Ben Reid on September 10, 2013, 11:25 pm

iWork, iPhoto And iMovie For iOS Now Free For All New Devices

There had been one or two rumors floating about that Apple’s iWork Suite, along with iLife, would be going free. Leaks of app information pages seemed to corroborate this notion, and today, Apple has announced that iWork, iPhoto and iMovie will be free of charge.

iWork is the Cupertino’s productivity suite, encompassing Numbers – the spreadsheet app, Keynote – the presentation app, and Pages, which is Apple’s own answer to Microsoft Word. With Apple having recently announced a move to integrate these apps into iCloud sans Google Drive, the company is now looking to drive up adoption rates, and what better way to do so than to give the app versions away for free?

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Although the apps only cost a few dollars to begin with, everybody likes a freebie, and those five apps are exactly that to anybody purchasing a new device.

Tim Cook today gave a brief demonstration at the keynote event, but while the apps don’t actually show the new iOS 7 design theme, we’d fully expect the final versions to ship with that new aesthetic language coded by Sir Jony Ive. As polarizing as the redesign has been of iOS 7, Apple is sticking to its guns, so fairly soon, every app will have ditched the skeuomorphism.

So, for all of you productive folks out there, this is a definite win, and will bestow upon you the powerful tools to get your work and documents completed on the fly. iPhoto and iMovie are ideal for tweaking images and videos, and given how many of us now use our smartphones as our main shooter, it’s good to see that they’ve now gone free.

Cook has stipulated that the apps are free to those purchasing a new device, but we’d hazard that this is merely a way of coaxing consumers into picking one up. Needless to say, the days of having to pony up money for these iconic apps are numbered.