AppleWorks, R.I.P.

It’s not like I’ve received a memo from Steve Jobs or anything, but it seems to me that the arrival of the Intel Macs marks the end of what Apple calls “the best-loved application for the Mac” – AppleWorks.

It’s still shipping with consumer-line PowerPC models (iBook G4, iMac G5, Mac mini), but the Intel iMac and the MacBook Pro both lack it.

AppleWorks, originally ClarisWorks, has had an amazingly long run. ClarisWorks 1.0 was released in the fall of 1991 – almost fifteen years ago. It was a great program in its day, and I certainly mean no offense to anybody who worked on it when I say that I imagine there are enough Krufty Karbon Kobwebs in there to dissuade even the most seasoned Apple application programmer from wanting to attempt an Intel-compatible update.

Update: I’ve since been told that the latest version of AppleWorks does in fact run on Intel Macs. But regardless, it’s not included.

Time to buy iWork, I guess! I do like the look of Pages…

Luke Miller commented on Sat Feb 11 14:42:36 2006:

Yes - I have Appleworks 6 running quite happily on my intel iMac though I was told inthe shop that it would not workl and to buy pages. Pages does not have anything to replace the drawing bit of appleworks - moving boxes of text about wihtout having to work in sections etc. Let’s hope Pages is extended to cover all the bases.

Paul commented on Sat Feb 11 21:43:48 2006:

Thanks for the update, Luke. iWork really seems like a work in progress – there’s no spreadsheet or database functionality either. I hope they continue to add to it.

Bruce Merrihew commented on Fri Feb 24 22:40:39 2006:

Sure glad to hear Luke Miller has Appleworks running on his Intel Mac. My question…how did he load Appleworks on the Intel Mac?

Bruto Rutabage commented on Wed Jan 17 21:09:05 2007:

Appleworks runs on the Intel Mac. It would not load from the disk. I copied the Appleworks folder from my ibook to my Mac Pro prior to putting my ibook out to pastuer

Paul commented on Wed Jan 17 21:40:48 2007:

Thanks for the update, Bruto. Keep the faith!

Jim commented on Fri Feb 2 13:49:30 2007:

I’m a die hard AppleWorks user. There is no better works program anywhere.

I copied my AppleWorks folder from my G5 and installed it onto an Intel Mac. It works fine, but I believe that it’s Rosetta that runs it.

Also, there’s some problem with permissions so you might want to check apple.com/appleworks for info on how to deal with this.

Stu commented on Tue Apr 3 03:46:27 2007:

Yep, I’ve been using it on my Intel iMac since I bought it also.

I used the firewire target mode and it was copied over.