Apple Numbers
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
6recommend
1warn against
Dec 8, 2025first mention
Sep 25, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“I recommend Numbers to the vast majority of users in our company, who mainly want to organize tabular data”
company IT/tech decision makeron “My Rules for Using Spreadsheets”
“all of which are excellent”
Show 3 more
“Numbers might meet most of the spreadsheet requirements”
“I set up some trivial code in Numbers (Free Excel) and that worked very well.”
“dropped the desktop Office suite in favour of Pages and Numbers, which are both free and absolutely working fine”
Caveats and dissent
“Both Apple Numbers and Mathematica still depend on a proprietary software package from a for-profit company”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Apple Business 2 mentions
- Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS 1 mention
- My Rules for Using Spreadsheets 1 mention
- Microsoft degrades functionality of perpetually-licensed offline products 1 mention
- Seeing Like a Spreadsheet 1 mention
- Ask HN: Best way to track medications for elderly family member? 1 mention
Also written as Apple Numbers. Data: apple-numbers.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 11
“Both Apple Numbers and Mathematica still depend on a proprietary software package from a for-profit company”
“I recommend Numbers to the vast majority of users in our company, who mainly want to organize tabular data”
“all of which are excellent”
“Numbers might meet most of the spreadsheet requirements”
“I set up some trivial code in Numbers (Free Excel) and that worked very well.”
“Numbers has a lot of keyboard shortcuts”
“dropped the desktop Office suite in favour of Pages and Numbers, which are both free and absolutely working fine”
I have an M1 with 8GB and M2 with 16GB, and they are not comparable. I once ran the M2 smoothly for over 250 days without reboot with a bunch of applications open the whole time (at some point it just force-rebooted, fair enough). On the other hand I regretted the 8GB on my M1 Mini every time I used it. 8GB is perfectly fine for light use, but I'd argue if that's enough then you don't need the power of an M1+ process
“running the Numbers/Pages/Keynote apps”
This anecdote from history feels timely given the recent shift of Apple’s iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) from being bundled with Macs to being a freemium subscription. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/28/apple-updates-keynote-numbers-pages/
“I used Apple Numbers for all my spreadsheeting”