I think his point was, that if it is a free service a lot of spammers will grab the free accounts with which to send out their messages. By being a paid for service, it greatly restricts the number of people that would use it.
I've been using Macs since '88. I dropped '.Mac' about two years ago. I am now very happy with Google Mail/Calendar/Contacts/Tasks/Apps/Picasa and use Dropbox for essential files I might want to have access to elsewhere. All that currently for free. I dropped '.Mac' because paying £65.00 in one payment seemed to hurt too much given the alternatives were completely satisfactory and free. In itself, I know £65.00 is good value for what you get - but not comparatively good value, compared with very good free add-supported services.
What's the marginal cost to Apple of another .Me subscriber? Must be extremely low. I reckon Apple could create a much larger on-line .Me community by dropping their price to £20 per year and accept automatic quarterly payments to make it easier to pay. I'm sure that at a price one third of the current price the User base would increase significantly - and likely the profitability of the service - and the also the relative importance of the service. With a only a handful of Users, it will remain a service of minor importance, certainly comparatively. The .Me service could be marketed as something important and worthwhile to the Apple-User experience and as such Apple shouldn't make it so 'painful' to adopt.
I don't agree that the same services from Google and others are "completely satisfactory" at all. Using other services for the (admittedly few) things MobileMe provides is overly complicated and the quality of the products is just one shade away from absolute crap IMO. That being said, you make a rational and logical argument even though the "average" person is not going to agree that using the free alternatives is easier, or has better value.
I would like to point out one mistake though. You said you wished for automatic payments, but I've been making automatic payments for MobileMe (and previously .Mac), for at least four or five years.
When you do it that way, it's just a minor charge on your credit card that you don't even notice. It's certainly a lot cheaper than many other things in our daily lives. I just went to the store a few minutes ago and got a jug of milk and two ice-cream bars. The cost was equivalent to aprox. three months of MobileMe.
I think his point was, that if it is a free service a lot of spammers will grab the free accounts with which to send out their messages. By being a paid for service, it greatly restricts the number of people that would use it.
Holy shit, what are you on about man? No wonder Apple has yet to make it free with this FUD in people's minds.
Some people here don't know how spam actually works.
Just because MobileMe is a pay service does not mean you are any safer than someone with a free email host. What matters is this, do you use your @me address with friends, family, web sites, on forms, resumes etc? If you do you run the HIGH risk of getting spam email. The more you use (and post) your email address the worse it will get.
So for instance if you sign up to an online site like AppleInsider with your @me address you run the risk of getting spam. Certain sites sell their member email lists to third parties for this very reason....to make money!
Some people are really naive. You don't need a @me email to spam @me members.
I’m glad Apple has learned some lessons from the MobileMe debacle of ’08. Instead of flipping a switch and letting everyone and anyone sign up with their new iPhone 3G to test out Find My iPhone while pushing this on their site in stores, they now have a 60-day trial that requires a credit card and they update pieces at a time with an opt-in trial. I think Apple has finally growns up.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bartfat
Web apps for 10.7? I doubt it. Multi-touch like the iPad? I doubt that will be 10.7 too. More likely it'll be an evolution of 10.6, because Snow Leopard wasn't a bad OS at all for the desktop, there was nothing wrong with it. In many ways, it's more powerful than iOS, because it can use a mouse.
I think he means the way the apps look. I’d like to see Calendar appear much more like the iPad app. I agree with ilogic that this will be the case.
I’d also like to have iCal and Address Book accessed directly through Mail app. Sure, they are tied to together on the backend and there is an inspector window for adding and viewing some items, but I’d like an option much more like Outlook, which I plan to test once a proper version is finished for Mac OS X.
Quote:
Originally Posted by matrix07
Can it sync with multiple Google calendars?
It can sync with iCal on a Mac or with Outlook, which can then sync with Google calendars. I can’t attest to how well that works, but it technically can be done.
Quote:
Originally Posted by latafairam
This makes even less sense.
