Apple is not going to give up $100/ year from x millions of current subscribers. Sure they'll give something away for free, but they aren't giving up what they already.
Nothing is free and if there is a free service I would expect there to be a premium service as well. The other possibility is that all of this is going to be partially iAd based. I would hope there's a premium ad free option.
The rumor also makes it sound like Apple is going to strand it's current MM users and ditch the current service all together? Way to alienate loyal subscribers. Again, I don't think Apple would ditch mail and calendars etc.
Using your home server as the "storage" for the cloud? Didn't we already come to the conclusion this won't work either?
I don't see any of these things happening. We will probably see a free MM with a mixture of components and features and the paid version will offer another mix.
My account renewed 7 days ago. I got no notice from Apple as per the students rumored above. I've been using the service since the very beginning with itools, then dot mac etc.
I essentially agree with all of this. Rumor has it Apple has around two million MobileMe customers. That comes to $200 million per year or $50 million per quarter. One has to wonder how they replace that revenue. Granted, they are making billions, but still. It's a small but significant percentage of quarterly income.
Apple had to qualms about charging me my renewal fee recently \
Werd! No qualms at all.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bige12
I hope the don't do away with the email on mobile me.
MM's email is a pretty important part of iOS in a sense. I don't think it'll vanish. If the new MM is about staying in synch, keeping email in synch across multiple devices is basically possible because of MM. There are other ways to make it happen, but MM is Apple's "no hassle", "join the ecosystem way" of getting it done. The service itself is going nowhere.
I do wonder though if there will be a complete rebrand and we'll all have to update our emails? Ugh I hope not. I truly love my email address.
MM has become something pretty amazing compared to what it started as. It's finally a product that I really value and I'm happy to pay for. Worst case IMO is a complete rebrand, new products, new services. Some free, extras paid, probably a new name.
Oh, my. Always with those "trusted sources"... how much can anyone "trust" someone who is willing to divulge secret corporate information for money or an ego stroke or the illicit thrill of breaking an NDA? What kind of person would continue to take payment from Apple (if they are in fact an employee) and sell them out to a blog? If they don't work there, they might just be a liar who wants attention. We're not talking about Wikileaks-level human tragedies here... Trusted source? I don't think so.
I essentially agree with all of this. Rumor has it Apple has around two million MobileMe customers. That comes to $200 million per year or $50 million per quarter. One has to wonder how they replace that revenue. Granted, they are making billions, but still. It's a small but significant percentage of quarterly income.
That's gotta cover someone's bonus anyway.
Thanks for the numbers though.
I hope it'll be free and premium offerings for the new service. I'm curious to see how the mix of features will be broken down between these products if Apple goes this route. I wonder if we'll finally see iAds get pushed. I still don't think they'll want to start off iAds with a $200 million subsidy to compensate for the MM loss which is why I think it'll be a rebrand with a new mix of products and services.
The more I think about it the more I'm like "yay. New email."
We will still pay with our personal information whether this service is free or not. Why pay them money when they are still going to sell my personal information? And should I stop watching TV simply because they show advertisements? This is capitalism. This is what keeps the economy going.
That is complete bullshit. If apple sold MobileMe subscriber info then why:
1) they don't have ads on it and don't report any ad revenue from data mining in their financial reports?
2) apple had major negotiation problems with google because they refused to release private information like geographical location, email addresses, etc. In exchange for the google apps like maps?
3) apple had negotiation issues with publishers because they refused to release iOS device owners' private info who purchased subscriptions and other content
4) required explicit opt-in for in app subscription purchases (instead of deceptive opt-out tactics that Facebook and google are famous for)?
what really intrigues me about mobile me and apple's server farm is the possibility of them overcoming perhaps the ipad and idevices' biggest shortfall... their reliance upon you having a mac/pc running itunes
imagine a virtualised os x that you can access via the web or at least a virtualised itunes.
an online repository where all your media is handled online on back up servers - this may still be some way off - maybe 3 -5 years into the future but who knows
and the reason why i reckon this is necessary? well we're now supposed to be living in the post pc age - in the tablet era. However an ipad and an iphone have an umbilical chord tied with a pc - you can't really use the ipad without a mac running itunes. And what's worse is you can't activate an ipad.
