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Apple Converting Trial and Pirated iWork, iLife and Aperture To Full Versions
tlhIngan writes "One aspect about the new OS X Mavericks release was that all Apple produced software was to be downloadable and updatable through the Mac App Store. However, this raises the obvious question: what happens to users who bought the software beforehand? Initial reports showed that the Mac App Store scanned your hard drive for software and offered to associate it with your Apple ID. The scans even found trial and pirated versions and upgraded those to fully-licensed versions. Even more interestingly, this is not a bug, and it appears Apple is turning a blind eye to the practice, giving away copies of iLife, iWork and Aperture to users who own trial or even pirated versions of the apps. Apple has also recently stopped providing downloadable trial versions of iLife, iWork and Aperture from their web site."
its associated with your corporate ID - apparently more valuable that the person-years it takes to write the software. Why is your identity so valuable ?
When can I buy an OS for a future "hackintosh" that I might build?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Good job, Apple. This will likely increase revenue from some of those whom you make legit, and will warm the hearts of some who, like me, despise all things Apple. Well, a little less today.
two generations of Mac pros is kind of vague. :) Last gen mac pro came out in 2010.
mac pros as of early 2008 are supported by Mavericks.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Current versions of Mac OS X require 64-bit EFI. The original Mac Pros only had 32-bit EFI. Mountain Lion does not have a 32-bit kernel and will not load 32-bit drivers in kernel space (kexts). If you replace the graphics card in the original Mac Pro with one that has a 64-bit driver, you can install Mountain Lion on the original MacPro1,1.
See http://www.jabbawok.net/?p=47 for instructions.
There's a lot of other operating systems to chose from. Linux, various *BSDs or even Windows.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: Piracy Edition (Piracy being assumed as the natural, efficient and convenient way to get software over the internet). It's working for Adobe, despite glacial user acceptance and strong vociferous opposition.
Step 1) entering product categories involving widely used standards: In this case we look at the "product category" as "minimal effort and cost software downloads" - what everyone lovingly calls digital piracy.
Step 2) extending those standards with proprietary capabilities: Beat-out the pirates on even the 'minimal effort' part by not requiring a crack, key or navigation of noisy comments for affirmation of operation/safety and worry of nested nasty bits in your bytes. Also the cost is actually less, since it's free of money and of questionable legitimacy.
Step 3) using those differences to disadvantage its competitors: No more trial downloads to easily crack, deeper mechanisms for software updates coupled with the ability to release consitent and constant updates which actually contain scoped functionality thereby daunting the crackers and hackers with new security mechanisms and version hell which results in a saturation of the pirate space with even more questionable softwares with varying levels of functionality/stability thus severly diminishing the causual pirate's desire and ability to identify and use the software they wish.
Brilliant. It works. Now I have to pay ;) (I, personally, have a personal moral stance which makes me inevitably wind up paying for, conservatively, %50 of the software I download - because it is the software I actually like or use and YES, believe it or not I actually want to pay programmers to write stuff!).
Still, it seems like there is another shoe to drop here. Now to read everyone else's comments for that shoe.
I bought Win8 using a pirated Win7. I suspect MS turned a blind eye as well, as my poorly cracked copy constantly nagged about being counterfeit software etc.
Apple is now providing it for free. Do the people who bought it get refunds?
I don't know. Is Apple able to go back in time and prevent you from deriving any use of the products until today?
For anyone that bought anything fairly recently, Apple does provide refunds...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple is now providing it for free. Do the people who bought it get refunds?
You can't, it's free also. Why would you want to pay more than nothing?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Same sort of thing happened with iTunes match. It scans your whole music library (legal or otherwise) and gives you high bit rate versions of all your tracks in the cloud (and available to download permanently, even if you don't renew).
I sold my last company in 2010. I bought a new MacBook Pro and decided to get iWork as it was far cheaper than Office. I needed to write a formal letter here and there, keep track of Farm expenses on a spreadsheet, and create presentations for start ups I was mentoring at a local technology incubator. Only thing that annoyed me slightly was having to buy the programs again for iOS. I felt if I bought them for mac they should have offered the iOS versions as part of the price.
Well then one of the companies I was mentoring started to take off and it went from mentoring to consulting to now being offered an executive position with the company. They were all Mac users as well, but that's when we found the problem with iWork. While documents synced between our own devices, Apple doesn't offer iCloud for small businesses where we could all sync to a company drive. Ironically to solve this we went to Microsoft SkyDrive and then eventually to Office365.
