“Apple Inc.’s new data synching service got off to a rocky start Thursday, as some users were denied access to their accounts just hours before the next-generation iPhone is slated to go on sale,” Jessica Mintz reports for The Associated Press.
“MobileMe, as the $99-per-year service is called, will let people view, update and sync e-mails, calendar appointments and contacts across iPhones, Macs and Windows PCs. Like its predecessor, Apple’s .Mac, MobileMe also lets users store and share files over the Internet,” Mintz reports.
“Existing .Mac users got word via the .Mac home page earlier in the week that the site would be offline from evening until midnight Wednesday, as their data was moved over to the MobileMe system,” Mintz reports. “But by Thursday afternoon, blogs devoted to Apple news and rumors were clogged with messages from people who couldn’t log on to either account using their Web browser.”
Mintz reports, “Apple did not detail exactly what had gone wrong. ‘The MobileMe transition is underway but is taking longer than expected,’ Bill Evans, an Apple spokesman, said in an interview. ‘The new Web applications are not yet online, but the rest of the service is up and running.'”
Full article here.
Relax. It’s just the Web app component — the rest of MobileMe is running — and this ain’t Microsoft we’re talking about here*. With Apple, good things come to those who wait.
*Microsoft’s Windows Vista: Five years for a chrome-plated turd – January 30, 2007
Figures no one will bother to comment on “Exchange for the rest of us” having an already longer then planned outage. RIM has a 2 hour one and everyone blasts about the NOC.
MobileME is a NOC like environment so get used to this.
Is this what we have to look forward to with cloud computing?
[cross-posted to mac.com support forum]
Look, Apple doesn’t care if you miss your mac.com/MobileMe access for a day (or maybe 2). They’ll never acknowledge it, and they’ll never apologize. That’s how you can tell they don’t care.
That said, I have had no email for almost 24 hours. I’m talking about my Mail client, not the web interface. I have a family account with 1 address exclusively for personal use, 1 just for business, 1 for my wife, and 1 that my family uses communally. None of it is working, none of our calendars are working, none of the web galleries are working, no back-up, no iDisk, nothing, nada, nil.
I knew that the upgrade was going to happen before 7/11, and a few weeks ago I got an email from Apple stating they would keep me informed. They did not. I never received an email stating the planned outage, and none of the other accounts on my family pack did either. I woke up this morning wondering why I had no mail. I finally found a forum at TUAW discussing the issue, and it appears that some people received email notices from Apple stating an outage from 6-12PM PST on 7/9 for the upgrade. Well we never got the email, and it’s also 6:00 PM 7/10 now and I still have no email, calendars, etc.
I’m an iTools original member (02/22/2000), and I accepted that the service would eventually incur an annual fee. I also accept that no matter what you pay for service, that it can go down. What I do not accept is that Apple never notified me beforehand, and then after after implementing the (apparently botched) transition, has not even acknowledged any issue. No questions answered by Apple. Chat support tells me “Sorry”.
It is clear that Apple has other things on their mind right now. And as I said above they simply don’t care about you. They probably don’t like that the transition is incomplete, especially as it is a touted feature of the at&tPhone;. As an Apple computer user who pays for the integrative benefits and flexibilty of mac.com I am very disappointed in this transition.
I hope, as everyone else does that MobileMe will far surpass mac.com in usability and stability. The features look promising but the indifferent attitude of Apple towards me and many others reminds me that they are ultimately just a corporation
It’s not even a few hours ferchrissake. OS9 to OSX, PPC to Intel, .Mac to MobileMe, holy crap people, lets get some perspective. You’ll be on “cloud” 9 soon enough, just frickin’ relax!
from the inside….
1. MAJOR LEAGUE Internet Exploder problems.
2. Major WebObj server problems.
Mobile Admin:
ALLLLLLLL email to your BB has to go thru the Canuck NOC… i only have one of my email accounts – ***@mac.com – is affected by an outage. And there is no reason for the BB NOC – the iPhone is actually how everyone SHOULD be operating their BB to Exchange server communications – directly. That is, your BB should connect to your server directly using exchange sync, not some proprietary single point of failure like the BB NOC.
Speaking of big transitions that were in the public eye – http://www.losangeles.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123068412
having been more than somewhat involved with that effort (i was the on-floor ops coordinator that wrote and ran the transition procedure) i think i have somewhat of an idea how difficult multi-million user-affecting switches can be…. and all i can say is….
They’re a total bitch. And it sucks to be the MobileMe.Mac transition team…
But i’m pulling for them.
