“Apple Computer’s latest advertising campaign, pegged to the slogan ‘It just works,’ is irritating some .Mac users as they wonder when the service will become operational again,” Dawn Kawamoto reports for CNET News.
“Over the past four days, .Mac users have struggled to get its Web site publishing features, iWeb, and related file-share capabilities, iDisk, to work. Users have complained not only about the length of the outage, but also what they say is a tardy response from .Mac’s technical support team, according to postings on Apple’s discussion board,” Kawamoto reports.
“Apple, meanwhile, says it is investigating the issue. ‘We are aware of the outage and are looking into it,’ an Apple spokeswoman said. She noted that it is premature to discuss whether Apple plans to reimburse users a portion of their $99.95 annual fee for .Mac service, which also includes data synchronization tools and group e-mail,” Kawamoto reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: According to Apple’s .Mac pages: “All .Mac services are online and operational.”
However, Apple’s online listing of .Mac System status for the last 30 days looks almost Microsoftian:
• 07/25/2006: For 8 hours iWeb publishing produced a network error message for some .Mac members.
• 07/25/2006: EMail was unavailable for 1.5 hour(s) for some .Mac Members.
• 07/24/06: Sync services were unavailable for 3 hours to all .Mac members.
• 07/20/2006: EMail was unavailable for 2 hour(s) for some .Mac Members.
• 07/18/2006: EMail was unavailable for 45 minute(s) to some .Mac Members.
• 07/18/2006: EMail was unavailable for 3 hour(s) to some .Mac Members.
• 07/17/2006: EMail was unavailable for 15 minute(s) to some .Mac Members.
• 07/16/2006: EMail was unavailable for 15 minute(s) to some .Mac Members.
• 07/14/2006: EMail was unavailable for 15 minute(s) to some .Mac Members.
• 07/13/2006: EMail was slow for 30 minute(s) to some .Mac Members.
• 07/13/2006: EMail was unavailable for 15 minute(s) to some .Mac Members.
• 07/10/2006: EMail was unavailable for 1 hour for some .Mac members.
• 07/06/2006: EMail was unavailable for 30 minutes for some .Mac Members.
What’s the deal, Apple?
Are any .Mac members having issues with .Mac? If so, please tell us about it below.
.Mac’s sins could all be forgiven if were only faster – A LOT faster… Since we’re paying a premium price, speed should be premium, also. That being said, .Mac is a great service. I particularly like how 3rd party developers can weave .Mac compatibility into their programs (DVDPedia comes to mind, among others).
Come on, Apple – speed, speed, speed!
I am a Mac user, but what is .Mac?
Game Over,
Google won a long time ago.
Apple would be better off spending some quality time with their products.
Problem 1: Frequent errors on my .Mac webmail telling me to go back to the “.Mac Homepage and try again” or telling me that a message couldn’t be sent to good addresses. This is regardless of what browser I’m on (Firefox, Safari, IE) and regardless of what OS I’m on (Windows or Mac OS X) and regardless of location (from home, from work, even when on holiday in Egypt!). However, the .Mac support team ignore this info and simply tell me that I must be having a problem with my browser.
Problem 2: Spam City. I don’t give out my email address but I get constantly spammed. I get around 50 or more spam mails a day. And what’s worse, IT’S THE SAME DAMN ONES ALMOST EVERY DAY! I continually send these to spam@mac.com with the full headers as they request but they’re clearly ignoring me and wasting my time because they’re never blocked.
Apple, please put some effort into .Mac.
$99 a year = 27 cents a day! Less than a soda.
Or $1.90 a WEEK, (or $8.25 a month).
So drop one Latte or beer a week, and it’s paid for.
I have had very few problems with .Mac and I’ve used it 5 years now. The one infrequent problem I have is with iSync. I only do 2, the Calendar and the Address Book. Sometimes when I try to do both, it won’t sync. If I then try one at a time. It works. iSync alone is worth $99.
E-mail has worked fine. I wish I had time to try the other .Mac features. I’ve used iDisk for quick and dirty small select backups, and on an unexpected dying Hard Drive and it’s saved my butt a few times.
I have all the features I want from .mac on my linuxserver and a whole lot more!
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1Tb online storage. Web, mail and game servers. 100Mbit *unshared* bandwidth.
This little package sets me back about us$60 per year ( the bandwidth, the rest was free
If you have the bandwidth then a .mac is not worth it.
“1) IDisk too slow? Keep a copy of your iDisk on your machine and sync in manually at the end of the day.”
Hah – iDisk is way too slow using the Finder. I use Panic’s Transmit to move stuff to my iDisk and it absolutely rockets. Now how is it possible that a 3rd party can make iDisk as fast as a network drive ( almost) but Apple can’t?
I got a .mac account for my business, but will drop it at the end of the term. Why? Because I can’t use a real domain name. I’m using Planet Argon for my web hosting. $135 a year. Unlimited email accounts. Database support with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Ruby on Rails or Django web framework, or PHP for those who still use it. But I’m a web application developer and a Mac consultant. .Mac doesn’t make much sense for someone like me.
.Mac [I]should[/I] be free. Or at the very least a lot cheaper. It’s nothing so great that it’s worth that much money. And they’d get at least twice as many customers if it cost half as much, I’m sure.
.mac should be cheaper… and gas should be cheaper too… and CD’s, they should be cheaper… and a ticket to the movies… those should be cheaper, and…
coffee
airplane tickets
computers
ipods
ice cream
toilet paper
paint
auto service
dry cleaning
candy
beer
lawnmowers
DVDs
televisions
cable
broadband
books
magazines
cars
These should all be cheaper, why aren’t they cheaper… I want cheaper!
Don’t know if you’ll get back to this thread as I’m a little late……….
l33t h@XXor: “It’s Apple’s fault. Why? For not adding multiple compartmentalization to thier operating system.”
I agree with you on that point, but since I am not a complete expert in OS X Server, that’s as much as I can say. Yes, it *should* be isolated from the rest of the network (either by OS or hardware barriers as you suggest), but again that is not my expertise. Glad you posted though, as I like to read those types of articles – very interesting.
[after an airplane passes just above his head]
I almost got head from Amelia Earhart!
I got a .mac account for my business, but will drop it at the end of the term. Why? Because I can’t use a real domain name. I’m using Planet Argon for my web hosting. $135 a year. Unlimited email accounts. Database support with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Ruby on Rails or Django web framework, or PHP for those who still use it. But I’m a web application developer and a Mac consultant. .Mac doesn’t make much sense for someone like me.
.Mac was created for the consumer, not for business uses. In fact, it is against the .Mac Terms and Conditions Agreement to run a business with your dot Mac account:
“.Mac has been designed for personal use and is not intended to be used to host e-commerce businesses for marketing, promotions and sales (including, without limitation, software distribution) over the Internet.”
http://www.mac.com/1/membership_terms.html