“Rumors are flying about major changes coming to Apple’s .Mac online service. Perhaps most interesting is this post from Dmitry Chestnykh, the CEO at Coding Robots. He went through the iCal Localizable.strings file in the recently released 10.5.3 update and found a number of changes. In particular, he found a lot of evidence that the .Mac brand name is going to be replaced. Apple is apparently using a placeholder %@ which will be dynamically replaced by the new name, whatever that is, when it’s release,” Mat Lu reports for TUAW.
Full article here.
Thomas Ricker reports for Engadget, ” If that’s not enough of a hint then there’s always the text, ‘the new name of Apple’s online service (was .Mac).’ This code change has also been found in the newly updated Safari and Mail apps and did not exist prior to the 10.5.3 update. So now the question: will the name change, presumably coming next week at WWDC, usher in Jobs’ promise to ‘make up for lost time‘ with the bealeugered service, or will it simply reflect the new semantics related to Apple’s Computer’s increased emphasis on iPhones, iPods, and other consumer level products?”
Full article, with screenshots of the code, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “TowerTone” for the heads up.]
@Jeremy
A name change and overhaul of the service doesn’t necessarily mean that existing .mac email addresses and personal websites/domains will change.
eWorld – maybe not.
They could always revive eWorld
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” /> (-: then I could ask for my old eWorld e-mail address back.
.pussy
What about iTunes? Since iTunes handles way more than just “tunes,” I’m wondering when Apple will change iTunes’ name, and what they’ll name it.
And it’s companion service Every.Thing
Then we can get Every.Thing and the Kitsch In Sync
“I don’t understand what Apple is thinking here. In my experience, most of the people on it are on it primarily for the cool email address and don’t want to change it out. ” – Jeremy
@ Jeremy,
If they rename it to “mac.com”, you won’t have to change your email address my friend. And I think it’ll be a good way to draw people’s attention to the Mac!!!
How in the world can you improve on .Mac? It’s so full of cool stuff. I can’t live a day without it! Yawn!!! NOT!!!!
About freaking time something is done with it. It’s such a waste. And so is iChat for that matter. I no almost no one I can chat with on it. Fix .Mac, Apple, or get rid of it!!!
Reality Check;
I agree. Going by your present performance, you do, indeed, suck.
I’m surprised that most of the comments revolve around the actual name change, and not a discussion of what the change will entail.
I think it would be in Apple’s interest to be aggressive and provide these new MobileMe services for free. That way everyone would have enterprise-like features available to them and the phone can utilize new related features system wide without having to worry whether the user has an exchange account or not. For those with exchange, they offer that support. For those without exchange looking for similar features on a more “personal” level, here’s a free MobileMe account. At the very least, they should offer a free push email account (that actually works unlike the Yahoo one). Why “push” people to Yahoo? (pun intended)
Also, just because they change the name of the service does not mean that they will change the user emails away from the xxx@mac.com structure. Stop freaking out about it.
Hoping they switch the name from .useless to .useful
As an email administrator I can tell you all to stop freaking out about the email change as ChrisM said. It is a trivial issue for them to keep those domains and your email address intact and they won’t turn it off due to the huge public backlash that would cause – and because it is technically stupid to do something like that and technically easy to keep the address/domain around despite a name change.
Nice, Bluefin!
Someone in the Appleinsider forums has posted what the Mobile Me icon looks like (found in the strings, too). It’s a little blue book. Kinda weird. Maybe it’s just a placeholder.
I could live with the embarrassment of using a service called Every.Thing and the Kitsch In Sync if Apple would address the price issue. For those of us outside the US, facing a lousy exchange rate (yep, there are sill some currencies lower than the $US), the price is prohibitive.
I could be wrong but wasn’t the .Mac name a play off of .NET, back when Microsoft was using that name to refer to their online services (e.g. .NET Passport). Now that they’ve renamed all that stuff to Windows Live, the .Mac name doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Mobile Me
New name: iCloud or AppleTalk?
RWR…
For the sake of debate, let’s look at your points…
First, v-mail is table stakes for any mobile phone. Apple cannot make it an additional cost beyond the price of the phone and connection charges.