If apple offered an online virtualised home folder, the first screen when i switch on a new idevice would be a page asking whether i want to connect to a computer or to the virtual host. This would let me activate any idevice i have. For example, I intend travelling to buy my ipad 2, i'd have to wait till i fly back home to get it started... ah well
it will also bring more non mac users to an online mac experience - an online itunes / mac system which can be a building block in apple's attempts at establishing some sort of social network.
Sounds like it will only hold file metadata in the cloud. Maybe all your devices upload their Spotlight indexes? They already have Back To My Mac where all your Macs register their IP addresses with MobileMe so their services can be found, so maybe this is part of the puzzle.
Anyway I actually have 4 years of email saved on MobileMe, so if they are cancelled the email service (which sounds possible) then I hope they provide a tool to archive those off somewhere.
If you use mail in Apple's Mail app it is already built in, select the mail box (any) then select Archive under Mailbox and select a destination.
Oh, my. Always with those "trusted sources"... how much can anyone "trust" someone who is willing to divulge secret corporate information for money or an ego stroke or the illicit thrill of breaking an NDA? What kind of person would continue to take payment from Apple (if they are in fact an employee) and sell them out to a blog? If they don't work there, they might just be a liar who wants attention. We're not talking about Wikileaks-level human tragedies here... Trusted source? I don't think so.
That thought always crosses my mind over all the pre release type leaks be it software or hardware.
Drop Box (www.dropbox.com) enables you to share files of all kinds "in the cloud." You can access any files you put in your "dropbox" from any computer with dropbox installed on it. It's a great tool that I use daily.
It will now be nice to sync all of my photos, music, and movies within iTunes so I don't have problems when syncing my iPhone on another of my computers.
Drop Box (www.dropbox.com) enables you to share files of all kinds "in the cloud." You can access any files you put in your "dropbox" from any computer with dropbox installed on it. It's a great tool that I use daily.
It will now be nice to sync all of my photos, music, and movies within iTunes so I don't have problems when syncing my iPhone on another of my computers.
What does drop box do that MM doesn't? You can already synch your iDisk "locally" and MM is not just about synching files. The only thing I can tell that drop box offers are more reliable speeds for certain users, compared to MM.
trust me: it will NOT be free. Even if it is at first, they will find some lame argument to charge you once you are already on the bandwagon.
No one forced you to stick around and pay
That said, I doubt they will make at all free. Syncing, maybe like a gb of email, whatever this media thing is sure.
But then you'll probably still have to pay something for the bigger email, iDisk etc. Perhaps not $99 but something. Like just drop at to $69 since they were giving a discount at the drop of a hat.
As for the whole 'bring it all into Ping' ideas. I think you have it backwards. Ping will be one component better linked into mobile me, not THE component that everytin else moves around. Say like new tools that will let you pull your ping comments and reviews over and put them as a feed on your iWeb created, mobile me hosted website.Be able to put in samples to songs you like or your iMixes (with links to buy of course). Not perhaps a bad move, especially if they give us more flexibility and complexity like you get with blogger, wordpress etc.
We will still pay with our personal information whether this service is free or not. Why pay them money when they are still going to sell my personal information?
Um, Apple doesn't sell MobileMe personal info for profit, never has. It's one of the reasons we pay for the service.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nkalu
And should I stop watching TV simply because they show advertisements? This is capitalism. This is what keeps the economy going.
If it annoys you enough, yes. It's one of the main reasons I don't watch TV anymore. There are many ways to get content these days that doesn't involve watching ads, you just have to pay money to do it. Seems fair to me.
“The goal is that your photos and other media content will eventually just sync across all your Apple devices without people having to do anything,” the person said.
Probably got tired of everyone using stuff like Google and Dropbox to synch their calendars etc.
