Fortune's 'Inside Apple' describes a furious Steve Jobs after MobileMe launch - Page 3

"obsolesced"? Does this pass for English in America these days or was it invented on the spot? This trend of turning adjectives into verbs is becoming very ugly.

You're comparing a legal agreement to the frustration of losing one's photos from installing a photo management program? You don't get frustrated when a piece of software hoses your computer? I guess not. I mean, after all...you're "responsible."

Only fools and children believe in magic. After two tries at mobileme I've given up and found alternatives.

I would like to be able to say that the email part of MobileMe is the bit that works, but I have discovered syncing issues there too.

I have had trouble with moving large numbers of email from one folder to another and also with renaming a folder with emails in it. Eg: A folder with a few thousand emails in it, renamed, the new folder appears after some winking on and off and then the emails all disappear. The email start to arrive back, slowly, then at some point it just stops. Not all the emails are there and the old folder is gone. Checking back later, the old folder reappears with the missing emails in it, so now I have to tidy up. In another case I moved a thousand plus emails from one folder to another and discovered that the total number of emails decreases each time.

So, in my experience, there is no part of MobileMe that is really safe to use.

Oh, and I often email notes to myself while out on the iPhone, then back on the Mac I find left over copies in Drafts.

Oh yes, and I have two or three Junk folders at any one time. I keep deleting them then they mysteriously come back.

Oh and now I also remember - I added my old hotmail account to mail.app for a while, then made some Notes in the iPhone, they disappeared and I found them not in MobileMe but in my Hotmail inbox.

Yeah, whats with the Junk mail under MAILBOXES/junk/.Mac and the other one under .Mac/Junk?

The other thing is that syncing on the Mac takes ages, if I havent used the mac for a while. Looking at the activity window shows about 10-12 threads, very few of them doing what I want.

I'm glad someone finally said this.

People are fond of saying "well at least the email works," but it just doesn't.
I understand that a lot of these failings are the failings of IMAP itself being as IMAP is built on the lie that you can have the same set of mail folders replicated on all your different devices and all kept in sync (when it fairly obviously doesn't work that way at all), but still ... this completely sucks.

More than that, it's completely impossible for the average person to figure out. I'm the person that has to figure out other people's mail problems where I work, and neither myself nor any of the technicians I work with have any real idea what the problem is with the duplicate folders and duplicate mail and why we can't just establish one set of mail as the master and have all the others sync with it.

What the average user is supposed to do with all those dozens of settings and the ten or twenty folders that sometimes appear in duplicate either on your computer or your phone or your iPad, I don't know. Without knowing the underpinnings of the system and how it works, the user hasn't got a clue whether they should be storing this or that folder locally, or on the server. All they know is that they want their mail and they don't want duplicates.

MobileMe was a step down from iTools and .Mac. iTools came out with a lot of cool features. I miss Apple's free iCard service. Now if you want to send somebody an ecard it is going to be packed with tasteless advertising.

Also Apple made a mistake by discontinuing offering a free version. When iTools came out it was billed as a for life service. It worked great, and was great advertising for Apple. When it changed to a pay or nothing model it created a bad taste in a lot of long time Apple fans.

Maybe you should address that comment to the people it applies to. I've used Windows extensively for 20 years.
I've owned and used an Android phone pretty extensively.
I've never used a Windows 7 phone, but I've never commented on it, either.

It's usually the Mac bashers who are the hypocrites who bash a product without using it. The overwhelming majority of Mac users HAVE used Windows, but the majority of Mac-bashing Windows users have NOT used a Mac.



There are free alternatives which offer a tiny subset of the functionality. I already said that. Some people would prefer to have everything work together.


Sorry, doesn't work as transparently on iOS devices, so it's not universal. It's also only one of the many functions of MobileMe.

Not to mention, of course, that I refuse to give Google access to my entire personal life. They've proven pretty convincingly that they can't be trusted with your personal data, so why would I voluntarily give it to them?


So you get to go through a couple of steps - and have to do it on every single device in order to get them all in sync. Sorry, not the same.

Not to mention, of course, that I refuse to give Google access to my entire personal life. They've proven pretty convincingly that they can't be trusted with your personal data, so why would I voluntarily give it to them?


Again, with several manual steps. Not as fully automatic as iDisk, which works even when you're not connected to the Internet and doesn't require user intervention.


Obviously, you're content with manual operations and multiple steps - and using a bunch of different tools to try to accomplish the goal.

MobileMe users are willing to pay because they use ONE tool which does all of the above (plus much more) automatically, and seamlessly. You see, not everyone let's their life revolve around 'free'.

It always amazes me how the ones that take the most issue with language have the least knowledge of language. I recommend a dictionary.



