pages 4.3 and Mojave …

Just because you own a Mac, and have reached a sexagenarian age — places no restriction on using the great variety of third-party Mac word processing applications that are available to you in the Mac App Store. You shoud determine what applications with free trials from the vendor site — offer the features that you require at this point in your life.

If you have an older Mac running either Snow Leopard (10.6.8), Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks, then you can run Pages '09 v4.1 (10.6.6 — 10.7.3), or Pages '09 v4.3 (10.7.4 — 10.9.5) with all functionality present. It was Yosemite and later where Pages '09 v4.3 began to suffer functionality loss.

The second paragraph spares you document export to Word, and the learning curve of a different word processing application.

Just to be clear: I am fine with Pages. Yes, even the new(er) Pages. My formatting demands are few; I just create text (I am a writer). The point I was trying to make is that I am becoming quite disillusioned with the Apple that I fell in love with eight years ago. No big deal, I realize. And as I said, I will probably buy another iMac if new models are announced at the event on Oct. 20. Because I am old and lazy and resistant to change at this point. But I would love NOT to buy another iPhone. And will try not to. But I'm old. And lazy. And resistant to change at this point in my life. I have become passively hostile toward Apple. Hard to explain. I don't like what they are doing, and I don't like how they are (not) doing it.

Like many others, I too prefer Pages '09, for many reasons. (An aside: when I tried to interest Apple in my concern, I was met with the usual pablum.) Now that I can't use it on Mojave, I'm considering a return to High Sierra. That would satisfy me now, but I will eventually have to confront the "going to Word" solution.

"I really do think that Apple wants (and intends to) get out of the computer business altogether." Hello, my wife and I are in our 70's and have been Apple users since the original Apple Classic. I have it in mind to buy her - for Xmas - a new Macbook Pro (the new one coming out to replace the Macbook Air). If your conjecture is correct, do you think I should reconsider?

"If your conjecture is correct, do you think I should reconsider?"

I have no way of knowing whether my conjucture is correct not, but I suspect that it is. Having said that, I will be watching the Oct. 30 event with great interest, and suspect that, should new iMacs be announced, I will probably get one. With reservations. I am 68, and am unwilling to retreat to Windows despite my suspicions of Apple's future plans, because it is the path of least resistance. My current 27" iMac will be 4 years old in December, and it is about time. I will, this time around, go with a SSD rather than Fusion drive, and hope for the best. Still, I am somewhat ambivalent about it due mainly to the fact that Apple's unslakakable, unmitigated naked greed---which is out there for all to see---disgusts me, and I feel conflicted about giving them any more of my money, because it means supporting a company (rather, a lifestyle "Brand") which I feel has become a monster which desperately and cynically attempts to present a human face.

Do what you feel is best and what you are most comfortable with.

Apple is making the Mac/macOS as unpalatable as possible. Even iOS which Apple has given a whole lot more love is getting tough on the user. I switched to Android and a much cheaper, large screen phone that actually works! Unlike my old iPhone 5 which always had issues, particularly with batteries and most importantly, making and receiving calls and messages.

It has always been a concern, just how long Apple will support its own hardware and software and in what state (usable/unusable) so I have always kept a foot outside Apple for everything because I can't afford to be screwed over.

You do not have to upgrade unless your existing iMac fails which I think is not likely. My iMac is now almost 8 years old and I expect it to last me a lot longer.

Pages '09 will work under Mojave except Mojave will not allow you to open '09 files! This is true even if you open with the latest pages and export as '09 file. Apple is clearly trying to force us off of '09, even though the current version of Pages *****. When I open my '09 files with the latest Pages version, the figure formatting is completely screwed up, forcing me to reformat. Apple could fix this problem easily, but they apparently are not interested. They are arrogant, believing that they know what's best for ALL writers. They don't.

As a deterministic individual, there is nothing stopping you from choosing a non-Apple word processing solution that complements your productive writing requirements. Decide, and take action. Stop whining to your fellow users, and making baseless comments about Apple arrogance, and how easy it would be to fix what is wrong with Pages. It is a free application, and free does not offer fee functionality.

Well, Pages 4.* was the best word processor ever for writing technical books with lots of illustrations. I've tried many other word processors and found Pages 4.* to be unequaled. The frustration comes from being 90% through a book and having important functionality disappear.

Free is not the point, and you may recall that in the early days iWork was not free. In the present Mac world, you can be sure that the programming costs of operating systems and other "free" software is bundled into the costs of Macs.

If you know of any other word processing software better than Pages 4.*, free or not, I would like to know about it.

I think you may need to get the latest version of Pages, which I think is 7.3. This will open your older Pages files and if you then try to edit them, it will try to save them as version 7.3 files that the older Pages will not open.

Around 70% of the Pages V4 features are in version 7.x but for some unknown reason, the other bits of functionality that made Pages the wonderful layout and text document creation tool that it was, they removed. They also decided it would be a good idea to obfuscate the UI to make it harder to use as well, just for fun.

I think the person who designed iTunes saw how wonderful Pages 4.x was and said, "No, no, this will not do!" and helped the Pages team make Pages as confusing and confounding as iTunes is. :-)

Found this thread while checking to see if Mojave supported Pages 4.3. Guess it doesn't. Oh well, it was good while it lasted.

There's one detail I haven't seen mentioned. Apple has said that Mojave is the last system to support 32 bit apps, BUT they also said that High Sierra was the last one to support them "without compromise"

So, clearly Pages is run with compromise on Mojave. High Sierra did work fine for me, though I can't guarantee it wouldn't break some specific functionality you use.

I got lucky: the new Pages actually now fulfills my needs. The last thing I needed was facing pages, and they added that about a year ago. So I'm now able to use the new Pages on mac, iphone and ipad. It's pretty nice.

But they have obviously not ported all features. On the bright side, they are slowly continuing to add features back in. Too slowly....5 years. But, they are doing it.

So High Sierra is the end of the line and you should be able to stay there for a while until you need to upgrade. But, I encourage you to make a list of Pages 4.3 features you need, and check if they've been added. I hadn't looked at the new Pages for a while and was surprised to find that everything I needed worked. And new features continue to be added.

I wouldn't hold out a ton of hope, but I also suspect that more than 0% of the people in this thread actually could use the new Pages, so it's worth looking into before switching completely. If you search my threads I had a few on making it work for my print and web workflow.

(Am currently using pages to scrivener to html. Both new and old Pages produces surprisingly good html output, which is why I continue to use it for my highly specific workflow)

Good luck all! I've got one thing to test on new Pages before I update to Mojave, to make sure everything works. And I plan to keep one old machine on Sierra or High Sierra so as to have access to Pages 4.3 just in case.

amen brother patrickindenver! every time apple updates our beloved pages i cringe because there was nothing wrong with it. as abe lincoln said [and i paraphrase], change for change sake is not progress. it seems most of what apple does is geared toward mobile app users to the detriment of those who helped apple get to the top. shame on them; it will cost them in the long run. long live the mid 2012 macbook pro!

Long live anything 2012 from Apple!

They have managed to stuff up just about everything since.

Don't think Apple will ever see another dollar from me. I must be some kind of trend setter because there are a heck of a lot of people I meet now who think exactly the same.

How many times can management trash Apple before it goes down for the last time?

For Pages problems, try here: Feedback - Pages for iOS - Apple