It makes perfect sense. You don’t give away a service if you have no option for making revenue from associated services.
There are no ads, Apple isn’t Google and can easily make you think everything on the internet is free of charge. If and when iAds makes a web appearance then a free version of MobileMe may appear.
But don’t count on it being the same MobileMe you get now with a paid account. Expect a much simpler version with much more limited feature set. MobileMe offers a complete package that no one else can come close to competing with at any price. This is not likely to change anytime soon.
Publish a calendar for a group or team: The Calendar beta lets you share a read-only public calendar that can be viewed by anyone, perfect for publishing an events calendar such as a soccer team schedule. After setting it up you can send the team members a link to view the calendar on their iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC.
Event invitations with RSVPs: Inviting any guest to an event is easy from the MobileMe Calendar beta. Just add their email address to the event (they don't have to be a MobileMe member) and your guests will get an invitation email they can respond to directly by clicking a link. Your event then automatically updates, making it easy to track RSVPs right in your calendar.
Now, these two features are great. I've been a MobileMe user since it was a free service-- iTools.
A couple of years ago, I tried publishing "team" information for my 3 grandkids soccer teams-- information: (schedules, maps to playing fields); pictures; videos. The "information" part was just scanned images (or screen capture images) of text files.
The pictures and images worked fine-- all team members could view and download; selected team members could upload.
The "information" part was static-- it just sat there, and didn't change much. There was no easy to publish schedule changes, cancelled practices, etc. The Invitation/RSVP feature is great for keeping the parents, players, coaches (grandpas) up to date-- as we all (except me) have busy schedules.
Last year, the sponsor of my oldest grandsons team subscribed to a TeamPages.com service:
Aside: There were lots of parents and siblings taking pictures, and they were the source of most of the quality pictures. I uploaded a few pictures and most of the videos and. With a Mac it was easy for me to do videos (mainly iMove, with a little Final Cut).
The only downside to TeamPages is that they do not host the videos-- rather, they are uploaded to YouTube:
-- it's questionable to some parents if they want videos of their kids on you tube
-- It takes a while for videos to become available on YouTube- slow upload speed + slow reformatting (processing) speed
-- YouTube restricts what background music can be used in a video- frustrating if you've spent time synchronizing appropriate music to action in the video.
But, overall, TeamPages is great, and I was thinking of paying for the service for one or more of the kids' teams this year ($66 per team for ad-free site, $55 per team with ads).
But, now, it looks like I can provide the same ad-free services, for all 3 teams, with my one MobileMe account. And, YouTube won't be an issue, plus I will have more flexibility and control.
I Hope iMovie comes to the iPad soon. If it does, I can use my iPhone 4 to capture videos, then, with the Camera Connection Kit, I can edit/publish selected clips on-the-spot-- during period intermissions ar dead time between games.
I was trying to keep that and other possibilities a secret from the general audience. Some people don't deserve it and others I am more than willing to pass it along.
I'll never understand the complaints about Mobile Me that say it needs to be free because it's too expensive. IF you pay full retail price it works out to just over $8 a month. Is that really an outrageous amount to ask for the service? If so, as others have stated, there are plenty of online avenues to get a much cheaper Mobile Me subscription.
I appreciate that some prefer the "free" Google apps instead of Mobile Me, but there is a cost associated with them. Google is trading in your personal information. They make money off of you in ways not always entirely clear. Personally, that doesn't sit well with me and I will gladly pay a nominal $8 a month to keep my personal information a bit more personal.
I hope Mobile Me never goes the free route because I fear it will either mean a lessening of the features we currently have or having to deal with ads and the sale of our personal information. We need the OPTION of a paid service like Mobile Me that is tightly integrated to the OS and our devices.
I remember meeting a gang of blokes at a little inn I was staying while I was in Ingelheim, Germany. They were frustrated because the town was too quiet. So I gave them directions to a couple of hot spots in Meinz and even told them the name of the doormen so they could get in right away and without paying a cover charge.
