Apple has emailed .Mac members today:
Dear .Mac Member,
.Mac services will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance from Saturday, Jan. 22nd at 10 p.m. until Sunday, Jan. 23rd at 6 a.m. (PST). Included in this outage are all web-based services and iDisk. New iChat sessions will be temporarily unavailable during the beginning of this maintenance period. Email access from a client application, however, will not be affected. We regret any inconvenience this causes and appreciate your support as we continue to enhance our service. You can review system status on the .Mac support page at http://www.apple.com/support/dotmac/
Warm regards,
The .Mac Team
At least they pre-warn us of server downtime!
I wish my company’s IT dept did that!!
couldn’t they do it in instalations, so only 5% is down at any given time?
wait a minute….. the timing is synchronized with the release date of all those new products…. connection? god i hope so.
I think DanK is right. Steve Jobs announced prints for 19 cents, but I bought a few the other day and they were still $39. I figured they have to retool the whole site to bring prices down. So I’m not surprised. I sure hope it doesn’t take too long for iLife and iWorks to arrive! Acrobat 7 and now these! What a great way to start 2005.
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I’ll be asleep anyway (U.S. CST, +2h from PST)…
this is probably going to be a really stupid question, but do all mac users everywhere have the ability to access .Mac, or is it like iTMS where only certain countries have access to it?
8 hours when I’m asleep with no interruption in email? I’m cool with that! Just make it cool and reliable.
homepage.mac.com/daddysteve
what does it mean when it says no new iChat sessions.
I’m not a .Mac user but i use iChat all the time and that would really suck.
is it just for the .Mac users who use a .Mac name in iChat to get onto AIMs network?
Probably going to increase dot Mac capacity from 250MB to 1GB.
Some free loops and samples form the new Jam Pack would be cool.
Oops! I meant from, not form!
rogozhin – “this is probably going to be a really stupid question, but do all mac users everywhere have the ability to access .Mac, or is it like iTMS where only certain countries have access to it?”
Not a stupid question. I’m an American, currently living in Seoul, South Korea, but I have a .Mac account that I use regularly.
I opened the .Mac account while still in the U.S. and pay the annual fee with a credit card issued by a U.S. bank. I still have a domestic U.S. address and am, therefore, able to use my .Mac account from anywhere in the world. BTW, my wife regularly downloads songs from the American ITMS because of the same reasons.
I don’t know, however, whether or not Apple makes .Mac available to any Mac user in the world. I don’t think that it would be a problem for Apple in the same way that the ITMS has to deal with all sorts of (local gov’t) copyright issues on music. Apple probably owns all of the [copy]rights to the .Mac service and shouldn’t have to deal with localized copyright issues. The method of accepted payment though, might limit who can subscribe to the service.
Hope this helps.
Email from Apple, don’t know what the Sept 22nd date is about, probably a typo.
Come to .Mac Night Tuesday, January 25
Dear .Mac member,
Interested in putting .Mac to work for your small business or organization? Join us for Pro
Day (http://www.apple.com/retail/proday) on Wednesday, Sept. 22, at
an Apple retail store near you for a special presentation demonstrating how
.Mac and the Internet can enhance how you manage your work every day.
A Mac Specialist will present the key features of .Mac that will help you
maximize your productivity, including transferring large files to clients,
collaborating with coworkers, and accessing your most important data — like
contacts, schedules, and critical files — when you’re in one place and your
Mac is in another. You’ll see real-life examples of how current .Mac members
use the service and learn about the results they’ve achieved.
Check the Apple Store (http://www.apple.com/retail) nearest you for its Pro
Day presentation schedule. We hope you can join us,
and we look forward to your visit.
Sincerely,
The .Mac Team
Apple respects your privacy.
Information regarding your personal information can be viewed at
http://www.apple.com/legal/privacy
Copyright 2005 Apple Computer. All rights reserved http://www.apple.com/legal
Go to http://www.mac.com to find out more about .Mac.
In short, for $99/year, you get an email account (user@mac.com – nice and short, easy to remember) and 250Mb of disk space for email and webpages (you can buy extra space). Just like the other Apple aps, it makes excellent looking webpages if you want to use their templates, or you can very easily upload your own code. Many web authoring aps can access your .Mac homepage directly.
Your .Mac disk space, called iDisk, is in your finder very similar to an external hard drive; just drag and drop anything to and from it. All aps can see it, so you can open and save files directly to/from ANY application. Many of Apple’s own aps work directly with homepage, such as iPhoto directly making an album from your photos and automatically making it a webpage on your .Mac account. iMovie will also post your home movie to your webpage, too. It is all very smooth and interactive: iLife, iWork and iDisk as all seamlessly integrated with eachother.
iDisk also has a “Software” folder with many other files (not part of your personal disk space) such as hundreds of royalty-free background music for your iMovie. Also in the Software folder are the free aps you get as a promotion from Apple for having the account, such as the first 3 Jam Pack disks for Garageband for free. It’s as easy as dragging them from the folder to your desktop.
I am hoping iWork and/or the new iLife updates will be free, or at least discounted, for us .Mac users. $99 for .Mac AND iWork would be a great promotion!!
iSync uses iDisk for backing up your Addressbook and Safari bookmarks so you can access them while away from your own computer. For me, it makes for a great backup for important files/information, such as insurance policies as well as photos of all valuable items in my home so if a some disaster destroys my computer, I still have the data safely tucked away in Apple’s computer system.
.Mac is one of the best and easiest online hard drive systems. I have changed my ISP about 3 times in the past 4 years, but my homepage and email have always remained the same.
Granted, the extra $8.25/month for an ISP-like service in addition to my regular ISP service may seem high, but it is very nice to have a stable place for all of my internet needs; homepage, email, iDisk, etc., and Apple does it with exceptional ease-of-use and professional quality. No one offers anything like it!
Big changes are coming to .Mac with the launch of Tiger and those of you who do not have it will want it. The downtime is undoubtedly a part of the prep for the launch of Tiger. New software at the server end and an upgrade to the server software itself.
Tiger will be announced. Maybe? Naw. It would be cool though.
Actually rogozhin, I am an American living in Japan. I originally signed up in the States while visiting home and can access the US .mac and also the Japanese .mac so I assume it is totally borderless. I use file chute with .mac sometimes. It is pretty cool. Drop a file on file chute and it automatically zips it and puts it on your idisk in a special file that normally no one sees (not even the owner). It then generates a link that you put in an email. The recipient clicks the link and the file automatically downloads to them. Nice for sending things without clogging up email (also for very large files). There are a few other programs out there that make use of the idisk functionality too.
Main thing that I really like about .mac is that I can put up a page of pics with thumbs and a slideshow with only two clicks!! Very macish.
I HOPE none of you out there are actually paying $99 for .mac – I’ve seen it for $79 from Amazon.com and I got mine in a box at a local Mac retailer for the same.