I hope it's stored in the cloud. It's ridiculous the concept that you have to have one "main" computer to which everything is connected. It doesn't work that way anymore. What if you have ONLY an iPad, or ONLY an iPhone, or ONLY an AppleTV etc.
Apple could introduce a complete revamp of its MobileMe internet service as early as next month that would be completely free for customers of the company's hardware devices, marking a departure and depreciation of the existing service which retails for $99 per year....
Clearly this article is actually a blend of a lot of different stories that are being passed around and clearly some parts are true, some are total BS, and some are somewhere in the middle. Anyone who takes this as verbatim is just not thinking. Just to point out a couple of areas where what is being said is just not likely:
1) The idea of a smaller, cheaper iPhone, but one that does all the same things the current iPhone does and has apps etc. being sold alongside the current iPhone is a complete non-starter. Why would anyone buy the current iPhone if they could get the second cheaper one that does the same stuff? The article even points to the problem raised by these kind of assertions when it says that it "isn't a dumbed down feature phone," but then goes on to describe something that sounds very much like a dumbed down feature phone. Unless it replaces the current iPhone (and therefore isn't an iPhone "nano" but simply the iPhone 5), it *has* to have a dumbed down feature set, there is simply no other way.
2) MobileMe is said to be going free, but the article implies that it will be so different that the paying users like myself, will need to be given "support" for the next year while it presumably transitions away to something so different that we might actually lose some features. This is absolutely asinine.
What features could possibly be eliminated that we need to transition away from?
If we ignore the features that are supposed to be offered in the free version, all that's left is email and online storage. Currently MobileMe offers it's paying customers *less* storage than is already available on almost every device they sell. If the new free service is going to sync your stuff it would arguably use more space on the servers by a huge factor than they currently "sell" to their paying customers.
Similarly, the email address and iTunes account (often the same thing) are the core of any service whether it be free or not. Is Apple likely to stop serving email? Does it make any sense to ditch all the folks that have stuck with them for ten long years using .Mac and MobileMe, over saving a few pennies by eliminating email?
There is so much garbage in this report it's impossible to determine which parts of it *might* be *slightly* true.
What does drop box do that MM doesn't? You can already synch your iDisk "locally" and MM is not just about synching files. The only thing I can tell that drop box offers are more reliable speeds for certain users, compared to MM.
So many things. Besides speed, it breaks up files into 4.3MB chunks so that even if you stop a upload/download it will continue again with little to no loss. It uses Amazon?s S3 file system (similar to Apple?s Time Machine?s sparse bundle) that will only update changes to files, not the entire file. It will remember deletions and changes/revisions to files for 30 days for free members and indefinitely for paying members. If the file (or parts of a file) are already on their server somewhere (even if the file name is different) it won?t waste your bandwidth or your time uploading, it will say the file is uploaded within a couple seconds, regardless of how large the file is. It will auto-sync to al the people who are sharing any number of folders you have with other people.
It?s a brilliant service and very Apple-like in the way it works. Meaning, just like Apple oft does, it uses technologies that already exist, but they found a way to make them more useful and more user-friendly. The only drawbacks to Dropbox are things they have no control over, like core OS functions that could make Dropbox be a little more user-friendly, something that Apple could achieve, at least on their OSes, if they decide to follow Dropbox. I don?t see how they can not follow their lead.
LOL...so true! You could be somone who has never laid a finger on an Apple product their entire lives, go buy a Mac the day after this service is activated and get the same "reward" as a devotee who has been bleeding Apple for 20 years!
That's the way it is I suppose. We did choose to spend that money, though. Not that I wouldn't mind some benefits
Nothing is free and if there is a free service I would expect there to be a premium service as well.
You're missing the point, the free service convinces people to buy hardware, and then "more hardware". The free costs is offset by the fact that the experience of it all sells hardware. If the service is good and works seamlessly and is free, I believe they are making the right move finically. They end up with happy users and sell more hardware. There's nothing wrong with that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by spliff monkey
The other possibility is that all of this is going to be partially iAd based. I would hope there's a premium ad free option.
