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Apple doesn't need to make .Mac free to succeed, just more reasonable. I think most people balk at $99 for what you essentially get for free via Google & Yahoo (storage space, contact book, email, etc.). If .Mac was $19.99, $24.99 or $29.99, there would be greater appeal and consequently much greater success.

May 09, 08 - 03:32 pm Comment from: macoverdose_dot_com

I havent bought into .mac yet but if they beef it up just a little bit more I will be sold... a price drop or free would be ideal but I doubt it will happen.

Well, if this is true, it is a good direction. I have been fuming at the prospect of having to switch to using Entourage in order to get OTA synchronization on my iPhone. I came from an Exchange environment using Outlook and the Treo 750. I enter calendar items all the time, and if I don't remember to sync my iPhone, then my desktop calendar doesn't match. OTA is going to be great.

There are two caveats though. First, Apple needs to add a task (to do) app to the iPhone. Second, Apple has to enable its phone to read its own files. On my WinMobile phone, I could take along Word documents, PowerPoint files etc. Now I can't take my Pages and Keynote files along. My iPhone doesn't read them.

If .MAC is going to be useful (and if I have to use Entourage to sync, I'll surely dump .MAC), then Apple has to tie all the pieces together.

May 09, 08 - 03:36 pm Comment from: Jim - TIV

So..... .mac gets an upgrade by using MS' active sync, now all iphones and iPod touches can sync with .Mac.

Millions of people start buying iphones for business....

Outlook takes a hit because MS licensed Active Sync to Apple.

Priceless.

May 09, 08 - 03:39 pm Comment from: John Gee

OK -- in case you missed it on the other similar post today...

.Mac is like 70-75 bucks on Amazon.

Save money and buy it there. I've been using for years, and it is a nice product, simple solution.

@ Timbo
No . . . your comment works here too! While M$ is working hard to transform the Zune to be almost as good as the iPod Classic, Apple jumps so far ahead it's laughable. Imagine how great it will be to have that iPod Touch / iPhone with .Mac working in the background? I give Zune less than a year till it all falls apart. BTW I wanted Zune to be awesome . . . I like innovation making things better. Too bad Zune never really tried innovation, aside from squirting songs it was all copy whatever works.

I've been a .Mac user for years, and it was overpriced (but handy) to keep my macs all synced up. I used a few other features but stayed on BECAUSE of iWeb. I can put up a great small password protected websites in 10 minutes for work, and I find it a GREAT way to make a presentation when I can't be there.

A Couple of days ago Apple sent me a detailed survey all about .Mac with questions about what features I use / would like to see. I told them exactly what I wanted. It's pretty obvious there is a change coming . . .

May 09, 08 - 03:49 pm Comment from: HMCIV

More storage? Faster connections?

Aside from making it free(which I don't agree with), Apple needs to speed up the bandwith both into and out of the Dot Mac servers.. it's still painfully slow.

The "second coming"???? Actually, this would make it at least the third if not the fourth coming of Dot Mac.

May 09, 08 - 04:07 pm Comment from: Dave - Colorado

Apple needs to drop the price, since I have the family pack (making the price a little reasonable), but am leaning away because it costing more than it should. A price drop and beefier would definitely keep me.

May 09, 08 - 04:18 pm Comment from: LateRegistrant

For my purposes .Mac is useful enough to maintain a subscription. However, the iDisk upload of large files could function better. After I drop a locally stored file's icon onto an iDisk folder, a progress bar seems to indicate that the upload has taken just a few seconds, but then the "finishing..." message sits there without providing a clue as to how far along the "finishing" is progressing. (Not just with iDisk, I've observed the problem with other WebDAV storage accessed via a Mac.)

May 09, 08 - 04:33 pm Comment from: dd

.Mac should be $79/year WITHOUT an iPhone and either free or as high as $19/year WITH one. For that price (but not any higher), I'd get .Mac after getting an iPhone.

.Mac the next big thing? Yeah . . . maybe if they make it *work* properly. Ever tried backing up a couple of gigs? Do you have a day spare? And why do they make it (a) so hard to obtain tech support and (b) so very, very difficult to unsubscribe. How *can* you do that, by the way? I have been *massively* unimpressed with .Mac to date. Essentially, it's a complete rip-off and the very model of appalling customer service.

hmmm. I think that I'm beginning to fall into the group that feels .mac ought to be free- to an extent- perhaps free email with a low limit, and a few MB of sync capabilities for ical and contacts. I'm perfectly happy paying $99-/ for my storage, we use iWeb quite extensively. I think making an entry level basic service free or nearly free would get folks hooked on the other features not to mention extending the benefits of the OSX platform in general. For example, if every mac had built in backup for email accounts, address books calendars and, a free 20MB email account, how much would that cost to provide, and (VS) how many switchers would the ensuing buzz generate. I think they'd sell a significant number of macs with that feature.

