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Jul
21
(2005)
Thinking of ditching .Mac
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: apple.
I’ve been a relatively hardcore .Mac user since the day it was announced (as the free iTools service, several years ago). I stuck with it when it switched from free to a paid subscription. It had enough handy stuff that I could totally justify the approximately $160 CDN per year.
But, I find I’m not using any of the .Mac services now, except for iSync. My dad uses a .Mac email address that I renew for him every year (he started with a free account, too, and was caught when it switched to a payment model).
So, I’m spending ballpark $170/year, for iSync and an email account for my dad. I use Flickr for all of my photo sharing (blows the crap out of .Mac homepage album management), and I use my blog for everything else.
I would guess that I could work out some way of keeping my two macs in sync, and throw my dad a GMail account, for something less than $170/year. Then, I could allocate the leftover cash to paying for my GoDaddy hosting, and maintaining a FlickrPro account, and have enough left over to pick up a new iPod Shuffle every year.
Unless, of course, there is a serious upgrade to .mac in the works…
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11 Responses to “Thinking of ditching .Mac”
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Ditto - I used my dot mac email as my ‘catch all ‘ for various online activities but I will move most of that over to gmail. I still support a few of my family for mail and iChat but that is hardly worth it. At the current rate I like the possibilities of Gmail upgrades before .Mac.
It would be really nice if iSync could work with a generic FTP server - that way I could still sync my macs without being “upsold” on .Mac
I’m coming up on 2 years with .Mac and I’ll be dropping it, unless they get .Mac Sync working again. I haven’t been able to sync my three computers since May 11th, right around the time that I upgraded to Tiger across the board. I’ve had an issue open with .Mac support for six WEEKS now (I was really hoping 10.4.2 would fix it, but it hasn’t) and all i get outta them is “you’re important to us, we’re working on it”, etc. I think I’ll call tomorrow, cancel, and try to get a refund retroactive to 5/11. I’m really steamed; the sync service was the only thing that made the service worth paying for.
blabor: that sucks. .mac sync has been almost bulletproof for me. once, I had to nuke the copy on the .Mac server, and re-sync from my laptop (also nuking the synced data on my other 2 systems, and then syncing freshly from the newly repopulated .mac server). IIRC, there’s an option in iSync to do this, or perhaps it’s in the .Mac account/sync pane on mac.com ?
Never understood why one is willing to pay money for something you could get for (nearly) free. I have my eMails at another provider which offers also a Fax-number, sendig SMS, a phonenumber for leaving voice-mails, and so on…
My .mac-demoaccount has expired two years ago, but I can still use the iChat with it since it expired. And *that* was mostly the reason why I first registered with .mac but when they wanted money I did not pay a cent.
For heavens sake the iCards are working without .mac account. Otherwise I would have signed up with http://www.bluemountain.com/
my 2 cents.
The problem is that I can’t register any of my computers. The list of registered computers is blank, and when I try to register any of them, nothing happens. There’s a message in one of the log files indicating that there was some invalid XML response from the server, but it’s a PITA to debug, as the connection’s secured. I’ve worked around that before (when I worked on reverse engineering the service) but I don’t really feel that I should have to.
I’ll be dropping .mac too. I’m always forgetting to check email, have switched to Flickr, blogging, etc.
Helge, I paid for .Mac because of the seamless integration, and when it came out the tools were far better than other available tools. The Homepage Builder was way ahead of the rest of the pack, and the integration with iPhoto was the big seller.
I do agree, though, that now that almost all .Mac functionality is available elsewhere, for less money, and often with better implementation, that it doesn’t make sense to keep paying for .Mac. Perhaps this could be a wakeup call for Apple? They generated a LOT of positive karma when they released iTools as free, and lost most/all of it when they started charging for what was once free. They lost whatever was left by essentially letting the paid .Mac service wither on the vine.
@D’Arcy: I agree, once upon a time, there was an innovative .mac, but… Yeah I also was pretty much amazed how Apple first was truly honest to itsel and enabled normal human beeings to publish to the net. And thinking of my dad there are *many* of those kind of people out there…
Apple could really make a big deal here, bringing themselves to a unique selling proposition (USP) with great integration of all Mac-iApps e.g. the Button to publish directly to Homepage is a great thing! Okay, powerusers will use flickr (using the right tool for the task!). But to be even mor true to itself Apple could just integrate something like iCal-server-support for each mac OS X box right from the start. Why not enabling people to build groups on .mac e.g. to coordinate calendars?
Why not use eLearning via .mac to bring newest info to the developers… I mean not just dumb QT-Movies but real eLearning with some powerful webbased solution?
There is so much possibility to integrate i.e. developers much better in the Apple halo. I think that .mac at its time was just some Marketing-buzz (Mac OS X was not yet that mature and was really in beta-stage taht days…), after Apple recognized people actually used it, they thought, hey why not take money for this. I was really angry the day they started charging money, because I once had a .mac-account and I even was unable to use it with iChat after the charging started. But later on they lowered the restrictions and another .mac-testaccount was misused by myself until now for iChat only.
But hey nevertheless Apple is ranked TOP of the TOP 20 most innovative companies… as it said on the shirts in the campusstore in 2004… “The root of all innovation…”. Seems that this innovation is just focused on other fields… at least not focused on WebObjects or .mac, we will see…
just my 2 cents.
I also agree. Apple hasn’t done anything to make .Mac very compelling. In this instance, I figure they’re competing in a sense with a horde of .coms (like Google) offering various free services, and a horde of programmers offering services that add up to anything they can throw against it. I think they’ve essentially thrown in the towel for now.
Heh. Ironically, my iSync menubar item has been hung for over an hour now - spinning ceaselessly, bringing my other menubar items down with it (clock is stuck at the same time, etc…) Another vote against .Mac, if it’s only used for iSync…