“It’s exactly one week until Steve Jobs takes the stage the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference to present another basket of fetish objects to his many worshipers,” Saul Hansell reports for The New York Times.
MacDailyNews Take: Hey, Saul, why don’t you stuff the extremely tired “fetish objects for worshipers” B.S. up your… write something original for a change? Sideways.
Hansell continues, “The diviners have fully examined the pigeon entrails and shipping manifests to prophesize the rebirth of the iPhone: It is said to surf faster, know its location better, and take pictures with more pixels. And it might even be cheaper.”
“Now there is a flurry of speculation about improvements to a minor icon an the Apple Pantheon: the .Mac online service. For six years, .Mac has been a $100 a year bundle of handy Internet services, now including e-mail, online hosting, backup, photo sharing, and tools to synchronize calendars and address books. Industry reports say Apple has between 1 million and 2 million subscribers,” Hansell reports.
“Those diving into the latest update to Apple’s operating system found that it no longer contains the text ‘.Mac’ but uses a variable ‘%@’ so the name can be updated on the fly by Apple. Indeed, hidden in the software is the phrase ‘%@ is the new name of Apple’s online service (was .Mac),'” Hansell reports. “Saturday, John Gruber at Daring Fireball found that ‘Me.Com’ appears to be owned by Apple.”
“The introduction of the successor to .Mac may offer a window into how Mr. Jobs sees advertising and the future of Apple. If the service, or a large part of it, is free with advertising, this may be the beginning of a shift that could build a significant new revenue source for the company (and possibly lead to a shift in the structure of the music business),” Hansell reports.
Full article here.
WWDC is usually not hardware oriented so his comment makes even less sense.
I would love free .mac before i have to renew in July.!!!
ad-free………hmm, whose ads ?
Talk about a “pigeon entrails” follower. Is he trying to out do Dvorak?
Even if this comes to fruition (and it’s really just wild speculation), I would pay to get the version *without* adds.
Everyone is fond of whining about how expensive .Mac is just because about half of it’s offerings can be had for free elsewhere, but it’s only 8 bucks a month, which is hardly a couple of cups of coffee nowadays.
I would certainly rather pay 8 bucks a month for the service being ad-free and pleasant to use as opposed to free but peppered with ugly adverts. If you want an ugly poorly designed complicated advert-infested POS web portal, then there are already many of that variety available out there.
Yes, I think jeremy is right. I’d rather pay for it sans ads.
So this guy spends a good part of the day reading really interesting slouthing reported on Mac fan sites. Purt a sacrastic spin on it all. Adds idle speculation that the revamped .Mac site could be all or partially paid for by add revenue (what a novel idea). and then makes a living doint it. What a world.
Not a chance, that is not Jobs style
What did Saul do with his ill-used time before blogs came along?
Perhaps it’s not wise to ask.
” … I would pay to get the version *without* ads …. “
Everyone says that they would pay for the privilege of NOT seeing ads, but what if MDN went to a subscription model with no ads or annoying pop-ups. How many of you would pay for that? Just wondering.
I think an ad based .mac model would have way more subscribers than you think. Although I would be surprised if Jobs pursued that path.
Oh God, please don’t make it “free with advertising”.
No advertising, and a charge is fine as long as it’s reasonable — which the current $99 is NOT.
This will happen the same day that they debut an iPhone with a slide out physical keyboard. I mean, really, they are both great ideas.
DO IT!!!!!
Free .Mac would be yet another reason in the growing list of why to switch.
Dutch writes, “Not a chance, that is not Jobs style”
I tend to agree. Apple is all about the user experience, and users *hate* ads – as does Jobs.
Here’s something to keep in mind. If the estimates of 1 – 2 million .Mac users are even close to accurate (and I am one of them), this means at a minimum that .Mac represents a $100M/year business to Apple. For a 24 billion dollar company like Apple, that’s 4% of revenue. Not insignificant, especially when you consider that the margins on the service are probably extraordinarily good.
Yeah, $99 per year is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE!!!
Imagine $8.25 per month! Why, that’ll buy you TWO cups of Starbucks! Or like 6 whole packs of gum! Or half a fscking lunch!!!
Ad-based .Mac would just become another Me-Too portal. The cost of running the service would go up and the quality of the service would more than likely go down. About the only thing that won’t change for the better would be the rate at which the service is enhanced.
If MDN offered a pay-for-no-ads option, I’d definitely take it. I’ve offered this to them many times, but they seem to be stuck on ads. I think that’s because they can influence a burst of new revenue by posting yet another article, such as on a slow Sunday evening.
I see more the possibility of .Mac becoming free for iPhone/iPod Touch users rather than ads being plastered all over it. That would mesh well with the new iPhone, iPhone SDK, and WWDC.
Now if they could just fix my iCal synching so it worked like it did in Tiger . . . .
This is just a hit piece trying to get readers to think .mac is worth . . . nothing!
I don’t see how Hansell makes the leap from “%@” (something widely known since last week) and “free with advertising”
Maybe because the value of his work is only worth “free with advertising.”
Why not let the market decide, just give the options.
$49 per year with no adds.
$29 per year with Apple only adds
$0 per year with everyones adds.
That way you open it up to a host of people who would jump right on. And Apple makes money on all users one way or another.
Why is “%@” any easier to replace than “.Mac”?
I pay way over $100 per year for .Mac since I have a family licence. Do I complain? No. Why? The spam filtering keeps my kid’s email clean and all 5 Macs are automatically and incrementally backed up off site each week without me lifting a finger.
The rest that I use (file sharing very large files), web gallery, .sync is just icing on the cake.
Addvertisements?
That’s ADS… not adds!
It’s short for advertisements. Get it?
What HolyMackerel said. Amen.
Ads? We don’t need no stinking ads….