I don’t pull of BB because their NOC is *not value added*. That is, it doesn’t give you anything to justify its existence. In fact, id expect that the whole reason that they keep that legacy POS online is so they can do a bit of spying on those trillions of email messages that you’re pushing thru them that would make the Bush admin blush.
so Apple screwed up. Yup. Oh well. I guess there are humans working there.
IE problems – apparently, crap doesn’t render right when you have 4 millions different versions of IE that do 6 million different renders.
JoJo: amen! this is a complete cluster fsck. Also, a little guidance on when iPhone 2.0 is going to be released would be nice too, no??
And furthermore, to complain about outages is acceptable, and of course Apple should provide more feedback to the customer, but Apple is also like that IT guy who will reboot a server no matter how many people have open files, without even thinking twice. Like it or not, paying the cost of outages and unexepectedness is far worth the pice for innovation. Google does great stuff, but everything is “beta”, they don’t have outages, and enraged users. Apple is simply commercializing on all the beta software that they are putting out. Google has proven that it’s ok to use beta systems as full releases. Apple is doing the same thing with a more consumer-driven approach. I’d rather have once-a-year outages on the eve of major innovations, than just maintaining boringness just to be safe. Run yourself a mailserver if you want always up mail.
Any way you try to spin this, it has NOT been a smooth transition…lots of potentially angry iPhone users if it’s not fixed in the next 24 hours!
Am I the only one that read the announcement that .Mac was going offline to prepare for the MobileMe transition?
It’s going to get there, I can feel it in my bones.
Apple should have recognized that the transition would be bumpy and done it well in advance of the new iPhone roll-out.
I would guess that iPhone 2.0 will be available tomorrow morning July 11 at 8AM when the att and apple stores open to start selling the phones. BTW, the only thing not working for me last time I checked a few hours ago was the back2mymac functionality. Email seems fine. Anyone who has done tech support of any type knows that these things happen and you just have to be patient. Should apple make some kind of apology along with the statement? Yes. On the other hand, much as I love many apple products, they can be a bit snooty on occasion.
-M
you are right Ottawa! I suspect that around noon, they started sending people home to sleep, so they ran something that would take some time and came back at 7 and are working on it all night.
at least, that’s what i would do if i was in charge.
i would also suspect that we won’t see any more fits and cocked-up starts until tomorrow morning because that’s the sure sign of people that had been awake too long trying things and making bad decisions under duress and a lack of sleep.
We won’t see anything until tomorrow morning – i’d bet $20 on it.
Also, if i was them, someone should wake up and put something onto the mac.com page giving some kind of status on where we’re at. Even if its “we are working on it”. Leaving the old page on it appears like they’re all out of control.
iphone software and the apps store have been available almost all day. I don’t even have an iphone and I know that. try to keep up with the world; it changes every second. Don’t complain if you miss the clues; they are all over the internet.
I use .Mac for my .mac address and two others that are fetched, not forwarded. I just sent an email from one to my .mac account and it arrived in 30 seconds.
My iTunes upgrade went smooth.
My AppleTV upgrade went smooth.
My iPhone 2.0 upgrade went smooth.
Remote works fine. So does Monkey Ball.
I am giving Apple the benefit of the doubt today.
Tomorrow is going to be hell.
Good luck, Steve.
(and thanks for the shortcut to the Address Book, how about one for Wi-Fi? Not today? OK….)
I thought MobileMe was supposed to be Exchange for the rest of us? I haven’t been able to access my e-mail for hours.
This is my first experience with Apple and it feels like I’ve been raped. I’ll never be able to trust the MobileMe service.
I like to know who at Apple thought a transition of this magnitude was only going to take 6 hours? And I like to know who signed off on it?
odd, first I have heard of all this trouble. Been sending and getting mail all day. What is happening for everyone else? Error messages? What?
Melinda.
Slow down and relax. Like MS was any better for you?
Drama Queen.
@Melinda S.
Wow.
@Melinda S. again
Really?
@It’s About Time
Somewhere in Apple HQ there is a Web Engineer in the corner of a server room holding a keyboard and a network cable. Jonathan Ive has a gun to the guy’s head. Phil Shiller has a giant pruning sheer locked around his right ankle.
Steve Jobs is minutes away from walking in the door and asking if the product release is going well. A pile of severed feet in the corner tell the engineer attest to the answers the last dozen web engineers gave.
@Melinda S.
You subscribed to MobileMe today? My sincere condolences. You have the worst timing ever.
What bunch of whiners! “Bwaaaa, my e-mail does not work!” Grow up! Since when does a major rollout of any application go smoothly.
Melinda, real rape victims don’t appreciate your analogy either. If you really are a woman, then you should know better. If you are a guy, grow some and shut up!
“this is my first experience with Apple and it feels like I’ve been raped…”
it only hurts like that the first time – you were asking for it anyway