs to OSX, they have continued to also add features to the desktop operating system that are nothing like what can be found on iOS and are of specific benefit only to desktop users (new multi-monitor handling, app nap, tags in Finder and the file system, the versioning system for documents, etc.)

So while what you say may indeed be possible about Apple's motives and future plans, I think I just interpret their actions differently and believe that the evidence (and occasional statements from past and present Apple leadership) points to Apple wanting to create applications optimized for platform (desktop and mobile) that are linked together and kept in sync through the cloud.  Not wanting to merge iOS and OSX into one lowest common denominator experience (I mean, how many times has Tim Cook made jabs at Microsoft for that approach?).  Apple may get less money from Mac than iOS currently, but who would flush $21 billion in revenue per year down the toilet just because it's less than $120 billion?  I'm sure that Apple would rather have both, not one or the other.  As a note, Macs still generate more revenue and profit than the totality of iTunes store sales (books, music, TV, movies, apps).  But I don't see people predicting the abandonment of selling apps and content because it makes less money than selling hardware.

Of course, the smart thing is to make money in all these arenas, and to compete and attempt to capture as much of the market as possible in each as well. 

You are correct that Apple is known for, and has a reputation for ruthlessly abandoning past technology, products, etc. and that their users must be aware of this when making a decision to use / stick with Mac and even iOS.  But I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be interested right now in still making the best possible desktop hardware and software, and being as competitive in that market as possible.  Most likely the reason they felt comfortable burning their iWork suite to the ground (and the users who depended on it) is because it had a negligible user bas in the first place, and wasn't competetive in its own market against Microsoft, Adobe, and Google.  So they are trying something totally new and different.  Again, I do not condone or support Apple's treatment of current and past users at all.  But I do have a different interpretation than yours as to WHY they are doing what they do, and where I believe they are going from here.