I still use iWork, especially Keynote for developing internal reports & presentations. As bad as this may sound, it's because I have a water proof case for my iPad and it's in my shower. That's where I often have my best ideas and it's handy to write them down, or go threw a presentation or write a todo list.
Where this is nice is for my Dad who now gets an office suite free with the latest version of the OS that will do everything he needs.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
From their POV, the pirated versions have cost them nothing. The worst that turning them to legit versions is going to do is increase their support costs. And if they were to pursue the case,
a) it wouldn't make them look good
b) show up how spyware their stuff looks
c) they'd still have to prove a loss
d) they'd still not have a sale.
Some people "pirate" because it's just damn well easier. If the full paid app is just as easy, then when they find out how easy it is, they may well take it.
Sale.
Dammit -- now I regret deleting the trial version after my trial period expired. Why oh why did I care about the disk space?
Now I can upgrade my pirated version of Lightroom to a legit copy of Aperture.
I bought iWork 09 several years ago (before the app store existed) and was surprised to see it upgraded on one of my laptops!
Thanks Apple!
If you have it, then you're using a mac one way or another. They want you using the latest software. The more people who use it the more benefit they get in terms mac or iDevice sales. They've already spent the money writing the software so they can sell more hardware. There is practically no marginal cost for distributing it.
I originally purchased iWork '09 via boxed media... When the App Store started distributing the individual apps, I preferred this for the convenience of downloading vs inserting a disc like a caveman.
Eventually I ended up re-purchasing Pages and Numbers for this convenience but have not forked over the dollars for Keynote as of yet... With this recent change, I dusted off my iWork disc and made the leap to the App Store version of Keynote for free.
It's always refreshing when paying customers aren't assumed to be thieves.
One company finally gets it!!!
You wouldn't happen to work for Microsoft would you? It seems like I've heard this before. . .
I've been using the new versions since they came out. They have more features than the previous versions, not fewer. As far as I can tell, there's no reason to use Office anymore, and I doubt I will. And from the sounds of it, the decision makers at Microsoft are very scared of this update. They are doing everything they can to devalue it.
I was running a pirated copy of iWork on one of my machines a few years ago when I noticed Apple software update recognized it as genuine, leading me to believe Apple has actually been doing this for some time.
The question I have is why does a company that has trust in it's customers need to be a member of anti-piracy groups like the Business Software Alliance [1]?
There are two things that has bothered me about people claiming Apple should be praised for allowing people to choose if they want to buy iWorks/iLife or just continue using the trial version:
(1) Steve Jobs had once claimed that with the upgrades of Mac OS X that "And everyone gets the ‘Ultimate’ version."[2] He was referring to Windows providing some features only if you upgrade to the highest priced flavor of the OS. But the truth is that Mac OS X by itself doesn't have all of the features of Windows Ultimate. It didn't have it back in 2007 when Steve Jobs made the statement and still doesn't now. For everyone to get a Mac OS X that has feature for feature what Windows Ultimate provides, Apple should have just bundled iLife and iWorks with Mac OS X.
(2) The true cost of using iLife and iWorks is not the initial purchase price but rather the vendor lock-in. Once someone becomes used to using iLife/iWorks as part of their daily routine, it is somewhat jarring to switch to another application. There are other alternatives that do similar things but they are not the same. While Apple has a set of libraries to makes it possible to port their application to Windows (as they have done with iTunes), iLife/iWorks mostly is only available on Mac OS X. The iCloud flavor of some of the apps is very much beta and incomplete. So, the bottom line is once you become accustom to iLife/iWorks, regardless of how you got hold of the applications, you are much more likely to continue using Mac OS X since those applications lock you into OS X to continue to use them.
Worst of all, Apple has a history of distrusting their users to let them know what products which where marketed as having a "flawless design" clearly have serious design flaws (overheating, not being able to power on after a shorter than expected life, not able to make phone calls when held a common way, etc). To claim Apple trust of it's customers is a beautiful thing is just failing to look at the big picture when it comes to Apple.
