Apple may re-brand .Mac internet service - Page 2

I'd prefer "Mobilize Me!"...

Yeah. Apple has a tendancy to deliver 90%, and then never seems to get around to the other 10%. Don't get me wrong, that 90% is always better than anyone else on the planet could have delivered. They just seem to have a short attention span when it comes to closing the gap.

As an example, .Mac's web galleries are pretty cool. The integration with iPhoto and Aperture is good. In fact, it's one of the reasons I paid for .Mac. iPhoto had that integration first, and they later added it to Aperture 2.0. But whereas in iPhoto you can rearrage the order your web albums appear in .Mac, you can't do that in Aperture. Yes, their free app has more functionality than the "pro" app! It's as if the Aperture team just said, "eh, close enough" and moved on to other things.

I hate to disagree (just being polite) but I know of a couple LARGE companies that have changed there "@whatever.com" and forced everyone to use the new one. Happened to my Dad.

I agree that rants, threats and "freaking out" are not warrented at this point. And I am sufficiently secure that my @mac email address will survive this, at this point.
However it is not always as easy as you indicate. With my Comcast account, they changed forced all their existing subscribers to new eMail accounts. I am positive that this happened once, it may have been twice (the past gets fuzzy after 5 or 6 years). So please forgive a moment of concern.

i think you might be!

Great now thats all I am going to think of when I see that!!!

Might I suggest iTools?

Indeed. The syncing is completely worth it. When I get a new comp at work... just put in the .Mac account, sync it, and all my calendars, bookmarks, etc. are all there and syncing. beautiful.

and idisk is a joke. even with 10GB storage... the upload/download speeds are incredibly slow, no matter where you are (college campus, work, home, etc).

I could say that about a lot of things.

BTW, has anyone noticed that a lot of switchers who buy in the store get saddled with .mac without having a clue what it is or what it does, and having no use for it? a bunch of my friends who switched ended up buying it without realizing. as a stockholder, I'm happy. as a person, less so...

but apple sorta likes backwards compatibility (let the attacks begin). I mean, if anything, I think they'd have both @mac.com and @mobileme.com work. Apple prides itself on ease-of-use. Forcing a bunch of people to go into AddressBook and "Send Updates..." isn't really all to compliant with that philosophy.

i think this is good news!

i've had a .mac account since it was called iTools and was free. i love the syncing between all the macs i have, even though i still do an iCal backup on each one before i do it (it's a trust issue).

while i agree that it's probably not really worth the money right now, it allows me to have one email account that i can access anywhere and that isn't in the hands of microsoft, google, yahoo or anybody else that uses my emails for data mining and marketing (as far as we know, anyway - i seem to recall some controversy over the original itools eula).

we all have different wish lists for .mac or whatever it's going to be called, but here is mine:

improved calendars, (it would be great if it integrated with exchange for windows users)
improved syncing with other online services (google, yahoo, msn etc.)
portable home folders, like you can have with OSX server
time machine support (wouldn't be feasible where i live, but where net access is fast...)
easy to implement certificate support (for digital signatures in acrobat for example)
push email (would go a long way to entice blackberry users to the iphone)
IM gateway (ichat to msn, yahoo, google etc.- get me out of the aol walled garden!)

and what i would REALLY love:

sms gateway, so i can RECEIVE text messages on my mac without a tethered phone.

i haven't had a cell phone in ten years - getting the iphone to canada soon will change that, but i think the convenience of two-way texting in something like ichat through .mac could be a killer feature in my opinion (if anyone has any pointers how to do that now, i'd appreciate it - my research has failed me).

i realise that not everyone needs all of these and that apple won't be able to please everybody all the time, but i think it would be nice to throw us long time supporters a bone...

syncing is going to get more and more important with devices that are going to emerge over the next years and to have one dependable (!) depository for the data we carry (or more importantly NOT carry) could go a long way in making our lives easier.

and that's what apple is all about, right?

a decade ago, it made sense (I don't remember that many freebee email addrs that were good enough to use). now, not so much...

tenon (makers of itools even when apple's itools was originally released) might take issue with that this time.

i could imagine that apple needs neither the hassle of switching over all those users, nor the inevitable backlash. i think this is a non-issue.

don't panic!

