The twist that Microsoft has made and that it announced late yesterday is very interesting: the Redmond company starts offering Outlook completely free to all Mac users. You will no longer need any license or subscription to download it.
And the news doesn’t end here: Outlook is now officially native to work with maximum efficiency on Apple Silicon chips. And that should be noticeable both in its boot speed and overall performance. Microsoft has put the batteries to make us feel at home with its applications and it shows.
Four apps in one, Outlook’s productivity weapon against its rivals
For those who don’t know it, Outlook is a popular application from Microsoft to manage our email accounts, our calendars, the occasional reminder and our contact list. That is to say, unites what in Apple are the applications Mail, Calendar, Reminders and Contacts in a single place.
Those who have been working with the Office suite for years (especially on Windows) are so used to Outlook that after jumping to macOS they have a hard time getting used to the fact that at Apple its functions are separated into several applications. It also didn’t help that in order to install Outlook you had to pay for an Office license that was more expensive than the standard one, which could go up to well over 200 euros a year.
The developers have taken care to integrate the features of Outlook with the native elements of macOS.
Now that’s over: anyone can use Outlook whether or not they’re paying for a Microsoft 365 subscription. Just download it for free from the App Store without being scared of your in-app purchases, which are simply the ability of those subscriptions to be able to use Word, Excel and Access combined with 1TB of OneDrive space.
There are also no compatibility problems between services: with Outlook you can set up Google, iCloud, Yahoo or IMAP accounts mail without problems. If you’re a heavy mail and calendar user, you might want to give it a try.