The next morning everyone, but one, was thanking me on how great a time they had had. The one dissenter could only complain loudly that the bar 'help' couldn't speak English, the bear tasted like shit, and how he felt he was being ripped off. It was obvious that it wasn't that they 'couldn't speak English to hem, but that they wouldn't..
Later that afternoon, he came and asked me what was the name of the other bar that I had recommended. At that moment, he was dead in my mind, and God made me judge.
I'll never understand the complaints about Mobile Me that say it needs to be free because it's too expensive. IF you pay full retail price it works out to just over $8 a month. Is that really an outrageous amount to ask for the service? If so, as others have stated, there are plenty of online avenues to get a much cheaper Mobile Me subscription.
I appreciate that some prefer the "free" Google apps instead of Mobile Me, but there is a cost associated with them. Google is trading in your personal information. They make money off of you in ways not always entirely clear. Personally, that doesn't sit well with me and I will gladly pay a nominal $8 a month to keep my personal information a bit more personal.
I hope Mobile Me never goes the free route because I fear it will either mean a lessening of the features we currently have or having to deal with ads and the sale of our personal information. We need the OPTION of a paid service like Mobile Me that is tightly integrated to the OS and our devices.
I agree and I love my mobileMe. Specially now that I can use external domains for emails. I think the problem with mm is that it is a complicated sell. It is hard to explain what the advantages are to the average user and when the annual family bill comes around it seems expensive (I suspect most people only use a couple of the services at best). Lowering the price may increase the take-up but I doubt it will make more people take advantage of the services. But I love the recent developments and I expect to see mm develop at a fairly rapid pace, what with the ios devices selling like they do. I hope to see a better 'control panel', or 'management functionality' in the future. I still struggle with syncing and I have lost countless contacts over time. My wife and I have many contacts we share but by no means all. I have my business contacts in addition to the personal contacts. My address book also syncs with other apps such as Daylite. It is easy to end up with hundreds of duplicates, or having contacts over-written. The other pain is managing a single family photo gallery from one computer when every body has their own galleries and mm logins. I have to log out, then log in to the main account and then publish the images. Then, if I forget to reverse the login procedure I get yelled at for messing with 'my email'. Then when I re-set everything the iDisk needs to be set up again. Not difficult but too complicated for many users, I'm sure.
I have MobileMe but I've been unable to convert for one reason alone...using the webapp I cannot search through my entire inbox including all my folders. I hate having to click on each folder individually. In Gmail, I type in some keyword and boom!...it searches everything.
Since they already updated the mail webapp, I hold out little hope this will be added. Oh well...
What I was trying to say was that, once the *.me.com domain email accounts are free and anonymous (like hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.) they will become a huge source of spam. At that point, mail from the *.me.com domain will begin to be automatically flagged by many other mail systems as a potentially large source of spam (like hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.) and your email to a vendor from the .me domain will be far more likely to be automatically moved to the junkmail folder if you're lucky, or be automatically deleted sight-unseen if you aren't (like hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.).
The new Apple calendar allows shared calendars through the online app, but does it allow users to share their iPhone calendars like a service like Hyper Sync?
I have always been a MobileMe Fan, but this is a really positive change. While I wish the updates would happen faster I like what Apple is doing. I continue to use MM more and more with each update. When the calendar update ships I can see myself no longer using iCal.
With the Mail update I rarely open mail. Now that all my accounts forward into MM Mail and I can replay to them from each account why do I need mail.
I can see a future where my iMac is only used for WoW/Steam, and Illustration/Photo work.
While the web apps are good, they're nowhere near as practical (and responsive) as the desktop apps. These days I check emails from my iPhone rather than using Mail or Webmail. I'd really like to see some of the iOS UI enhancements make it to my Macbook, 10.7 seems so far away...
Some people here don't know how spam actually works.
Just because MobileMe is a pay service does not mean you are any safer than someone with a free email host. What matters is this, do you use your @me address with friends, family, web sites, on forms, resumes etc? If you do you run the HIGH risk of getting spam email. The more you use (and post) your email address the worse it will get.
