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.
Come on everyone. If they are going to rebrand .Mac (and it sure looks like they are going to) they are not going to get rid of the mac.com domain. So everyone who is freaking out about getting their @mac.com email changed... that wont happen. They may end up making mobileme.com for new subscribers, but all the old @mac.com's will stay the same.
That happen to me a long time ago when Verizon bought out the phone company I had my dial-up account email with. They changed everything to Verizon including new subscribers but left every existing one the same as it was.
Do you see your town randomly changing street names and addresses and forcing everyone to change? No.... so @mac.com isn't going anywhere.
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.
Come on everyone. If they are going to rebrand .Mac (and it sure looks like they are going to) they are not going to get rid of the mac.com domain. So everyone who is freaking out about getting their @mac.com email changed... that wont happen. They may end up making mobileme.com for new subscribers, but all the old @mac.com's will stay the same.
That happen to me a long time ago when Verizon bought out the phone company I had my dial-up account email with. They changed everything to Verizon including new subscribers but left every existing one the same as it was.
Do you see your town randomly changing street names and addresses and forcing everyone to change? No.... so @mac.com isn't going anywhere.
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 hear this a lot, but honestly, it all depends what you use it for...
For me, the ability to keep all three of my Macs in sync (daily) is worth the price alone.. The iDisk is a joke, but the syncing of contacts, calenders, appointments etc. is very useful..
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).
The only upgrade I want is a cheaper or free price-tag.
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...
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.
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'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.
Yeah, I never understood why people use these email addresses that comes with the ISP. Things change, you move, you change internet provider. If you don't want to go with your own domain at least go with a provider separate from you internet provider. Like gmail, yahoo, hotmail (god forbid;-)) etc. Then your email address is a lot less likely to change while everything else might....
/Mikael
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...
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 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.
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...
As a former Apple Store salesperson I attribute this to two things:
Apple Store employees' performance is partially judged on the ratio of computers to .Mac memberships sold.
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.
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!
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.)
I hear this a lot, but honestly, it all depends what you use it for...
For me, the ability to keep all three of my Macs in sync (daily) is worth the price alone.. The iDisk is a joke, but the syncing of contacts, calenders, appointments etc. is very useful..
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.
Comments
That's what they're worried about!
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.
Come on everyone. If they are going to rebrand .Mac (and it sure looks like they are going to) they are not going to get rid of the mac.com domain. So everyone who is freaking out about getting their @mac.com email changed... that wont happen. They may end up making mobileme.com for new subscribers, but all the old @mac.com's will stay the same.
That happen to me a long time ago when Verizon bought out the phone company I had my dial-up account email with. They changed everything to Verizon including new subscribers but left every existing one the same as it was.
Do you see your town randomly changing street names and addresses and forcing everyone to change? No.... so @mac.com isn't going anywhere.
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.
Come on everyone. If they are going to rebrand .Mac (and it sure looks like they are going to) they are not going to get rid of the mac.com domain. So everyone who is freaking out about getting their @mac.com email changed... that wont happen. They may end up making mobileme.com for new subscribers, but all the old @mac.com's will stay the same.
That happen to me a long time ago when Verizon bought out the phone company I had my dial-up account email with. They changed everything to Verizon including new subscribers but left every existing one the same as it was.
Do you see your town randomly changing street names and addresses and forcing everyone to change? No.... so @mac.com isn't going anywhere.
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'm sorry, am I the only one thinking "Magical Me", like in Harry Potter, when I see "Mobile Me"?
i think you might be!
i think you might be!
Great now thats all I am going to think of when I see that!!!
MobileMe sure sounds like something made up by an ad agency. I think it should be something with an "i" prefix.
Might I suggest iTools?
I hear this a lot, but honestly, it all depends what you use it for...
For me, the ability to keep all three of my Macs in sync (daily) is worth the price alone.. The iDisk is a joke, but the syncing of contacts, calenders, appointments etc. is very useful..
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).
The only upgrade I want is a cheaper or free price-tag.
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...
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.
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'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?
Yeah, I never understood why people use these email addresses that comes with the ISP. Things change, you move, you change internet provider. If you don't want to go with your own domain at least go with a provider separate from you internet provider. Like gmail, yahoo, hotmail (god forbid;-)) etc. Then your email address is a lot less likely to change while everything else might....
/Mikael
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...
Might I suggest iTools?
tenon (makers of itools even when apple's itools was originally released) might take issue with that this time.
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 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!)
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...
As a former Apple Store salesperson I attribute this to two things:
- Apple Store employees' performance is partially judged on the ratio of computers to .Mac memberships sold.
- 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 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.
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!
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.)
I hear this a lot, but honestly, it all depends what you use it for...
For me, the ability to keep all three of my Macs in sync (daily) is worth the price alone.. The iDisk is a joke, but the syncing of contacts, calenders, appointments etc. is very useful..
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.