(just make sure you know where your towel is!)

As a former Apple Store salesperson I attribute this to two things:

1. Apple Store employees' performance is partially judged on the ratio of computers to .Mac memberships sold.
2. While Apple Store salespeople don't work on commission, entire stores are awarded quarterly bonuses if they meet certain sales criteria. One of these criteria being the ratio of computers to .Mac memberships sold.

While I personally refused to sell .Mac to anyone who I didn't sincerely believe would use it, I knew of a lot of employees who would offer .Mac as a solution to just about any problem their customers would describe to them, regardless of weather it was a relevant or practical solution. I also had a number of one-on-one customers who told me they never used the .Mac features after the first month of having their computer. I don't doubt that it's a useful product for some, but for most people, it's snake oil.

I let my .mac subscription expire. It sucks.

Apple has long needed to rework its dotmac service. I have used the service for years and each year it seems we get less and less value out of the service. The biggest reason I use dotmac is that the syncing of my computers settings has saved my bacon more than once and having that automatic backup to dotmac has been a lifesaver.

I also use to to transfer files but I could use any other free service like AOL's Xdrive to do the same thing. Apple made a big deal of selling tiger and dotmac by offering exclusive dotmac dashboard widgets just for dotmac users. Apple never released them and that was pretty telling about how much they were really investing in dotmac at the time.

I will probably stick with dotmac at least on more year. Unless they really knock me out with some cool features for my desktop Mac, my Macbook and my iPod Touch, I don't see much use in keeping it.

I went to godaddy to see if mobileMeAlbum.com was registered and it was available. So I grabbed it. I'm sure that Apple will pay me big for this! I'm gonna be living life large!

Maybe I'll just trade it for a brand new mac pro with 16gb of ram and two 30 inch displays ... and a Macbook ... and a trip to Cupertino ... and dinner with Steve ... and ...

Ya, you're probably right ... I just wasted $7.05!

You might want to go ahead and pony up another $7.05 for mobileMeSucksBalls.com because, unless Apple changes a lot more other than the name, more people will want to complain about it than anything else. Then, you'll be rich, stinkin' RICH, I say, . . . (etc., etc., in the style of Daffy Duck.)

But Plaxo does this better, and across Mac and PC.

I was on .Mac for about five years and all I ended up using was the IMAP mail (which was nicely integrated into Apple Mail). Everything else I ended up using other services (free services too) which work better than .Mac.

I would still come back to .Mac if they cut the price and some of the really tedious home-user cr4p like iWeb. If it's just a case of changing the name, especially to something like MobileMe, I won't be enticed.

I can't believe they even registered MobileMe. I didnt think it was physically possible, but this name both sucks and blows.

When Apple launched iTools, they didn't offer itools.com addresses, but mac.com ones.

I therefore don't believe they'll discontinue those mac.com addresses (that would be very foolish IMHO).

However, I doubt very much that they'll offer mobileme.com.

Instead, it would make more sense to keep offering mac.com as they have always done and bring a new address that will work alongside it like, say, iphone.com... I don't know how long they've owned iphone.com (they used to only have iphone.org), but www.iphone.com reroutes to Apple, so it's definitely a possibility and much better than mobileme.com! :-)

Also, it could entice people to get both mac.com and iphone.com addresses, making Apple earn an extra $10 per user.

I'd love to know how to use those other services!
I don't and neither do the thousands of new switchers to the mac platform.
I think we all should see .mac for what it is and that is to sell an add-on service for users of Mac.
When it works (and98% of the time it does) it is fantastic for home use, sharing pics with family and teaching kids how the future of the net could work

Steve must be having a blast with this level of speculation...

As part of working with an Apple Premium Reseller I got a free one-year .Mac account. Honestly, I am frickin hooked on it and I wouldn't be able to use a Mac without it. It kinda becomes something you take for granted and just works (except for certain downtime outages), like the OS itself.

@mac.com will probably last. There's too much DNS infrastructure/ protection in place for it to be changed, I think @mobileme.com is pretty ridiculous, it may happen, but, unlikely I think.