So for instance if you sign up to an online site like AppleInsider with your @me address you run the risk of getting spam. Certain sites sell their member email lists to third parties for this very reason....to make money!
Some people are really naive. You don't need a @me email to spam @me members.
hmm, interesting. i have one gmail account that i never -ever- use for online forms etc, and i have only given the address out to 3 or 4 close friends. at this very point in time, there are 172 items in the spam folder.
Comments
It's not really a quote when you re-type it and don't check your spelling! Aside from that, the point is...
I think his point was, that if it is a free service a lot of spammers will grab the free accounts with which to send out their messages. By being a paid for service, it greatly restricts the number of people that would use it.
This makes even less sense.
I've been using Macs since '88. I dropped '.Mac' about two years ago. I am now very happy with Google Mail/Calendar/Contacts/Tasks/Apps/Picasa and use Dropbox for essential files I might want to have access to elsewhere. All that currently for free. I dropped '.Mac' because paying £65.00 in one payment seemed to hurt too much given the alternatives were completely satisfactory and free. In itself, I know £65.00 is good value for what you get - but not comparatively good value, compared with very good free add-supported services.
What's the marginal cost to Apple of another .Me subscriber? Must be extremely low. I reckon Apple could create a much larger on-line .Me community by dropping their price to £20 per year and accept automatic quarterly payments to make it easier to pay. I'm sure that at a price one third of the current price the User base would increase significantly - and likely the profitability of the service - and the also the relative importance of the service. With a only a handful of Users, it will remain a service of minor importance, certainly comparatively. The .Me service could be marketed as something important and worthwhile to the Apple-User experience and as such Apple shouldn't make it so 'painful' to adopt.
I don't agree that the same services from Google and others are "completely satisfactory" at all. Using other services for the (admittedly few) things MobileMe provides is overly complicated and the quality of the products is just one shade away from absolute crap IMO. That being said, you make a rational and logical argument even though the "average" person is not going to agree that using the free alternatives is easier, or has better value.
I would like to point out one mistake though. You said you wished for automatic payments, but I've been making automatic payments for MobileMe (and previously .Mac), for at least four or five years.
When you do it that way, it's just a minor charge on your credit card that you don't even notice. It's certainly a lot cheaper than many other things in our daily lives. I just went to the store a few minutes ago and got a jug of milk and two ice-cream bars. The cost was equivalent to aprox. three months of MobileMe.
have never had spam in my mobileme mailbox. >fingers crossed!<
That Leukemia spam will hit every inbox one of these days.
I think his point was, that if it is a free service a lot of spammers will grab the free accounts with which to send out their messages. By being a paid for service, it greatly restricts the number of people that would use it.
Holy shit, what are you on about man? No wonder Apple has yet to make it free with this FUD in people's minds.
Just because MobileMe is a pay service does not mean you are any safer than someone with a free email host. What matters is this, do you use your @me address with friends, family, web sites, on forms, resumes etc? If you do you run the HIGH risk of getting spam email. The more you use (and post) your email address the worse it will get.
So for instance if you sign up to an online site like AppleInsider with your @me address you run the risk of getting spam. Certain sites sell their member email lists to third parties for this very reason....to make money!
Some people are really naive. You don't need a @me email to spam @me members.
Web apps for 10.7? I doubt it. Multi-touch like the iPad? I doubt that will be 10.7 too. More likely it'll be an evolution of 10.6, because Snow Leopard wasn't a bad OS at all for the desktop, there was nothing wrong with it. In many ways, it's more powerful than iOS, because it can use a mouse.
I think he means the way the apps look. I’d like to see Calendar appear much more like the iPad app. I agree with ilogic that this will be the case.
I’d also like to have iCal and Address Book accessed directly through Mail app. Sure, they are tied to together on the backend and there is an inspector window for adding and viewing some items, but I’d like an option much more like Outlook, which I plan to test once a proper version is finished for Mac OS X.
