Dive into OS X

This week Apple confirmed that its long running rival productivity suite ‘AppleWorks’ has finally been put out to pasture. AppleWorks has been around some 23 years, beginning life as ClarisWorks before being taken over by Apple and renamed AppleWorks. AppleWorks was a great tool, and at one point it was the industry’s best-selling piece of software, beating even Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC.

AppleWorks was updated for Mac OS X and given a presentation maker, but it never received a Universal binary facelift after Apple moved its machines to Intel processor. In 2005, AppleWorks was shoved into the deep shadows as iWork debuted. AppleWorks had not been updated in three years and the news comes just nine days after Apple announced its successor iWork ‘08.

Apple has instantly removed all trace of AppleWorks from its site and redirected all AppleWorks queries to its new iWork suite and a search for AppleWorks returns iWork as the top hit. While AppleWorks does still come up on some of Apple’s foreign language stores, it seems safe to declare the suite terminated.

Although iWork is faster and more robust than AppleWorks, there doesn’t appear to be any upgrade discounts on iWork for existing AppleWorks customers, which is too bad.