.Mac revamp if with push IMAP email for iPhone and iPod Touch would be awesome. Buy .Mac, get IMAP Push Email with your mynameiswhat@mac.com

As with all Apple products, more client/ customer education will be the main driver of Apple product popularity, methinks.

Not expensive, but not trivially easy either.



I think that's part of the problem. Usually when I hear about .Mac, I hear about the sub-services that go down often or are just plain broken. If there's an Apple product or service that's not up to Apple's usual level of quality, it's .Mac.



Isn't Hotmail.com changing to live.com? That's the problem, I know someone with a hotmail.com but they switched to an msn.com email.



It's nice that there is some precedence. The cost of keeping the domain is so low that I think Apple would be very stupid to drop it.

Before they rebrand everything they better fix existing issues with service. I have not been able to synchronize my address book for about 2 months now, and I have escalated the issue to the executive offices. The lovely response I get is that 'We are aggressively working to resolve your issue, but we do not know how long its going to take' I find that to be atrocious.

Nevermind... missed link in article

Plaxo's sync is not better than .Mac if you need more items synced. I'm going to need more than just a Calendar and Address Book. I need bookmarks, widgets and whatever third party companies (like Ominigroup) can whip up.

I'm not going to choose free solutions for my personal data because they're not free..they are datamining my info and making a lot of money.

My dot mac account expires tomorrow! Do i renew or do i wait?? If it expires, will all of my info be purged?

i have subscribed to .mac for a couple of years but rarely use it. i still think that eudora is the best email progtam even though it is no longer supported. qualcomm dumped it. maybe apple can incorporate it and pick it up for pocket change. there is still a vital eudora support group that doesn't want to quit.

You should've used 1&1 instead. Cheaper.

I use Bluehost. They're better, I think.

I hope this means iLife 09 is one the way too since iLife is so tightly tied to dot Mac. I would love to see an Apple multi-user database system that ran on the web within web sites. Given FMPro is Apple really why not? Plus iWeb has huge potential if they'd just let it do a few more things and be able to upload multiple sites to any host with out the need for 3rd party help as it does now. iLife Pro maybe

Your .Mac account will have expired by the time you read this...

You should receive an email explaining everything, but your data will be kept live for a couple of weeks or thereabouts, in which time they will email you a few times to try and lure you back to them before it's too late. I believe the email account will stay active for maybe a couple of weeks more, which also gives you a bit of time to sort out auto-replies with your new email address (which you can set up on .Mac Mail).

The good thing is you will keep your @mac.com Apple ID, even when all of this has expired. So if you ever want to go back to .Mac, your email address will stay safe.

That is of course unless they decide to do some radical restructuring of .Mac - but for now it's safe.

Bookmarks = Foxmarks. I know it's Firefox not Safari, but it actually works. Ever since I had .Mac the bookmark syncing never really worked properly. Foxmarks actually tells you when it's syncing and you see it update to the correct version. I always found .Mac a bit of a random update experience.

Widgets... If you mean Dashboard, I find Dashboard pretty but totally pointless considering it takes so long for the screen to load up all the widgets. I guess it's the reason they brought back the Calculator (and Spotlight Calculator) to the main part of the OS... I must not have been the only one frustrated at the amount of time it took to get to something as important as a calculator.


Hmmm, that old chestnut. They don't cost you anything? Then they are free. Whether or not you like WHY they are free is a different matter. Personally I don't care, I'm not doing anything online I shouldn't be doing so let them use my data. You think Apple don't use your data for their own marketing stats?

If .Mac was a bit more reasonably priced I would carry on - in the UK it's £68.99 - that's a US equivalent of $136.52. If it were under £50 I'd seriously consider renewing. £30-£40 would probably ensure I stayed with them for life. For £70 per year I expect more... Lifetime OS upgrades, for example.

Would be cool if they bough Netvibes to bring a personalized homepage + community to .Mac.

Anyway, even though I am member I completely gave up and went to Dropbox which is ten times better, quicker and even easier than the iDisk.

Until they really fix all these points that you guys mentionned, my web combinaison will remain:
A personal domain/email address + Google Apps + Dropbox + gSync

You do care about your business right?

Yes but .Mac is a particular rip-off.

It sucks at that price, but would be great free service.