Apple would rather you write a book in iBooks Author than anything else. Pages and MS Word have never really been products for the professional author: they ar

Apple would rather you write a book in iBooks Author than anything else. Pages and MS Word have never really been products for the professional author: they are consumer-class apps for the mass-market. Apple recognises this to a greater extent than Microsoft, and by cutting functionality, they can vastly improve usability for the core market. Whether they will bother to fill the void left with their own professional writing software or not is up for debate; they will, IMO, just leave that to Adobe. I think you should still tell everyone you know to buy a Mac. Just tell those who are professional-class writers that the latest version of Pages might not fulfil their needs and point out the alternatives.