Amber Neely
Apple has updated its iWork suite of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote to version 14.4, bringing more Apple Intelligence and other changes and improvements to its productivity software.
On Thursday, Apple rolled out updates to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. This time around, many of the updates are identical for each app, as Apple tries to keep its productivity suite consistent across the three products.
The most notable update is powered by Apple Intelligence. Users on Mac, iPad, and iPhone can now make text edits using Writing Tools directly in their documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
Users can now export documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, into other formats using shortcuts. Copy and paste from Freeform has been improved, too.
To take advantage of the features mentioned above, users will need to run macOS 15.4, iPadOS 18.4, or iOS 18.4.
Apple says that when using Pages, users can also more easily add additional pages to a word-processing document. It also notes that Screen View on iPad now displays text, images, and other elements in a continuous flow optimized to fit your screen.
Numbers saw the most amount of software-specific updates. Apple points out that it has improved compatibility when importing or exporting Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.
Users can now utilize over 30 new advanced functions including LET, LAMBDA, FILTER, SORT, and UNIQUE. Results from a single formula are now visible across multiple cells using spilling arrays.
Users can update or download one or all of the iWork products by heading to the App Store on their device of choice.
It's important to note that to use Apple Intelligence features, users will need an M1 Mac or later. When it comes to iPhone or iPad, users need an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, an iPad mini with the A17 Pro chip, or any iPad that uses an M1 chip or later.
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10 Comments
Had they release this two years ago, I might have been impressed. Today, it is very meh bordering on instilling a feeling that Apple is lost–no vision and little execution. Their hardware is amazing, but the competition is closing the gap. Apple leadership was caught flat-footed by the popularity and usefulness of generative AI LLM’s even though Apple has been in the AI business for years. And this is with LLM’s being a the very beginning of the usefulness cycle. The only thing I knowingly use Apple Intelligence for is as a bad but convenient interface to ChatGPT to do the work that needs to be done. Although I mostly use the full ChatGPT app as stand-alone or via the “Work with…” functionality because of the very small context size allowed by the Apple Intelligence interface.
Now there are MCP servers accessing Apple’s service (so far just Apple Maps and Apple Notes). When the MCP server gets full access to all of the iCloud services via MCP and OpenAI starts supporting it for ChatGPT and their API for use with automation tools, I start having fewer reasons to continue to buy Apple hardware.
Time will tell, but it is not looking
I suspect he's paranoid that AI writing tools are the death knell of his profession. If I were in his shoes I'd probably feel the same although my guess is my public reaction would be different.
Anyhow AI writing tools here in 2025 aren't going to win any Pulitzer Prizes. They will facilitate the composition of mundane communications like summarizing notes from this morning's meeting into an e-mail or writing basic expository articles.
They will help people with weaker writing skills bring their output to something closer to their colleagues who are more capable of articulating their thoughts into words.
Which brings up one key point. AI doesn't make the user smarter. It just does the work for them. In decades of working in a lot of businesses from small mom-and-pop shops to a Fortune 500 tech company, I've noted a strong correlation between good thinking and good writing. Having AI writing tools do the writing part won't make you think any better. It just takes away some of the tedium, especially for more mundane writing chores (like many work e-mails).
But in order to know if the AI writing tools did a good job, you really need to be a decent writer to begin with and to make sure that the LLM used isn't steering the points the wrong direction.
AI writing tools are also very helpful for people with weaker typing skills or are writing in a language that isn't their native tongue.
In the end AI writing tools are just like any tools and you can choose to use them or not use them. There are carpenters who use circular saws for a lot of work but hand tools for certain tasks, especially finishing work. There are bakers who use large electric mixers for some work, but still end up kneading bread dough and shaping loaves by hand. Cooks. Tailors and seamstresses. Farmers and gardeners. The list goes on and on.
In the same way sometimes I fire up my inkjet printer but I still write thank you notes and postcards by hand.
Apple is not pointing a gun at anyone's head saying they need to use AI assisted tools. Even if Apple Intelligence is turned on, you still need to deliberately click a button (or two) to use the AI assisted functions.
The way Apple is rolling out AI features is relatively unobtrusive and benign, partly because this is really alpha-quality software and they are late to the party, partly because many of the AI functions on smartphones are limited to a small percentage of iPhones in use (iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 family), and partly because Apple has prioritized user privacy which means less data is being sent to the cloud.
It's not the end of the world yet for professional writers. But for sure these tools will improve over time and most people in an office setting will find themselves spending less of the company's time pumping out corpspeak. I sure wish I had AI-assisted spreadsheet tools when I was at my last corporate job.