Correct to a point: voice mail is a given in any mobile phone package, but Visual Voicemail – especially if presented as a Unified Messaging concept that can be accessed within an e-mail paradigm either from the iPhone, an iPod touch (on Wi-Fi) or a PC/Mac is above and beyond the call of duty.
Can you find a mobile phone system that does this? I don’t think so.
Second, Apple would likely have to negotiate with AT&T;or the like to transfer messages from their control to Apples. Once Apple has the data, what do they do with it?
Sure, they’d have to negotiate with all of the carriers, but – given your earlier statement on “table stakes” – it’s not like as if there’s any real differentiation in voice mail. In fact, it’s a PITA if you’re the mobile network.
As for what they would do with it: that’s the joy of having disrupted the market with Xserve RAID which has led to even more powerful solutions like those from Promise and Apple’s own Xsan.
Given that you can compress voicemail into 8kbits/sec, a 60-second voice mail is 60KB which is hardly an issue compared to some of the crap that flies around my mailbox.
Apple doesn’t currently have a network and designing the iPhone to connect for v-mail like it does for e-mail is fraught with problems. If I stop getting v-mail, where is the failure?
Did AT&T;record the incoming message?
Did it transfer it properly to Apple?
Are Apple’s servers working properly?
Did my iPhone software properly try to connect?
etc….
Well, that’s just simple guaranteed delivery, using a CCITT-based message transfer agent, such as X.400, as opposed to SMTP which is – with all due respect – cheap and lightweight, but as reliable as a politician’s promise. (actually the cheap and lightweight could also apply to many politicians, but that’s another topic entirely) gives you a high-integrity message transfer agent (call it an MTA or an MHS, I don’t care).
In fact, guaranteed delivery should be required by most countries’ telecoms regulatory bodies – but should and is are very often strange bedfellows.
It’s simple: the carrier records the message and then e-mails it to the address which Apple has supplied to the carrier (e.g. c=US;a=AT&T;p=APPLEMAC; o=CUPERTINO;s=Appleseed;g=Johnny;cn=+13125557676).
I grant you that it’s an unwieldy address, but that’s what happens when you let the telecoms industry do the job of the IT industry.
Result: voicemail delivered to your .Whatever alias (which is your phone number if you hadn’t guessed) in the correct country and via the correct carrier. Once the X.400 message transfer agent confirms a complete transaction (which is what it does in reliable EDI installations hundreds of thousands of times every day), your carrier (AT&T;in this example) marks the message as transferred and then purges it seven days later.
No…FWIW, I think Apple should bundle this online service with new Macs and use it as yet another way to differentiate between the Mac and PC experience.
I think iPhone, iPod Touch, QuickTime, iTunes and Safari are all doing that very nicely all on their own and three of them are free of charge and Apple makes no money from them as an identifiable revenue stream.
The Service Formerly Known As .Mac (TSFKA.M) at least makes money: $100 every year per customer.
And if Apple manages to get 35% of iPhone customers to buy into the service, that could mean 100 million users within five years and another $10 billion in revenues annually.
Let us not forget that Apple makes very little from .Mac relatively speaking and has $20 BB in the bank.
Economies of scale I suspect.
They’d probably need to have several data centres globally: Cupertino – aren’t they already building one of those, Houston, Singapore, somewhere in the EU and possibly somewhere in Japan with a lot of mirroring over some dark fibre. But, with the exception of the data centre space and the dark fibre, they either make the damn things or they get it at a discount.
But not one part of that is not a better investment in the future of Apple and the Macintosh brand than leaving it in the bank.
I’m with bob & bon. Not only has Apple registered “Mobile Me”, but it denotes the “cloud computing” Apple is obviously striving for.
Mini Me.
Or maybe Byte Me.
“.Matrix” maybe?
about two years ago Apple applied for and secured the trademark ‘mobile me’.
Since then i have tried on numerious occasions to get mobileme@mac.com as one of my dot mac alliases.it is and always has been unavailable, as is mobi me. However i did get mobilme
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My money is on mobile me as the new name for .mac
I just hope they drop the price…