If you’ve been interested in trying out Apple’s iWork suite of productivity apps for yourself, but don’t have an Apple device to try them on, you’re in luck: Anyone can now create an Apple ID and sign into the iCloud Beta website to use Pages, Numbers and Keynote for free.
Although it only works on the beta website for now, if you go to iCloud Beta, you have the option of creating an Apple ID at the bottom of the page. Once you sign up, you get access to the productivity apps plus 1GB of iCloud storage space for your trouble.
It’s unknown whether Apple plans on bringing this to the main iCloud site, although I would think so. By making it easier for new customers to check out iWork, Apple’s lowering the bar to entry for people for whom excellent productivity software is the biggest criteria when buying laptops, desktops or tablets.
We all know that iWork is just as good as Microsoft Office, but a lot of Windows users don’t. Now they get to find out for themselves, for free.
Via: iMore
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
4 responses to “iWork for all! Apple opens up iCloud website to everyone”
Is it really possible, to not have a iCloud account??
I’m wondering when Apple’s going to turn iCloud into a social networking site that’s ad free. All they would have to do is give people an updated iWeb app w//themes to create their own webpage, people can add content that’s stored in iCloud, and it’s just adding the social networking features of a Facebook/Google+. That would definitely screw with Facebook’s World.
But for people to want to use iCloud apps, they have to be more full featured.
I think Apple has to do quite a bit of things to Numbers and Pages to get them to compete with Excel and Word. It’s just a fact and Apple needs to step it up a notch.
“We all know that iWork is just as good as Microsoft Office”
Ummm, no. I use Office all day, and iWork can’t touch it, especially when you compare Numbers to Excel. The two things are not even in the same league.
That hurts me to say because I love just about all other Apple software, but iWork simply is not a replacement for Office.
It’s actually not that bad once you get used to it. It has the most popular features, at least in Numbers (I haven’t played with/compared Pages). I don’t know what the average person would want that it doesn’t have.