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As we all know, Apple has a terribly stupid approach to offering iLife/iWork for free. They basically say, "Every new device gets offered them for free. Unless you image your Macs first, in which case ^&*( you." This is just wonderful for schools and businesses that obviously cannot pass out stock devices, but instead really do need to image them.



Well to get around this, it's always worked to install an older version first, then OS X will see it and offer to install the update, which will link it to your account. Voila, claimed for free, just like everyone else in the world.



Well, as I now see today, they killed that. When we install any of the programs, the App Store refuses to see them. It doesn't offer updates, and the prices are still up around $20 each. PLUS, now Garageband is $4.99, so our SS policy where users could open and get GB for free is now useless. They sure loved that news!



Anyone have any ideas? The vast majority of our users are local admins of their machines and use personal Apple IDs, so we have no interest in pushing out an old version that will never update or anything (which is what we DO do in our computer labs)



>> this is an example method of the old way that now won't work: http://lifehacker.com/get-iwork-for-free-on-any-os-x-mavericks-machine-1469700860 . We did it a tad differently in that we captured the installers for each individual program from the App Store, then pushed those out, where they would be picked up, updated, and linked to the AppleID.

Edit** - Even when I can get them to show up in the "Updates" section, it says it's unavailable for my AppleID. So, still broken.

When Apple gave it away free it was only to the first AppleID that logged into on that station. If you then gave that device to a new user they would not get the offer of free software. Even if you did not use your tricky would have ran into problems sooner or later.



As for your ticket, that was technically stealing the software and it isn't surprising that Apple fixed it.



Also, I have a similar issue. I have Apple's Remote Desktop installed, from installation disk, and I am told an update is available. It then tells me that I can' have the update because the software was purchased under a different AppleID. It wasn't purchased with an AppleID, it was purchased from a brick and mortar store.

We are dealing with the first appleID to log in. We image then deploy. And I've never heard it called stealing. Apple is clear that the first user on a newly purchased device gets them free. But their trigger to launch that offer is broken. We're just now seeing that our workaround to manually trigger the offer has been broken too

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