14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Apple announced the release of the latest version of its productivity suite, iWork. This also marked the death of AppleWorks, Apple's formerly iconic productivity suite.
Although there were no announcements, the information we quietly passed along to resellers, who were told that the software had reached "End of Life" status. All sales of AppleWorks have stopped and the product's website now directs users towards the iWork section of Apple's website. While iWork 08 marks the moment AppleWorks was officially declared dead, the software actually drew its last breath several years ago.
The original AppleWorks was written by Robert Lissner and began its life in 1984 when it was released for the Apple II computers. At one point in its early history it was the best-selling software on any platform, beating rivals such as Lotus 1-2-3. The modern incarnation of the software suite started out as ClarisWorks, which at the time was written by Bob Hearn and Scott Holdaway. Apple bought and rebranded it and at one point, AppleWorks was bundled with all consumer level Macs sold by Apple. The last update for AppleWorks 6 was published in 2004, but the software had been languishing since the late nineties.
Considering that AppleWorks has been outdated for many years now, some have wondered why Apple waited so long to pull the plug on it. The only explanation is that the company waited until Numbers was released as a part of the latest version of iWork, in order to provide users with the same core functionality as AppleWorks. Though AppleWorks is officially dead, Apple continues to provide customers with an excellent productivity software suite. In many ways iWorks is the natural continuation of AppleWorks and even if they do not share the same name, they share the same principles and functions.