“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.
WWDC is usually not hardware oriented so his comment makes even less sense.
I would love free .mac before i have to renew in July.!!!
ad-free………hmm, whose ads ?
Talk about a “pigeon entrails” follower. Is he trying to out do Dvorak?
Even if this comes to fruition (and it’s really just wild speculation), I would pay to get the version *without* adds.
Everyone is fond of whining about how expensive .Mac is just because about half of it’s offerings can be had for free elsewhere, but it’s only 8 bucks a month, which is hardly a couple of cups of coffee nowadays.
I would certainly rather pay 8 bucks a month for the service being ad-free and pleasant to use as opposed to free but peppered with ugly adverts. If you want an ugly poorly designed complicated advert-infested POS web portal, then there are already many of that variety available out there.
Yes, I think jeremy is right. I’d rather pay for it sans ads.
So this guy spends a good part of the day reading really interesting slouthing reported on Mac fan sites. Purt a sacrastic spin on it all. Adds idle speculation that the revamped .Mac site could be all or partially paid for by add revenue (what a novel idea). and then makes a living doint it. What a world.
Not a chance, that is not Jobs style
What did Saul do with his ill-used time before blogs came along?
Perhaps it’s not wise to ask.
” … I would pay to get the version *without* ads …. “
Everyone says that they would pay for the privilege of NOT seeing ads, but what if MDN went to a subscription model with no ads or annoying pop-ups. How many of you would pay for that? Just wondering.
I think an ad based .mac model would have way more subscribers than you think. Although I would be surprised if Jobs pursued that path.
Oh God, please don’t make it “free with advertising”.
No advertising, and a charge is fine as long as it’s reasonable — which the current $99 is NOT.
This will happen the same day that they debut an iPhone with a slide out physical keyboard. I mean, really, they are both great ideas.
DO IT!!!!!
Free .Mac would be yet another reason in the growing list of why to switch.
Dutch writes, “Not a chance, that is not Jobs style”
I tend to agree. Apple is all about the user experience, and users *hate* ads – as does Jobs.
Here’s something to keep in mind. If the estimates of 1 – 2 million .Mac users are even close to accurate (and I am one of them), this means at a minimum that .Mac represents a $100M/year business to Apple. For a 24 billion dollar company like Apple, that’s 4% of revenue. Not insignificant, especially when you consider that the margins on the service are probably extraordinarily good.
Yeah, $99 per year is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE!!!
Imagine $8.25 per month! Why, that’ll buy you TWO cups of Starbucks! Or like 6 whole packs of gum! Or half a fscking lunch!!!
Ad-based .Mac would just become another Me-Too portal. The cost of running the service would go up and the quality of the service would more than likely go down. About the only thing that won’t change for the better would be the rate at which the service is enhanced.
If MDN offered a pay-for-no-ads option, I’d definitely take it. I’ve offered this to them many times, but they seem to be stuck on ads. I think that’s because they can influence a burst of new revenue by posting yet another article, such as on a slow Sunday evening.
I see more the possibility of .Mac becoming free for iPhone/iPod Touch users rather than ads being plastered all over it. That would mesh well with the new iPhone, iPhone SDK, and WWDC.
Now if they could just fix my iCal synching so it worked like it did in Tiger . . . .
This is just a hit piece trying to get readers to think .mac is worth . . . nothing!
I don’t see how Hansell makes the leap from “%@” (something widely known since last week) and “free with advertising”
Maybe because the value of his work is only worth “free with advertising.”
Why not let the market decide, just give the options.
$49 per year with no adds.
$29 per year with Apple only adds
$0 per year with everyones adds.
That way you open it up to a host of people who would jump right on. And Apple makes money on all users one way or another.
Why is “%@” any easier to replace than “.Mac”?
I pay way over $100 per year for .Mac since I have a family licence. Do I complain? No. Why? The spam filtering keeps my kid’s email clean and all 5 Macs are automatically and incrementally backed up off site each week without me lifting a finger.
The rest that I use (file sharing very large files), web gallery, .sync is just icing on the cake.
Addvertisements?
That’s ADS… not adds!
It’s short for advertisements. Get it?
What HolyMackerel said. Amen.
Ads? We don’t need no stinking ads….
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…
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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!
Please don’t let it be true. Please, please, please.
Do you guys really think Saul can write sideways? Leonardo could write backwards, but of course HE was Leonardo.
Well it would just be about perfect if .mac did become free, I have spent the last 6 months weaning myself off of it moving totally to a google mail account, mozy backup service and foxmarks bookmark synchronization (By the way if you need 2 GB of free backup space try Mozy and use my referral code Q4CASG, I’ll get an additional 256 MB if you do, it won’t cost you anything. But it’ll make me smile
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” /> ) And now that I don’t rely on it as I have since back when it was free that would be par fo rthe course. But Hey, if it were free most of what i just described might just get abandoned except for Mozy, it really is a pretty cool backup service.
.Mac represents a $100M/year business to Apple. For a 24 billion dollar company like Apple, that’s 4% of revenue. Not insignificant, especially when you consider that the margins on the service are probably extraordinarily good.
Check your math. $100M is 0.417% of $24B. That’s not insignificant either, but much closer to it.
That said, instead of an ad-supported model, which doesn’t fit with the way Apple does things, I think that massively increasing storage space (10GB? What is this, 2002?) and cutting the cost in half would be the way to go. Of course, while giving consumers a great bargain isn’t exactly Apple’s MO either (flamers, commence!) I’d be more than willing to pay $50/year for 100GB of space and a .mac address. Heck, I can get unlimited storage (!) from BlueHost for under $7/month with their current hosting plans. Come on, Apple.
You know what I like about gmail, it’s free and there are only a few text-based ads. It’s simple and it serves my needs. And there’s not a drip of Microsoft on the site. Go figure! And for the record when I buy a new mac I never bother taking up the complimentary membership with .Mac because it’s just so much of a rip.