May 09, 08 - 05:22 pm Comment from: HolyMackerel

Only if they bundled .Mac functionality into MacOS X Server would businesses consider it as a viable alternative to Outlook.

I'd be willing to pay a little for syncing, but that's really the only feature that I can't easily get elsewhere. I have my own domain hosting, my own email, and local external hard drives are much faster for back up than iDisk.

I'd pay $20/year for 1) syncing my iPhone and my iMac, and 2) a hosted photo gallery to which I can post pictures from my iPhone. I don't need anything else, and don't want to pay $80 more for it.

May 09, 08 - 05:26 pm Comment from: ElderNorm

I have tried .Mac a couple of times and..... I just do not get it. Like above, I get e-mail from google and yahoo.

Would I go to .Mac??

Make the price 35$ per year and 65$ a year depending on use.
Keep the mac to mac capability.
Keep the web site support.
Add features for tying all the Mac products together.

And its reasonable that I would buy into it.

But now its just a want-a-bee that is priced way to high. Sorry.

en

I wouldn't mind $70 a year for .mac. However, they need to up the online storage space to 20 or more GB.

"OK -- in case you missed it on the other similar post today...

.Mac is like 70-75 bucks on Amazon."

If you buy it at Best Buy, it's $100, but when you sign up, you're sent a $30 check.

May 09, 08 - 06:01 pm Comment from: Gandalf

I don't want free.

Google/Yahoo/MSN etc 'free' is scanning your emails etc for keywords to sell to advertisers. Free in dollars and cents maybe but that is the least important kind of free. Did you read (and understand) all the small print in the user agreement, the copyright clauses for one? Lots of lawyers don't understand it, they reckon it needs to be tested in court. Until then all your data belongs to ??? - it's a gray area.

Land of the free, if it wasn't so ironic it would be amusing.

May 09, 08 - 06:14 pm Comment from: jocknerd

Sorry but Apple lost me with dot Mac. I've paid for 4 years of it and feel like I through away $350. No more. My mail is on Google, my Calendar is on Google. My pictures are on Flickr. My videos are on YouTube. And I couldn't be happier.

dotMac is dead brand the might as well sell it to Microsoft

I don't get it with .Mac. Apple are will to use iTunes sales to drive Pod sales; iTunes Movie rental to drive AppleTV sales; various software freebies to drive iPhone sales; iWork to help drive computer sales. To tie all together ---- gimmy a 'C note'????? I think they need to wake up and use a free conduit to tie everything together by utilizing .Mac. Come on Apple put everything in one sack and drive your hardware sales even further and faster for the common person.

.Mac needs to be free but with very little storage - like 10MBs - pay for more. I paid for it once - and was never able to connect because the service was too slow in my neck of the woods. I never asked for a refund; and I'll never pay for it again without proof that it works.

I use Google because it's free and that's the only reason. If Apple makes .Mac free I'll switch over in no time flat but I just can't see Apple doing this any time soon.

@ John Gee
Can you use the boxed version to renew or just initial sign up. Can a US boxed version be used for a .mac account in Australia. I'm paying the equivalent of 235 USD here for a family pack.

May 09, 08 - 10:06 pm Comment from: TowerTone

Russ
Apple makes money off of iTunes on the whole from sales of music, TV shows, movies, and rentals of movies. The iPhone stuff are not freebies. They have been planned as add ons from the get-go with a slow roll-out. iWork is not free, either. See my drift?

you have to pay for that bandwidth and all those servers, not to mention maintenance and the buildings themselves. I wouldn't mind seeing a stripped down version, but for myself and my kids, I buy the full Family Pack (and no ads, thank you).

$49 per year sounds good, $29 if you buy it with a mac.

May 09, 08 - 10:41 pm Comment from: iDon't

$99 forever sounds good too.

May 09, 08 - 10:55 pm Comment from: ken1w

.Mac is actually pretty cool already. I like iDisk working like any disk on the Desktop. It's convenient to be able to copy (drag and drop) any jpeg file or html file into the Sites folder and have it available on the web through a URL.