Can it sync with multiple Google calendars?
It can sync with iCal on a Mac or with Outlook, which can then sync with Google calendars. I can’t attest to how well that works, but it technically can be done.
This makes even less sense.
It makes perfect sense. You don’t give away a service if you have no option for making revenue from associated services.
There are no ads, Apple isn’t Google and can easily make you think everything on the internet is free of charge. If and when iAds makes a web appearance then a free version of MobileMe may appear.
But don’t count on it being the same MobileMe you get now with a paid account. Expect a much simpler version with much more limited feature set. MobileMe offers a complete package that no one else can come close to competing with at any price. This is not likely to change anytime soon.
Publish a calendar for a group or team: The Calendar beta lets you share a read-only public calendar that can be viewed by anyone, perfect for publishing an events calendar such as a soccer team schedule. After setting it up you can send the team members a link to view the calendar on their iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, or PC.
Event invitations with RSVPs: Inviting any guest to an event is easy from the MobileMe Calendar beta. Just add their email address to the event (they don't have to be a MobileMe member) and your guests will get an invitation email they can respond to directly by clicking a link. Your event then automatically updates, making it easy to track RSVPs right in your calendar.
Now, these two features are great. I've been a MobileMe user since it was a free service-- iTools.
A couple of years ago, I tried publishing "team" information for my 3 grandkids soccer teams-- information: (schedules, maps to playing fields); pictures; videos. The "information" part was just scanned images (or screen capture images) of text files.
The pictures and images worked fine-- all team members could view and download; selected team members could upload.
The "information" part was static-- it just sat there, and didn't change much. There was no easy to publish schedule changes, cancelled practices, etc. The Invitation/RSVP feature is great for keeping the parents, players, coaches (grandpas) up to date-- as we all (except me) have busy schedules.
Last year, the sponsor of my oldest grandsons team subscribed to a TeamPages.com service:
http://www.teampages.com/teams/17374...r-team-website
Aside: There were lots of parents and siblings taking pictures, and they were the source of most of the quality pictures. I uploaded a few pictures and most of the videos and. With a Mac it was easy for me to do videos (mainly iMove, with a little Final Cut).
The only downside to TeamPages is that they do not host the videos-- rather, they are uploaded to YouTube:
-- it's questionable to some parents if they want videos of their kids on you tube
-- It takes a while for videos to become available on YouTube- slow upload speed + slow reformatting (processing) speed
-- YouTube restricts what background music can be used in a video- frustrating if you've spent time synchronizing appropriate music to action in the video.
But, overall, TeamPages is great, and I was thinking of paying for the service for one or more of the kids' teams this year ($66 per team for ad-free site, $55 per team with ads).
But, now, it looks like I can provide the same ad-free services, for all 3 teams, with my one MobileMe account. And, YouTube won't be an issue, plus I will have more flexibility and control.
I Hope iMovie comes to the iPad soon. If it does, I can use my iPhone 4 to capture videos, then, with the Camera Connection Kit, I can edit/publish selected clips on-the-spot-- during period intermissions ar dead time between games.
I like that!
Great timing-- our first team meeting is tonight!
.
I was trying to keep that and other possibilities a secret from the general audience. Some people don't deserve it and others I am more than willing to pass it along.
Seriously? Who ITF died and made you judge?
I appreciate that some prefer the "free" Google apps instead of Mobile Me, but there is a cost associated with them. Google is trading in your personal information. They make money off of you in ways not always entirely clear. Personally, that doesn't sit well with me and I will gladly pay a nominal $8 a month to keep my personal information a bit more personal.
I hope Mobile Me never goes the free route because I fear it will either mean a lessening of the features we currently have or having to deal with ads and the sale of our personal information. We need the OPTION of a paid service like Mobile Me that is tightly integrated to the OS and our devices.
Can you clarify: Are you saying Mobile Me gets no spam at all, or that emails you send from gmail will end up in the spam folder of the recipient?
