For years, Apple Pages was a rare oasis of sanity. You opened it, you saw a beautifully blank, white sheet of paper, and you wrote. It didn’t judge you. It didn’t bother you. It just sat there, quietly doing exactly what it was told.
But now, some bright spark at Apple has looked at this elegant, tranquil workspace and thought, “You know what this needs? Ads. Let’s make it look like a cheap neon sign in Amsterdam.”
In the latest, utterly baffling update, the designers have seen fit to plaster advertisements for their new features all over the Template Chooser. It looks less like a sleek piece of modern software and more like a collection of tacky bumper stickers slapped onto the back of a Rolls-Royce.
It gets worse. They have tacked a row of entirely useless icons onto the toolbar, desperately trying to lure you towards flashy new gimmicks with grand, sweeping names like Hub Content, Shape Generator, and Image Generator.
However, here is the catch. And it is a big one. You cannot actually use any of them. Clicking on any of these shiny new buttons does not unleash a wave of productivity; it simply pops up a digital hand demanding twenty dollars a month. Twenty dollars!
And the ultimate insult? The industry pundits have concluded that these features are actually pretty rubbish. They are nowhere near as powerful, or as clever, as the completely FREE images you can get right now from Google Gemini. It is, quite frankly, madness. No, it is heartbreaking.
It’s like buying a house, and the previous owner leaves a massive, locked vending machine right in the middle of your living room. You don’t want the fizzy water inside it, you can’t open it anyway, but you have to look at its stupid, glowing plastic face every single day.
Worse still, these icons are designed to look like essential tools. They sit right next to the bold button, practically begging to be clicked. It is a psychological trap designed to make you feel like your regular, free version of Pages is somehow broken or inadequate. It isn’t. It’s just being held hostage by accountants.
Mercifully, however, the engineers left a back door open. They knew we’d hate it. And if you, like me, want this graffiti scrubbed off your digital property immediately, you can do it. And it is remarkably simple.
1. Enter the Customization Zone
Open a document in Pages. Move your mouse all the way to the top of the screen to the menu bar. Do not click the icons themselves—that only brings up a prompt asking for your credit card details. Instead, click View and scroll down to Customize Toolbar…
2. The Great Purge
A sheet will drop down, revealing every tool available. Now comes the satisfying part. Click on the offensive, paywalled icons directly in your toolbar and drag them completely off the bar, tossing them into the ether. They will vanish with a delightful little poof sound.
3. Lockdown
Once your toolbar is clean, minimalist, and entirely free of corporate panhandling, click Done in the bottom right corner.
And there you have it. Peace is restored. The corporate vultures have been shooed off your lawn, and you can get back to writing your manifesto in glorious, uninterrupted silence.
