While Microsoft pushes Office 365 subscriptions hard, it has so far retained the option of one-off purchases of new editions – and it has confirmed that this will also be available for Office 2024 for Mac.
The other good news is that we’re expecting the price to be unchanged from Office 2021 for Mac …
Macworld spotted a recent blog post in which Microsoft opened by announcing a non-365 version of Office for organizations who can’t use an always-online device.
We know that some customers have niche yet important scenarios that require a truly long-term servicing channel: regulated devices that cannot accept feature updates for years at a time, process control devices on the manufacturing floor that are not connected to the internet, and specialty systems like medical testing equipment that run embedded apps that must stay locked in time. For these special cases, Microsoft continues to offer and support the Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC). Today we are pleased to announce that the commercial preview of the next Office LTSC release – Office LTSC 2024 – will begin next month, with general availability to follow later this year.
Further down, however, it confirmed that a single-purchase option will also continue to be made available to consumers.
We are also planning to release a new version of on-premises Office for consumers later this year: Office 2024. Office 2024 will also be supported for five years with the traditional “one-time purchase” model. We do not plan to change the price for these products at the time of the release. We will announce more details about new features included in Office 2024 closer to general availability.
The reference to five-year support doesn’t mean that the app will cease to work after this time, rather that the company only guarantees to support it for this period. This might, for example, mean that it is no longer updated to retain compatibility with future versions of macOS after 2029.
The current 2021 version costs $149.99, and Microsoft says that it has no plans to increase the price, but doesn’t quite go as far as guaranteeing that this won’t change.
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