“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.
Who cares what they name it. The service is down more than it is up. I have paid $100 for the very LAST time
If it continues to be slow – who cares.
There’s a rotating .Mac Promo on the Apple startpage that says “Email everywhere you go. Always ad-free.”
Now why would they hype “ad-free” and change it to ad supported. The guy is a moron…
Is it just me or mac.com is unavailable right now ? I ve refreshed a few times but still offline… Could it be preparation for a .Mac announcement soon ?
Back on the subject, .Mac is slow enough, I don’t think putting ads in the mix will make it any faster, and this is Apple, not Microsoft, so forget the ads.
Price reduction maybe if they want to reach more than a small percentage of mac users / and maybe windows users too
It says:
We’re sorry,
.Mac Mail on the web is temporarily unavailable. Please try again soon
A ad based .Mac is possible, Apple Store, itunes store and other iphone and ipod related products can sponsor the service. Apple only needs to design a marketing strategy and they can get more from those ads than the $100.
.Mac mail is down now. (9:30 Japan local time).
Still down here in Canada
It is back, no changes. (10:30 Japan time)
Something’s afoot.
Maybe he’s been reading pigeon splatter.
[Using my Simpsons Comic Book Guy voice]
<i>Best MDN take… ever.
I would drop my .Mac account if became ad supported. I’ve had .Mac for three years now. The fact that .Mac is free from ads, along with all its other features, is what makes it wonderful.
If Apple wants to make a free, ad supported .Mac “equivelent” they should go with .Me (@me.com) rather than throwing ads in .Mac to please the whiners.
Well, Mail is back up.
Oh and MDN, if you decide to go subscription only just tell me where to send the check!
pretty please keep .Mac ad free…give me a break $99 a year is a joke, most of you spill more than that on the bar in a year.
I dont want a free .mac….and I don’t want the email dot mac to be a different domain name…
I’ve had a dot mac since its iTools debut…I’ve been a paying member since the first charge several years ago…and I currently pay for the 30 GB…
I dont want ads, I don’t want it to change unless it improves (i.e. faster, more hard drive size, etc)..
As I already stated: these are just the last spasms of the dying!
Lapsus: this goes for RIM…
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />
why are you moaning about ads. MDN is full of them but we ignore them. Even when they slow surfing down for us. If Apple did any kind of ad system it would be advertising the iTunes top 10 or apple hot news or maybe pushing iPhones or apple accessories. However it is done it will be tasteful and I seriously doubt it will have third party ads.
What I personally would like to see is them making it free for anyone with a Mac but the generic stuff could be free to Windows users with the advanced “Mac only” stuff being advertised to those same Windows users telling them how much cooler a service they would get if they bought a Mac.
but to say it would remain a paid for service is pretty dumb. Many small freeware developers have put their (often useful) stuff up for download on their .Mac space only to not renew their subscription the next year. It’s so frustrating to click download on a useful sounding little app to find it’s no longer there. In fact I would go as far as saying that at least 60% of .Mac sites I find on google are no longer available. It’s like sitting in a hospital waiting room thumbing through magazines and finally reading on the cover of one an article that sounded really interesting only to find some tosser tore it out.
Pithhelmet strips the crap, sorry adverts, off MDN; so hopefully it will work with a ‘%@’ account.
i just want dem to make the email seperate and free, that’s al im asking and all i ever wanted!
[sarcasm]$100!!!!! That’s only 27 cents a day!!!! And just over a penny an hour. Too expensive? Pshaw.M[sarcasm off]
Seriously, those that say it’s “only” the cost of something are falling the trap of fallacious reasoning. If it was a $120/ MONTH, there would be some saying, THAT’S ONLY a COFFEE A DAY FOLKS!
Not only does all these little amounts add up, it’s also not wise to overpay for any service.
Right now, .Mac is grossly overpriced in comparison with its competitors.
Like someone said WHO’s advertising! And if they do make it free they need to do something for people who have paid the rip-off of $99 with in the past couple of months. Like many people the key reason I use it is 1)already have the e-mail set up but could easily change 2) keeps my two macs synced!