Comments
You are probably right. But this is Apple. They will find a way to make it fair and favorable for everyone.
HAHAHA. WTF? Where you born yesterday?
This rumor is BS.
Apple is not going to give up $100/ year from x millions of current subscribers. Sure they'll give something away for free, but they aren't giving up what they already.
Nothing is free and if there is a free service I would expect there to be a premium service as well. The other possibility is that all of this is going to be partially iAd based. I would hope there's a premium ad free option.
The rumor also makes it sound like Apple is going to strand it's current MM users and ditch the current service all together? Way to alienate loyal subscribers. Again, I don't think Apple would ditch mail and calendars etc.
Using your home server as the "storage" for the cloud? Didn't we already come to the conclusion this won't work either?
I don't see any of these things happening. We will probably see a free MM with a mixture of components and features and the paid version will offer another mix.
My account renewed 7 days ago. I got no notice from Apple as per the students rumored above. I've been using the service since the very beginning with itools, then dot mac etc.
I essentially agree with all of this. Rumor has it Apple has around two million MobileMe customers. That comes to $200 million per year or $50 million per quarter. One has to wonder how they replace that revenue. Granted, they are making billions, but still. It's a small but significant percentage of quarterly income.
Apple had to qualms about charging me my renewal fee recently
Werd! No qualms at all.
I hope the don't do away with the email on mobile me.
MM's email is a pretty important part of iOS in a sense. I don't think it'll vanish. If the new MM is about staying in synch, keeping email in synch across multiple devices is basically possible because of MM. There are other ways to make it happen, but MM is Apple's "no hassle", "join the ecosystem way" of getting it done. The service itself is going nowhere.
I do wonder though if there will be a complete rebrand and we'll all have to update our emails? Ugh I hope not. I truly love my email address.
MM has become something pretty amazing compared to what it started as. It's finally a product that I really value and I'm happy to pay for. Worst case IMO is a complete rebrand, new products, new services. Some free, extras paid, probably a new name.
I essentially agree with all of this. Rumor has it Apple has around two million MobileMe customers. That comes to $200 million per year or $50 million per quarter. One has to wonder how they replace that revenue. Granted, they are making billions, but still. It's a small but significant percentage of quarterly income.
That's gotta cover someone's bonus anyway.
Thanks for the numbers though.
I hope it'll be free and premium offerings for the new service. I'm curious to see how the mix of features will be broken down between these products if Apple goes this route. I wonder if we'll finally see iAds get pushed. I still don't think they'll want to start off iAds with a $200 million subsidy to compensate for the MM loss which is why I think it'll be a rebrand with a new mix of products and services.
The more I think about it the more I'm like "yay. New email."
It's about time.
I've felt like an idiot paying $99 for the last few years just to get the syncing capability. It should have be much cheaper all along.
MobileMe was never marketed as just "syncing capability".
We will still pay with our personal information whether this service is free or not. Why pay them money when they are still going to sell my personal information? And should I stop watching TV simply because they show advertisements? This is capitalism. This is what keeps the economy going.
That is complete bullshit. If apple sold MobileMe subscriber info then why:
1) they don't have ads on it and don't report any ad revenue from data mining in their financial reports?
2) apple had major negotiation problems with google because they refused to release private information like geographical location, email addresses, etc. In exchange for the google apps like maps?
3) apple had negotiation issues with publishers because they refused to release iOS device owners' private info who purchased subscriptions and other content
4) required explicit opt-in for in app subscription purchases (instead of deceptive opt-out tactics that Facebook and google are famous for)?
imagine a virtualised os x that you can access via the web or at least a virtualised itunes.
an online repository where all your media is handled online on back up servers - this may still be some way off - maybe 3 -5 years into the future but who knows
and the reason why i reckon this is necessary? well we're now supposed to be living in the post pc age - in the tablet era. However an ipad and an iphone have an umbilical chord tied with a pc - you can't really use the ipad without a mac running itunes. And what's worse is you can't activate an ipad.
