Users of older iLife, iWork apps seeing trouble upgrading to new apps

“Some users of iLife ’11 and iWork ’09 are having trouble upgrading to the new versions released yesterday, according to complaints,” MacNN reports. “The difficulty is that when trying to download the new software through the Mac App Store, the store fails to recognize the earlier installations.”

MacNN reports, “An Apple spokesperson states that the company is aware of the problem, and working on a solution.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Are iLife, iWork upgrades working for you?

96 Comments

        1. My two Mac Pro’s are stuck at Leopard and Lion and won’t get any Mavericks love. Guess it’s time for a new Mac Pro. What’s kind of funny are the words “64 Bit” proudly stamped on the outside of the 2007 Mac Pro box. Guess not.

        2. I just upgraded 2 MacBook Pros to Mavericks – both on Lion and both are 3-4 years old. Not sure what you’re referring to. If your Mac can run Lion, it can run Mavericks.

      1. … an hour just to DOWNLOAD Mavericks! AFAIK most of that time was spent waiting to START the download. After that, things went smoothly.
        Have not tried iWorks or iLife … yet. I figure the Apple site is getting hammered and I can avoid some stress by waiting. Glad I’m not depending on any “new features”. 😉

        1. Hammered is putting it lightly.

          When apple released ios 7, the internet slowed.
          When apple released 10.9 for FREE… I think we will hear stories if servers crashing once again under the stress.

          It took a while for my download, maybe 2 hours, but other than a few odd things 10.9 is great.

          Lost some swipe gestures in finder for one.. Apple has known for a while but has yet to address it.

        1. Then you must not have bought them before or had them installed on your system.

          Either that or you were not logged into the account that you registered them with.

          It “should” work fine…

          I actually had them all download twice – once through my Australian account and then again through my US account.

          Kind of weird. And no charge for either.

      1. My understanding reading the Apple website is that you had to buy new HARDWARE to get these updates for free. iPhones purchased after September 1, 2013 qualify, and Macs purchased after October 1, 2013 qualify.

        You want to save $20 per update? You need to spring for new hardware — or at least that’s what the Apple site clearly states.

        1. I talked to Tier 1 Apple support this am about this. He assured me that my iWork ’09 boxed set was eligible for a free upgrade.
          Like others, Pages & Numbers only showed a Buy option, Keynote let me upgrade for some reason.
          I installed Mavericks first, signed out of and back into the Mac App Store, etc., etc..

    1. I own iWork’s 2009 which I bought on a CD when I purchased my MacBook Pro 13″ in 2010 and at first, I could not upgrade to the new version of iWork’s. I downloaded Macerick last night and this morning, I had a notification from the Mac App Store telling me that I had 3 updates (Keynote, Pages and Numbers.) I downloaded them and all is swell. It also gave me the option to download GarageBand even though I never paid for it prior to downloading Maverick.

    2. I ran into the same problem. I had purchased iWork ’09 on a disk and the Mac App Store was asking me to pay for the upgrade. This workaround was effective for me:

      note, I had already downloaded and installed Mavericks and updated iPhoto and iMovie.
      – download & install iWork 9.3 update from http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1563
      – restart
      – upgrades were available at Mac App Store
      note that before the restart, the Mac App Store indicated I had 3 updates available, but would not show them or install them. That was only possible after the restart.

  1. I attempted to upgrade iWork prior to downloading Mavericks. The App Store was going to charge me for the apps, and it didn’t show up in updates. I had purchased iWork on a disk, but previously had been able to receive updates through the App Store. After I upgraded to Mavericks, iWork showed up as an update for free.

  2. I need to buy the desktop iWork still, I’ve been using the ios and iCloud versions. The iCloud iWork has been amazing since the beta, I can do all my work online from the crappy school machines running xp without Microsoft office

  3. The upgrade process worked great.

    However, there are some serious deficiencies in the new iWork apps: can’t customize the toolbar, some functions are that were simple to find are now hidden in menus, rulers aren’t as functional, no distinction between page layout and word processing in Pages, etc.

  4. As I’ve commented elsewhere, iWork needs to become cross platform (Windows, Unix, etc) and possibly even open source in order to dethrone Office as the de facto business standard. Apple tried and failed before with AppleWorks, but now the time seems right.

    Some of us here still remember earlier tectonic transitions – WordStar, WordPerfect…

      1. iWork.com redirects to Apple.com on firefox but on Safari on a PC it shows iwork.com but has the Apple page..

        On a PC, icloud.com will work on IE or Chrome but Safari doesn’t support all the features. I find that strange.

  5. To my surprise, mine updated and I didn’t get them off the App Store. They were installed off my old DVD that I purchased back in the day. Glad to see they updated nicely off the App Store.

  6. Owned iWork via original DVD. Have had no issues getting upgrades (such as they were) over the years via Software Update. I did have to wait until Wednesday AM before I saw the October 22 updates for Pages, Keynote and Numbers. Now I have copies of both the ’09 versions as well as new 2013 versions.

  7. Aperture, purchased in the box, also updates to the current version with the online store.
    The Garage Band update was a s-l-o-w experience on a fast cable internet connection, but Apple’s servers must have been hammered hard yesterday.

  8. The downloads went fine, but I think I’m actually still running the old versions. The icons are the old ones, and About gives iWorks ’09 v2.3 for Numbers. They don’t seem to start up any faster…was that going to be part of the deal?

    1. You should see new icons – Pages has a sheet of paper and a pen, Numbers now has 4 bars in 3D coming off of the sheet, and Keynote has a blue lectern.

      If you don’t see those icons, launch LAUNCHPAD, look for the new icons for the iWork apps and start them from there. That should put the new icon at the end of your dock – move it where you want and delete the old ones off of your dock.

      1. Ah ha. The old versions were still hanging around in ?applications/iWork ’09. The new versions are just loose in /Applications. But now Software Updates says theres an update to Pages again. Huh. The Pages.app modified date is still last night. ??

    1. If you did them last night, you paid and shouldn’t have. If you waited until this morning (as I should have but I don’t have that kind of patience) they should have been FREE. If you paid, contact Apple through Mac Store Support and ask for a refund. I just sent my request, I’ll update when I see a response. Hopefully they don’t just laugh at me and call me an impatient sucker!

  9. All worked fine except for iPhoto which, despite having the install showing in the App Store, changed to the ‘do you want to purchase’, which I accidentally clicked and it proceeded to install.

  10. Keynote 6 is much worse than Keynote 5.3. Some cool animation and transition effects from 5.3 are missing in Keynote 6. The new animations are few in quantity and mediocre in quality. Also, certain features of my presentations are missing when I open them in Keynote 6.

    1. I had this exact problem. Phoned Apple support and they talked me through a “fix” involving the creation of a “Test” administrative user. Using this allowed my various machines to download 7 apps. When I returned to my normal log-in account, the App Store still showed that I needed to update 7 apps even though they were actually updated. I was told that Apple were/are aware of the problem. Good luck, but please register your problem with Apple support (which was excellent in my case).

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