There is no argument as to why YOU should pay for it. If a product doesnt fit your needs then YOU shouldnt pay for it because YOU wont use it.

But that doesnt mean the service isnt useful to others or that it doesnt have features that other services do not. Youre disagreeing with jragosta by ignoring the features you cant get with MobileMe and only comparing a subset from MobileMe.

Read his post again, and the others in this thread about the services that MobileMe provides and youll see that you cant get that service anywhere else.

There is something unusual about your problems with iMAP. I've been using it for ages and never have any problems at all and have never heard of anyone experiencing problems like you describe. There is although a bug/feature with the iOS Mail implementation of IMAP as it does not actually keep track of the folder contents very well, I guess to minimize bandwidth or battery usage but if you send a message from a different device it does not show up in the sent folder on iOS.

But IMAP works really well for me with regular computers. Almost all of the big mail providers have browser based email clients that use IMAP. I think your problems must be specific to some misconfigured servers at your location and not issues with the IMAP protocol.

Steve's a passionate guy, everyone at Apple knew what they were getting into. I can guarantee that if your reaction to that was anything other than, "I probably should," Apple would not be the best place for you to work.

I'm with you.

Hes not going to admit he didnt understand what cloud meant and failed to comprehend what you, me and others wrote, including the wikipedia page he linked to. At this point hes choosing to not to see the internet as being a form of cloud computing. Let him wallow in his ignorance.

Steve Jobs was right and his willingness to call out abject failure in the harshest terms and even punish executives for creating something as monstrously wretched as the MobileMe service is why he is a great executive. If you do well for him, there is no end to the amount of love he will shower. MobileMe is very unusual for Apple because it not only fails to do well even the most basic things, but the things it fails at are actually performed successfully by other companies.

I use mobile me for Back To My Mac, screensharing and sync. As long as those service remain relatively unchanced I don't care what else Apple does with the service.

I also use Pandora, which has some shortcomings (too many live albums for one, too slow to add requests for another). If Apple can do it better I may consider switching.

I agree that usage is awkward, but originally that word was a verb in Latin (obsolescere), and it is still recognized as a verb in English: http://bit.ly/iLO5hK.

You might consider studying the etymology of a word before being quick to criticize.

Apple's CEO was just doing his job. While I have often disagreed with excessive control and stock option bonus policies at the top of Apple's food chain, I have to stand with Steve Jobs on this one.

The bottom line is that you cannot portray yourself as a high price luxury brand and sell shitty products.

He obviously doesn't watch South Park. Do not search for humancentipad.

"So why the f--- doesn't it do that?"

Haha! If this is true, I would have loved to have been a fly in the wall.

This is why you want this man to lead your company. Tough to work for, but gets the job done, WELL. When something is not up to his high standard, he'll do something about it.

As an Apple customer, I like to hear this. Shows the CEO really cares about the quality of Apple products.

Well it doesn't for me, it's basically as I described. I get people all the time with the same problem in my office also.

I got a really angry guy just today actually with this exact problem. He had his laptop set to keep the sent, deleted, and junk messages on the server (which is the default as the 'powers that be' at my workplace want us all to use web clients and not use local clients like Mail at all). But the Mail client will constantly create duplicate local folders of all the above. Worse, there are different amounts of messages in the local folders vs. the ones on the server. So you can't just delete the local folders.

Using the "Sync MobileMe" tool on the Mailbox menu or going offline and going online again all did/do nothing.

I've also regularly experienced the "15 copies of a draft email you never even tried to send in the first place" in the Drafts folder, and the "MobileMe couldn't access your Trash on the server and created a local copy" message/problem.

The real gravy though is I regularly (3 or 4 times a month minimum), get completely errant email from other MobileMe users. Not spam, real emails that were supposed to go to someone else, but instead came to me. I was thinking of publishing a book of all the messages because it's kind interesting. I get a picture of some random person sent from an iPhone, or sometimes a movie of someone's kids at the school play. Once I even got email sent to a group of folks that included some fairly high up Apple employees.

So MobileMe mail can be entertaining, but it can't really be called functional IMO.

"Jobs reportedly asked the MobileMe team what the new product was supposed to do. When an employee told Jobs what the purpose of MobileMe was, the CEO reportedly responded: "So why the f--- doesn't it do that?"

"You've tarnished Apple's reputation..." Jobs reportedly said. "You should hate each other for having let each other down... Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us."

Amazing how many people miss the word "reportedly".

Did he actually say "You should hate each other..."? or do you think that he might have said something like "You should hate that you have let each other down..."?

Reportedly. Much the same as many tend to believe that every single email that is reported to come from Steve Jobs actually does and is worded exactly the way it is reported.

Yes, Steve admits to sometimes emailing users directly, but I doubt every one we read about and that gets sensationalized actually come from Steve.

Reportedly, that is...