“.Mac is the answer to Apple making bigger inroads into business,” Scott Kleinberg blogs for The Chicago Tribune (RedEye).
“Apple has all of these plans for exchange e-mail of course and no way to harness it other than to tell companies that exchange is available?” Kleinberg writes. “Of course not. It’s got to be much more involved than that. And while Apple could partner with Microsoft and create a Mac version of Outlook, that’s not Apple’s style.”
Kleinberg writes, “Apple takes a step into a new territory every day … a little step on Photoshop with photo editing tools in iPhoto … a bigger step on Microsoft with iWork … Apple has this one covered. It has from day one. It just never used it to its full potential. Somehow, some way, I believe that this was the plan for Apple all along … a powerful, robust way to tie together corporate e-mail, calendars, etc., that’s all Apple and just a little touch of Microsoft.”
Kleinberg writes, “And you know what it will do? It will flatten the morale at RIM pretty quickly. Like a BlackBerry pancake, if you will.”
“.Mac is Apple’s next big thing, and it always has been… .Mac will become as important a piece to Apple as Outlook became to Microsoft,” Kleinberg writes.
“If you combine this amazing functionality with an iPhone, your iPhone is going to become your personal organizer on steroids in a hurry. Over-the-air calendar and e-mail updating via 3G and Wi-Fi,” Kleinberg writes. When Apple finally releases “the second coming of .Mac,” Apple should “drop the $99 price tag” and make .Mac free.
Full article here.
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.
$99 forever sounds good too.
.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.
@jocknerd
looks like you “through” away yer money on edumacation two.
threw !
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.
I’m still bitter about the “free email address for life”, a la myname@mac.com.
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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.
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.
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.