If apple offered an online virtualised home folder, the first screen when i switch on a new idevice would be a page asking whether i want to connect to a computer or to the virtual host. This would let me activate any idevice i have. For example, I intend travelling to buy my ipad 2, i'd have to wait till i fly back home to get it started... ah well
it will also bring more non mac users to an online mac experience - an online itunes / mac system which can be a building block in apple's attempts at establishing some sort of social network.
Sounds like it will only hold file metadata in the cloud. Maybe all your devices upload their Spotlight indexes? They already have Back To My Mac where all your Macs register their IP addresses with MobileMe so their services can be found, so maybe this is part of the puzzle.
Anyway I actually have 4 years of email saved on MobileMe, so if they are cancelled the email service (which sounds possible) then I hope they provide a tool to archive those off somewhere.
If you use mail in Apple's Mail app it is already built in, select the mail box (any) then select Archive under Mailbox and select a destination.
Oh, my. Always with those "trusted sources"... how much can anyone "trust" someone who is willing to divulge secret corporate information for money or an ego stroke or the illicit thrill of breaking an NDA? What kind of person would continue to take payment from Apple (if they are in fact an employee) and sell them out to a blog? If they don't work there, they might just be a liar who wants attention. We're not talking about Wikileaks-level human tragedies here... Trusted source? I don't think so.
That thought always crosses my mind over all the pre release type leaks be it software or hardware.
Drop Box (www.dropbox.com) enables you to share files of all kinds "in the cloud." You can access any files you put in your "dropbox" from any computer with dropbox installed on it. It's a great tool that I use daily.
It will now be nice to sync all of my photos, music, and movies within iTunes so I don't have problems when syncing my iPhone on another of my computers.
...DropBox.
Drop Box (www.dropbox.com) enables you to share files of all kinds "in the cloud." You can access any files you put in your "dropbox" from any computer with dropbox installed on it. It's a great tool that I use daily.
It will now be nice to sync all of my photos, music, and movies within iTunes so I don't have problems when syncing my iPhone on another of my computers.
What does drop box do that MM doesn't? You can already synch your iDisk "locally" and MM is not just about synching files. The only thing I can tell that drop box offers are more reliable speeds for certain users, compared to MM.
trust me: it will NOT be free. Even if it is at first, they will find some lame argument to charge you once you are already on the bandwagon.
No one forced you to stick around and pay
That said, I doubt they will make at all free. Syncing, maybe like a gb of email, whatever this media thing is sure.
But then you'll probably still have to pay something for the bigger email, iDisk etc. Perhaps not $99 but something. Like just drop at to $69 since they were giving a discount at the drop of a hat.
As for the whole 'bring it all into Ping' ideas. I think you have it backwards. Ping will be one component better linked into mobile me, not THE component that everytin else moves around. Say like new tools that will let you pull your ping comments and reviews over and put them as a feed on your iWeb created, mobile me hosted website.Be able to put in samples to songs you like or your iMixes (with links to buy of course). Not perhaps a bad move, especially if they give us more flexibility and complexity like you get with blogger, wordpress etc.
If the service is going to be free then why are students having to sign up for a 60-day trial?
The same reason students can buy a last-gen MacBook Pro on the day before the release of the new ones.
We will still pay with our personal information whether this service is free or not. Why pay them money when they are still going to sell my personal information?
Um, Apple doesn't sell MobileMe personal info for profit, never has. It's one of the reasons we pay for the service.
And should I stop watching TV simply because they show advertisements? This is capitalism. This is what keeps the economy going.
If it annoys you enough, yes. It's one of the main reasons I don't watch TV anymore. There are many ways to get content these days that doesn't involve watching ads, you just have to pay money to do it. Seems fair to me.
“The goal is that your photos and other media content will eventually just sync across all your Apple devices without people having to do anything,” the person said.
Probably got tired of everyone using stuff like Google and Dropbox to synch their calendars etc.
