Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

How does a new Mac user acquire Pages, etc?

F

fingerpuppet

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 5, 2018
17
3
This is really bamboozling me ...

I am selling a 2011 MBP to a friend. I wiped the drive and did a clean install of Sierra, leaving it at the stage where he needed to enter his credentials, iCloud info, etc, to set it up as a 'new' Mac.

All went well until we discovered Pages, Keynote and Numbers were missing - I had assumed they would be part of the OS, but no ... He is a new Mac user, and has never purchased or downloaded those apps before. Therefore, in the App Store purchases tab nothing shows. The versions of the apps in the App Store are for Mojave, and won't download.

So, in situations like this how does someone acquire those apps for an older OS?!
 
They naturally won't show up in his purchases since he's a new Mac owner. However, he can download them from the regular App Store. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers are free for all Mac users. He will of course need an Apple ID and password.
 
  • Like
Reactions: organicCPU and Apple_Robert
fingerpuppet said:
Yes, but versions for Sierra cannot be downloaded. That is the problem!
Click to expand...
Did he really try to press on the download button? If yes, is he logged in with his Apple ID? Sometimes logging out, restart and logging in again helps.
Usually one can not download the most recent version on older macOS versions, but the MAS should serve the last version of running iWork app (I could even download Pages 4.3, Keynote 5.3 and Numbers 2.3 for Mac OS X 10.8 in 2017 without ever having installed those apps before)…
 
For sure. Logged in and button pressed. Only the HS/Mojave version was available.

I brought the MBP home with me and did another Sierra clean install. Logged in with my ID, and again the apps were missing. This time of course they did show up under purchases, but again they could not be downloaded. No older versions available.

I read somewhere that installing iWork 09 can do the trick, but no. I installed and registered the apps, but newer (Sierra) versions did not appear in Updates, and I still can't download the versions in Purchased.

It's bonkers, but it is proving to be impossible to get the Sierra apps!
 
Last edited:
As I mentioned above, this didn't work for me, even after serializing the iWork apps.

Absolutely nothing works.
 
That even you, signing in with your own Apple ID didn´t get the older iWork versions that had been installed before is almost unbelievable. I hope it´s not because of the MBP 2011 is marked as legacy or the Mac was activated before Sep 1, 2013 or some similar artificial limitation. That would be just annoying.
Yes, you should really give Apple support a call or start a chat with them. There´s even a dedicated iWork team that might be able to help.

By the way, what about trying to set up a temporary account with the corresponding Apple ID for your friend on a Mac that does support macOS Mojave. Will he then be able to download the latest iWorks apps from there? And if that would work, what is going to happen afterwards, if trying again to get the older versions on the Mac running macOS Sierra? As a final resort, patching the MBP 2011 to run Mojave might be another option to get iWork (maybe on a second partition). If there´s no way to get the old apps installed and patching is no option, I can recommend LibreOffice that I prefer anyway over iWork.

EDIT: Just read the footnotes on https://www.apple.com/iwork/:
Pages for Mac, Numbers for Mac, and Keynote for Mac are available on the Mac App Store. macOS High Sierra or later required. Downloading apps requires an Apple ID.
Click to expand...
Sounds like your friend should install HS, quite soon… Don´t know why Apple has to take such actions without providing the legacy versions for free. I start to believe that Apple doesn´t like old Macs anymore. They might just functioning way too long ;)
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: fingerpuppet
Yes, in the end I caved in and installed HS on the MBP. As a test I logged in my credentials, and was able to download the three apps. :)

Also, iWork 09 still works well, so I will let him have that too.

Let this be a lesson to myself, and anyone else in a similar situation: with Sierra you are stuffed, unless cloning from a drive that already has the apps.
 
  • Like
Reactions: organicCPU
Meaningless question... are the iWork apps free-free, or are they free with a new Mac purchase? It used to be they went free with a Mac. I don't have any way to tell, I bought iWork back in the day, and have been updating the apps right along from the MAS.

HS right now, have no reason to bother with Mojave before September.
 
Last edited:
fingerpuppet said:
Let this be a lesson to myself, and anyone else in a similar situation: with Sierra you are stuffed, unless cloning from a drive that already has the apps.
Click to expand...
According to waybackmachine, that limitation has been starting in the end of September 2018. Until 09-23-18 iWork still was available for macOS Sierra. Seems like Apple almost conforms to its two years macOS life-cycle with the iWork suite. In 2016 the limitation seems to have been not the running macOS, but device activation date after September 1, 2013. So I might have downloaded iWork in 2016 and not in 2017 on Mac OS X 10.8.
posguy99 said:
are the iWork apps free-free, or are they free with a new Mac purchase?
Click to expand...
I suppose that as long as your Mac is running macOS High Sierra or later (models starting around 2009 to 2010 could do so) iWork apps are free-free right now. AFAIK, iWork is still tied to your Apple ID, so you could try by creating another account and Apple ID and download it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back