[1] http://www.bsa.org/about-bsa/bsa-membership
[2] http://macdailynews.com/2007/10/16/apple_mac_os_x_leopard_leaps_october_26/
This is not what the FSF meant when they said free software
while
Fucking Tim Cook is a fucking pussy. I'm going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to fucking kill Apple.
iWork still seems thrown together to me
<pedant>They released an updated Mac Pro just last year, though most people considered it barely worth mention, since it was a minor update after a long wait. Even so, that would be the last-gen Mac Pro, and it was in 2012.</pedant>
Beware about jumping on this too soon. iWork '13 on the Mac has many features *FEWER* than the previous version, to bring it more in line with the iOS version. A lot of people seem pretty annoyed by this, and who can blame them? I guess the good news is that the older version is moved aside, not deleted by the upgrade.
3 is not a lot and if you want a modern GUI, which is a GUI allowing you to control 100% of the computer through it, then *BSD and even most Linux distros are not real contenders. So that only leaves you only with Windows.
Nice!
I upgraded to Mavericks the day it came out (I know, risky move but so far, very impressed... especially memory management and battery life).
I just checked the App store for iMovie on my older MacBook Air and it offered me a free update of the "09" version which came with my machine.
iMovie is just about the only Apple software which I really like and use a lot so I'm happy to have the update.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
It seems that you can also install Mountain Lion on the original MacPro1,1 by using the patches provided here:
http://www.osxhackers.com/Installation.html
Apparently no need for a 32bit graphics card and it seems to work with 32-bit EFI, I haven't tried it tho.
Do you ever wonder how Microsoft products (Office, Windows, etc) killed the competency in the past?
Yes at some point Excel was better than Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro Pro; but there is another business strategy used by Microsoft outside the States: They were extremely tolerant to piracy in order to spread their products.
I live in Argentina, and here software piracy is more common than in the States.
Microsoft made some lobby to prevent piracy at work (there is an institution called "Software Legal" that was backed mainly by MS), but in other hand they ignored piracy when is convenient.
For example when Microsoft released C# they gave Visual Studio for free each time that they can. At that time Visual Studio Express didn't existed... but instead of giving a trial they gave the full version on different presentations/conferences that they did. The same happened with Office, they don't care too much if you have a pirate copy at home (most of the piracy prevention that they put in place is easy to turn off); but they put more pressure to companies in order to get money from license packages.
Please go ahead and install Windows 64 bit on any of those 32 bit only processors. Oh wait, you cant. How about 64 bit linux.... wait that doesnt work either....
ZOMG FOAM AT THE MOUTH ZOMG!
Maybe if you had a clue as to how computers even worked you would understand why they stopped supporting 7 year old computer hardware that were made with the craptastic Core 2 duo processor platform.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's a smart move because you don't want to alienate your possible customers. Either the pirates will buy your stuff in the future or they won't ever. Giving them a copy of the software that they already pirated doesn't cost Apple anything.
Is there a way to remove these? Apple is tracking us with this as a DRM. So, we can't even share our downloaded apps (e.g., Mac OS X installers) onto other computers. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Spotlight is now needed for some functionalities that didn't need it before, for example Mail's Smart Mailboxes.
Microsoft turned a blind eye years ago when people were pirating DOS and Windows 3.1 and later 3.11...and even to some extent Windows 95....though they made it harder and not so obvious, so that the average rube wouldn't know how, but it used to be a simple matter of using all 0000-0000-0000-0000-0000 and that was your installation code for Windows 95, enjoy...unlimited machines. Well that didn't last long, and as word made it to beyond the "nerd herd"...and up to the Mi¢ro$oft execs..."WHAT?!?!?! Some people aren't PAYING?!?!...."...then came the Alpha-Numeric registration key, who's generation method was cracked shortly thereafter. Then came the registration server, and the stupid and convoluted "Phone Home" method of registration with XP and Server 2003...(they've created an entire industry just based around the ability to even install the damn thing....call centers...registration server maintainers, and that's not even counting the licensing to USE the damn thing.....
I think Apple, if they're wise....will see what a boondoggle that is, and leave it alone. That *is* one of the selling points of Mac-in-Trash....they have fairly decent hardware, and relatively cheap software...and the few who don't pay for it, well that's giving them marketshare. If they were smart, they'd make the OS installable on non-Mac hardware, corner the market, and send M$ running, because Windows8 is a dog.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
It's "Differently Enabled" or if you prefer "Feature Challenged". Cripple is such a negative word.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.