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.