I like having a mac.com email address, and being able to create multiple alias mac.com email address for free. .Mac is very well integrated with Mail. Setting up a .Mac account in Mail is a one-step process. If you set up an email alias address in .Mac, it is immediately available in Mail as your "from" address.

The sync-related features are very nice, as is the tie-in features with iLife apps.

I probably only use about 1/3 of the available .Mac features, and I think it's worth the cost. If Apple lowers the price, I'll like it even more.

May 09, 08 - 11:24 pm Comment from: Scott in Japan

@jocknerd

looks like you "through" away yer money on edumacation two.

threw !

May 09, 08 - 11:33 pm Comment from: Scott in Japan

I have also been with .mac since the iTools days. At times I also feel like I should stop the service. $100 is a lot of money. I agree with the general consensus that a lower (but not necessarily free) price with more storage would make it much more appealing. I just took a look at my home folder and there is no way I could use my iDisk for backing it up.

Here's to hopes for a bigger, cheaper .Mac.

May 10, 08 - 01:33 am Comment from: HazMatt

I'm still bitter about the "free email address for life", a la .

I'd like to see .mac free as a value added service to buying a new Mac.

I agree with ken1w. I find .mac synching, email aliases, and Backup well worth the $79 I pay every year. With regard to speed. I use Transmit 3 to move larger files to and from my iDisk which is considerably faster than using Apple's built-in solution.

I do feel .Mac is priced too high. But I have multiple .Mac accounts anyway. Nothing else provides the smooth integration with the Mac. And I do like .Mac mail services as well as som other things. But the price is too high.

Accessing Dot Mac in SE Asia is too slow, although I suppose they have servers in Singapore (since we will be billed in S$). I have tried a free service for a year once but used only a sync function mainly and found that it 's not worth the current price. If they drop the price to less than US$30, that 'd be more attractive.

May 10, 08 - 07:26 am Comment from: Jamie

to have blazing fast transfers onto iDisk use Transmit.

I just couldn't use my iDisk with Finder, I'm based in the UK and it hardly ever worked, I'd get 'closing file' message indefinitely...

With Transmit, my transfers are fast and easy.

Every .mac hosted website I ever visited was the absolutely slowest loading, to the point of unusability for me. If I see a site from a friend is a .mac site, I think twice before wasting my time. What's the deal with that? I'd never, ever have considered paying a single dime for that kind of speed, etc. Now, if they get that fixed, drop the price, add a reasonably decent amount of storage - that's another story.... So, let's see what Apple's got up their sleeves, and let's hope it's a huge improvement.

first of all, it needs to be called mac.com .Mac is almost as bad a name as Zune.

if they rename it mac.com that might start the synapses firing so they can come up with an actual net content strategy.

I have been looking at and will buy my first Mac and iWork this year and slowly convert all my computers to Mac. So, I come from a different perspective. As for .Mac, the price is a little too much for me to convert myself from Google. Seeing the videos online about .Mac from the Apple website and other places, I see there is some more ease in using your Mac and .Mac together. Yet, to pay for the convenience is something I doubt I would do. Would I try it out for $20.00, probably. Would I try it for free and stick with it? Most likely.

Perhaps you can have a free side and a pay side. The free side has some basics and the pay side you get much more. Still, you are competing with Google, so the focus should be to make it more affordable.

Of course, this is from a guy who has never personally used a .Mac. I could find that "I can not do without" once I use it. Or, I could say "I love it but it is too expensive." From what I have seen, the latter is where I currently reside.

When .Mac / iTools was free I was very excited about the service... when it became a paid for service I balked at it (and most everyone on this website did too back then as I remember) and decided it was not worth it. .Mac is a service that should be free in order to up the value of a Mac purchase.

May 12, 08 - 12:46 pm Comment from: MacRaven

Cheaper than a 6 pack of imported beer. $99 a year is only $8.25 a month. Big F'n deal.

.Mac has been useful in more than mail and posting photos and a web site. When I had a computer drive acting questionably after a power outage, I was able to transfer critical documents immediately to Cupertino and not sweat it.

Even if my house burned down and my computer AND my Time Machine turned to toast, my most critical things would be safe, and I could just hit iSync to restore my bookmarks, addresses, etc. on the new purchase.

If you don't want to buy and maintain an OFF SITE server, .Mac is a reasonable alternative for many things.