I’m sure old farts like me increasingly bang on about peak Apple. The good old days that followed the very, very bad old days when it felt like the company might wink out of existence entirely. But Steve Jobs returned and the hits kept coming. iMac. iPod. iPhone. iPad. Apple was a hardware company making fantastic hardware. But to make people want to use it, Apple made great software too – and obsessed over the details.
Sure, there were flubs, and you’d need to be spectacularly naive to think Apple didn’t also care about money. This was, after all, a company that needed an awkward cash injection from Microsoft to stay afloat. But it constantly talked about prioritising the user experience, living at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, and ‘bicycles for the mind’.
That Apple feels gone. Nowhere is that more evident than in the latest revamp of its office apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which shows what’s currently wrong with Apple in microcosm. In short, I don’t like it. In ‘not short’, here’s why…
Money for new rope
Ads have been creeping into Apple software for years. The App Store places sponsored results above exact search-term matches. You’re nudged towards paid Apple services at every turn. But now even productivity isn’t safe.
Open the new Pages, Numbers or Keynote and you’re urged to upgrade to the new Apple Creator Studio subscription bundle. Banners are impossible to avoid. ‘Premium’ features glow purple in menus and elsewhere. Click one and you’re again asked to pay.
When looking for a template, you must now scroll past ‘premium’ options (that look no better than free ones) to get to something that won’t require your credit card taking a hit. And you can’t turn this off, which makes the new iWork resemble freemium App Store detritus rather than the quality premium suite it’s been since its inception.
Elsewhere, a ‘creator hub’ of clip art is gated, as are variable AI features. The AI generator doesn’t appear to be meaningfully superior to the free Image Playground. Usage caps evaporate after a couple of Keynote decks. And while ‘Magic Fill’ in Numbers can be useful, it’s absurd that spreadsheet wizards can only access it by splashing out for a bundle that includes pro-grade video, music and photo editors they might never use.
Liquid a——
Adding insult to injury: that detail thing I mentioned earlier. Apple software was never perfect, but it appears Apple of late is making a special effort to not care about the finer details.
Updating from version 14.5 to 15.x of these apps requires new downloads that sit alongside the existing ones. Cue broken Dock items and confused elderly relatives. And the interface is a hot mess as Apple wrestles with the shortcomings of its own deeply flawed Liquid Glass design language. Clarity suffers. Some interface elements are straight-up broken. And unified toolbars mean document titles can end up truncated because space-hogging icons rampage across the screen and take priority.
Speaking of icons, even the app ones are now bad. Indie designer Guillaume Ardaud of Héliographe Studio quipped that if you put historic iWork icons in reverse, “it looks like the portfolio of someone getting really really good at icon design”. I wouldn’t go quite that far – early skeuomorphism had its own issues. But Apple swung too far the other way. It’s gone beyond iconographic forms to abstract blobs that barely communicate function.
Name game
Heck, even the names are a mess, ditching refinement to bolt on obnoxious SEO-driven subtitles. According to developer Craig Hockenberry, even this is rooted in cynicism: it blocks others from using the same subtitles on any platform. So: a land grab by Apple to deal with its own store’s shortcomings and block others from using key terms. Hilariously, because macOS strips colons from file names, apps across Apple Creator Studio initially use Captain Caveman syntax. Keynote Design Presentations! Pages Create Documents! Final Cut Pro Create Video! And so on. Mercifully, they at least fix themselves once the app’s done installing.
Still, I hate it all. And I say that as someone who uses Numbers daily and genuinely likes the design-led, very Apple approach these apps have long taken. They used to feel distinct and considered – a cut above. Now? I’m not so sure. I worry new features will sit behind a subscription rather than be rolled out for everyone. I’m concerned services revenue is steering the Apple ship, with software – and even hardware – demoted to supporting acts. And I’m tired of updates squeezing a few extra bucks out of users rather than genuinely attempting to create something new and compelling.
In all, this revamp feels like another masterclass in prioritising money over user experience, taking another small chip out of Apple’s soul.
