(And that minority who “needs” Word actually need a true publishing platform, which Word is miserable at pretending to be - but that’s another story.) Plus, it’s also, arguably, a better word processor for most people than Word itself. In short: Pages IS a minimalist MS Word document viewer (and editor), it’s fast, it’s lightweight, it’s free, and the reason there isn’t really any competition for it is that it’d be an insane amount of work to come up with something half as good, if you’re lucky. I don’t remember it taking much more than that on my long-since-gone very-old Intel MacBook Pro that the M1 replaced. Enter fullscreen, and even that’s gone, leaving the document, only the document, and nothing but the document.Īnd on my first-generation M1 MacBook Air, it opens in a single bounce of the dock icon. And if you turn off the sidebar (click “Format” in the toolbar) and the toolbar (View menu => Hide toolbar, second from the bottom), you’re left with just the document itself and the top menu. If it actually bogs down, and if your computer was made after 2015, come back with details.Ĭlick to expand.Um … Pages in its default view has almost exactly the same “clutter” as Preview - which is almost none save a minimalist toolbar / sidebar. But if you instead measure actual performance to discover where the bottlenecks actually are, you can focus on that and get real-world benefits (as opposed to Platonic ideal world benefits). You inevitably waste all the programmer’s very expensive resources on something that gains you almost nothing of the computer’s very cheap resources. The cardinal sin of programming is premature optimization. (PageMaker ran fine for most people on Macs that fit in the same part of Apple’s lineup as the MacBook Air does today.) And by today’s standards, Pages is nothing whatsoever “heavy” applications these days are doing IMAX-resolution video editing or real-time 3-D photorealistic virtual reality rendering. By the standards of those days, that was pretty “heavy.”īut, by those same standards, an Apple Watch is at least a seriously big mainframe, if not an outright supercomputer. Today’s pages is about as “heavy” as, say, Aldus PageMaker was back in the ‘90s. Have you actually had real problems with Pages using excessive resources?

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