MobileMe as Spam in Gmail
http://www.google.com/support/forum/...20eb2be5&hl=en
MobileMe getting spam
http://discussions.apple.com/message...sageID=7704087
No, the point is that free email services become sources for spam, and mail from those services (e.g. Hotmail) end up on spam blacklists.
Controlling accounts (which costs $$) helps ensure that email from those domains doesn't end up on spam blacklists.
Its not about mail coming into free services, its about spam coming OUT of them.
Seriously? Who ITF died and made you judge?
I remember meeting a gang of blokes at a little inn I was staying while I was in Ingelheim, Germany. They were frustrated because the town was too quiet. So I gave them directions to a couple of hot spots in Meinz and even told them the name of the doormen so they could get in right away and without paying a cover charge.
The next morning everyone, but one, was thanking me on how great a time they had had. The one dissenter could only complain loudly that the bar 'help' couldn't speak English, the bear tasted like shit, and how he felt he was being ripped off. It was obvious that it wasn't that they 'couldn't speak English to hem, but that they wouldn't..
Later that afternoon, he came and asked me what was the name of the other bar that I had recommended. At that moment, he was dead in my mind, and God made me judge.
I'll never understand the complaints about Mobile Me that say it needs to be free because it's too expensive. IF you pay full retail price it works out to just over $8 a month. Is that really an outrageous amount to ask for the service? If so, as others have stated, there are plenty of online avenues to get a much cheaper Mobile Me subscription.
I appreciate that some prefer the "free" Google apps instead of Mobile Me, but there is a cost associated with them. Google is trading in your personal information. They make money off of you in ways not always entirely clear. Personally, that doesn't sit well with me and I will gladly pay a nominal $8 a month to keep my personal information a bit more personal.
I hope Mobile Me never goes the free route because I fear it will either mean a lessening of the features we currently have or having to deal with ads and the sale of our personal information. We need the OPTION of a paid service like Mobile Me that is tightly integrated to the OS and our devices.
I agree and I love my mobileMe. Specially now that I can use external domains for emails. I think the problem with mm is that it is a complicated sell. It is hard to explain what the advantages are to the average user and when the annual family bill comes around it seems expensive (I suspect most people only use a couple of the services at best). Lowering the price may increase the take-up but I doubt it will make more people take advantage of the services. But I love the recent developments and I expect to see mm develop at a fairly rapid pace, what with the ios devices selling like they do. I hope to see a better 'control panel', or 'management functionality' in the future. I still struggle with syncing and I have lost countless contacts over time. My wife and I have many contacts we share but by no means all. I have my business contacts in addition to the personal contacts. My address book also syncs with other apps such as Daylite. It is easy to end up with hundreds of duplicates, or having contacts over-written. The other pain is managing a single family photo gallery from one computer when every body has their own galleries and mm logins. I have to log out, then log in to the main account and then publish the images. Then, if I forget to reverse the login procedure I get yelled at
Since they already updated the mail webapp, I hold out little hope this will be added. Oh well...
With the Mail update I rarely open mail. Now that all my accounts forward into MM Mail and I can replay to them from each account why do I need mail.
I can see a future where my iMac is only used for WoW/Steam, and Illustration/Photo work.
iOS rocks (which is what MobileMe is becoming).
Just because MobileMe is a pay service does not mean you are any safer than someone with a free email host. What matters is this, do you use your @me address with friends, family, web sites, on forms, resumes etc? If you do you run the HIGH risk of getting spam email. The more you use (and post) your email address the worse it will get.
So for instance if you sign up to an online site like AppleInsider with your @me address you run the risk of getting spam. Certain sites sell their member email lists to third parties for this very reason....to make money!
Some people are really naive. You don't need a @me email to spam @me members.
hmm, interesting. i have one gmail account that i never -ever- use for online forms etc, and i have only given the address out to 3 or 4 close friends. at this very point in time, there are 172 items in the spam folder.