Apple’s .Mac service, is “a $99-a-year collection of online tools released in 2002 featuring 10GBs of file storage, Web site hosting, and photo sharing, among other things,” Tom Krazit writes for CNET.
“Apple has designed .Mac to work very closely with its Macs, and updated it last year with additional storage and hooks into the latest version of iLife. But Apple charges far more than competing online services, which offer many of the same services for free or for a nominal charge,” Krazit writes.
“The art of business–even in a Web 2.0-gone-mad world–has not yet evolved to the point where giving your product away for free always makes sense. Maintaining a storage and networking facility costs real money,” Krazit writes. “And why give something away for free when people are willing to pay something–if not $99 a year–for a service?”
“Of course, Apple’s financial performance isn’t exactly hurting these days, so it’s not like .Mac is a huge drain on the company,” Krazit writes. “But the company is letting price get in the way of a service that could be a unique selling point for its hardware: the real profit engine at Apple.”
Krazit writes, “Apple could turn .Mac into a real selling point for its hardware if it cut the price in half to $49… Or, Apple could give away a free year of .Mac service with the purchase of a new Mac. That’s the drug-dealer strategy: the first one is free. After that, once you’ve put all your images and videos on the .Mac service, $49 a year won’t seem like much to keep that service running. Apple does provide a 60-day trial period for .Mac services, but that’s not enough to get hooked.”
Krazit writes, “Grocery stores sell basic items like tuna fish and bread at razor-thin margins, because they know people are likely to pick up a few other things while they’re at the market for the basics. Apple has an opportunity to do the same thing with .Mac, and it won’t have to give away the store to make it happen.”
Read more in the full article here.
Yes, it is, it was the reason I did not renew.
My suggestion $29.95
Too much, of course.
I’m always able to find the renewal for $20 less online or so I don’t really have a problem paying $70 or so.
I use it for all kinds of things like large file transfers in addition to photo sharing, downloads, work groups, calendaring and so on.
And while the service works pretty well most of the time, I worry if they opened the ‘free’ floodgate it might slow it down, and when it’s slow, it’s really slow.
In the uk, bt offer something called home vault, its half the amount of storage on line as .mac (5GB vs 10GB) no imap, no website, no leaning center, no web gallery, no back to my mac, how much of it you use determins its value to you, but its not expensive. Also We all know of other individual cheaper services offering similar things but Its very easy to set up and well intergrated, geeks take there knowledge for granted but to someone not to tech savvy ease of use and intergration are priceless.
I’ve had it since day-one, and will continue to use it.
Would it be nice if they lowered the price?
Always.
I get a lot out of .Mac. No complaints really about the price, but hey, I wouldn’t mind if Apple cut the cost down by a few bucks either.
I do appreciate the functionality improvements in recent years. One example is the ability to create and edit web galleries easily from within iPhoto.
$99 is far to much!!! I agree 100% with Rob: $29.95/year.
And for that amount, they should provide a .Mac portal website with (licensed) articles, (licensed) audio/video media content and Apple web services for business people, designers, etc. The same type you find on Harvard Business Review. The kind of articles and services and services worthwile you paying for. Otherwise, you might as well go with your Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail account.
.Mac syncing and online storage has paid for itself time and again. I have multiple Macs and having them all stay in sync effortlessly is awesome. I’ve even set up my own user accounts on friends’ Macs and had all of my email and data (via Yojimbo) on there, as well.
Add in the email and simple backup (prior to Time Machine) and it’s easily worth the money.
People will never be happy paying for packaged services when they only see themselves using a part of it.
I think Apple should provide all Mac users with a free .Mac account, and then they can add on services on an a la carte basis. That would be more flexible and affordable across the board.
File transfers on .Mac always seem to be very slow for me.
$110 is way too much. For some idiotic reason it’s another $10.00 in Canada. I guess our electrons cost more up here!! Must be the clean air! *cough*
But I’m not bitter!
@Rob
Have you ever put up a website before? It’s not free to just slap up a site on some domain. $30 would be ridiculously small though would make many happy and probably more to sign up.
You can go on amazon and get an account for $20 less if you don’t like the $100 yearly. I do web development and I think 80 is a very reasonable price since thats what I paid before for a year of hosting through a place that didn’t offer stuff to work with my mac.
Increased volume by offering it for free with a registered purchase only would pump their knowledgeable reachable database plus guarantee a taste of the total Mac experience. But only based upon a much improved feature rich upgrade. Lose shortterm in order to win longterm.
.Mac should be improved and made free. That would entice MANY switchers once they see what “bonuses” they get by buying a Mac.
been a .mac member since it was announced.
$29 is a fair price.
Definitely too much. If they really want to expand their base it should be free for the first year, no restrictions, to coincide with the standard warranty.
After that they should bundle it into the Applecare Protection Plan, either as a standard feature or an upgrade over the basic plan. When it expires, consumers have the option of paying the yearly subscription fee or buying a new mac.
Many of them will use it as excuse to upgrade, making it a win/win for Apple and it’s customers.
Try $135 in the UK for a SSLLLOOOOOWWWW service (£69).
If the price was slashed, and service improved, I would consider taking up the service once again.
With Apple, hasn’t it always been about the hardware? Offer it for free.
“But the company is letting price get in the way of a service that could be a unique selling point for its hardware: the real profit engine at Apple.”
This guy said it all. At $99, Apple will never, never, never have my money. Dropping the price to $29.95 however, and adding more web services, would attract people like a magnet.
Think about .Mac providing more services than a Yahoo, a Hotmail or a Gmail account, better designed and free of those stupid ads for something like $2.49/month!!! Which Mac computer user would say no??? None!!!
Seems that those who cry for less fees on .Mac are those who only use it for storage. Geeze. If that is all I used it for then it would not be worth it. Look at ALL .Mac supplies before calling it too expensive. I would like it to be cheaper too, but not at the “expensive” of reliability.
That girl that recovered $5000 Dlls worth of electronics using the .Mac feature “Back to my Mac” sure thinks 99Dlls is very little…..
http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008805090392
“That’s the drug-dealer strategy: the first one is free.”
Someone needs to introduce me to these drug dealers because that’s not the way it works in real life.
I am not sure why I need .Mac. I have a gmail account, so, email is covered. I take my notebook with me when I travel. I have a time capsule for backups. Gmail gives me almost 7M of storage for free.
.Mac seems like a hassel without a payback. What would I need it for?
Why not $49 per year?
Apple should include free for the first year you own a Mac.
Or throw it in with cost of AppleCare.
People will get hooked on it, then renew when it runs out.
OR just keep buying new Macs to keep their .Mac service going uninterrupted.
Free 2.0! The way of the web.
I bought a 1 year subscription with my new mac and the first thing I noticed is that the various ‘parts’ of the service (idisk, e-mail) are not immediately available but take about 15 minutes to activate while in the mean time generating error messages. Very confusing.
The idisk service (file transfer) is slower than my ancient 9600 baud modem and of no use to store larger (more than 1 mb) documents. I hope that will improve.
All in all a service I find that it could be very usefull and indeed worth 99 euro’s a year if it were decently implemented. As it is I’ll just keep my Amazon S3 and Jungledisk, and external e-mail.
That gives me all I need (imap and idisk) at a fraction of the cost.