I hope it's stored in the cloud. It's ridiculous the concept that you have to have one "main" computer to which everything is connected. It doesn't work that way anymore. What if you have ONLY an iPad, or ONLY an iPhone, or ONLY an AppleTV etc.
Apple could introduce a complete revamp of its MobileMe internet service as early as next month that would be completely free for customers of the company's hardware devices, marking a departure and depreciation of the existing service which retails for $99 per year....
Clearly this article is actually a blend of a lot of different stories that are being passed around and clearly some parts are true, some are total BS, and some are somewhere in the middle. Anyone who takes this as verbatim is just not thinking. Just to point out a couple of areas where what is being said is just not likely:
1) The idea of a smaller, cheaper iPhone, but one that does all the same things the current iPhone does and has apps etc. being sold alongside the current iPhone is a complete non-starter. Why would anyone buy the current iPhone if they could get the second cheaper one that does the same stuff? The article even points to the problem raised by these kind of assertions when it says that it "isn't a dumbed down feature phone," but then goes on to describe something that sounds very much like a dumbed down feature phone. Unless it replaces the current iPhone (and therefore isn't an iPhone "nano" but simply the iPhone 5), it *has* to have a dumbed down feature set, there is simply no other way.
2) MobileMe is said to be going free, but the article implies that it will be so different that the paying users like myself, will need to be given "support" for the next year while it presumably transitions away to something so different that we might actually lose some features. This is absolutely asinine.
What features could possibly be eliminated that we need to transition away from?
If we ignore the features that are supposed to be offered in the free version, all that's left is email and online storage. Currently MobileMe offers it's paying customers *less* storage than is already available on almost every device they sell. If the new free service is going to sync your stuff it would arguably use more space on the servers by a huge factor than they currently "sell" to their paying customers.
Similarly, the email address and iTunes account (often the same thing) are the core of any service whether it be free or not. Is Apple likely to stop serving email? Does it make any sense to ditch all the folks that have stuck with them for ten long years using .Mac and MobileMe, over saving a few pennies by eliminating email?
There is so much garbage in this report it's impossible to determine which parts of it *might* be *slightly* true.
What does drop box do that MM doesn't? You can already synch your iDisk "locally" and MM is not just about synching files. The only thing I can tell that drop box offers are more reliable speeds for certain users, compared to MM.
So many things. Besides speed, it breaks up files into 4.3MB chunks so that even if you stop a upload/download it will continue again with little to no loss. It uses Amazon?s S3 file system (similar to Apple?s Time Machine?s sparse bundle) that will only update changes to files, not the entire file. It will remember deletions and changes/revisions to files for 30 days for free members and indefinitely for paying members. If the file (or parts of a file) are already on their server somewhere (even if the file name is different) it won?t waste your bandwidth or your time uploading, it will say the file is uploaded within a couple seconds, regardless of how large the file is. It will auto-sync to al the people who are sharing any number of folders you have with other people.
It?s a brilliant service and very Apple-like in the way it works. Meaning, just like Apple oft does, it uses technologies that already exist, but they found a way to make them more useful and more user-friendly. The only drawbacks to Dropbox are things they have no control over, like core OS functions that could make Dropbox be a little more user-friendly, something that Apple could achieve, at least on their OSes, if they decide to follow Dropbox. I don?t see how they can not follow their lead.
LOL...so true! You could be somone who has never laid a finger on an Apple product their entire lives, go buy a Mac the day after this service is activated and get the same "reward" as a devotee who has been bleeding Apple for 20 years!
That's the way it is I suppose. We did choose to spend that money, though. Not that I wouldn't mind some benefits
Nothing is free and if there is a free service I would expect there to be a premium service as well.
You're missing the point, the free service convinces people to buy hardware, and then "more hardware". The free costs is offset by the fact that the experience of it all sells hardware. If the service is good and works seamlessly and is free, I believe they are making the right move finically. They end up with happy users and sell more hardware. There's nothing wrong with that.
The other possibility is that all of this is going to be partially iAd based. I would hope there's a premium ad free option.
That is certainly a possibility. We'll see.