“As Apple moves its .Mac customers over to the cross-platform MobileMe web suite services, further compatibility problems are surfacing. And some customers are demanding refunds for the days when the subscription service was either unavailable or beset with problems,” Lexton Snol reports for PC Advisor.
Besides some extra-dense Windows PC sufferers complaining that MobileMe Mail does not work in Internet Explorer 6 and earlier [MacDailyNews Hint: Get a real browser (not to mention, a real OS)], Snol reports that “Readers of Macworld are also demanding rebates for the days when .Mac and MobileMe services were not working or buggy.”
Snol reports, “Forum goer Martin Faint is frustrated: ‘After two days of this Apple should really offer an extension to the service of existing dotmac customers as a good will gesture. We have paid for this time.’ At the same discussion, user danutinske has clearly lost his patience with the hiccups: ‘Basically I want a refund for the nearly one week without access to my .mac account or email.'”
Full article here.
At the very least, Apple should add a week to every .Mac subscriber’s term of service. An apology would be nice, too.
I’ve said this before: .Mac was a ripoff, .Me is a ripoff, and these services should be free to all Mac users.
Oh, and if possible, maybe Apple could try and make this service work once in a while.
Anyone ever try and use iDisk?
I tried the 2-month trial once, what a complete waste.
Interestingly,
Apple sent e-mails to all of us saying that there will be outages during this time and that all syncing should be done and completed by a certain time and so on. Why is it that some people understand and accept for future abilities it is sometimes necessary to have things not work. The one thing I have noticed since I did the complete switch to Apple products two years ago was that PC people can’t stand us and for good reason. This is a clear example. When your car goes in for service do you demand a pro-rated amount back on the lease? Apple winers must start to relax a little. It would make the world a lot nicer place to be if everyone lost the air of entitlement and got real about their place in life!
Well, as frustrating as the outage was to accessing .Mac through the web, my .Mac email was never down, and to me that was more critical. Am I surprised that this happened? Not from tidal wave surge of traffic the servers were hit with. Should Apple been better prepared? Heavens yes. Should people chill? A little patience goes a long way.
But while MobileMe was down, I upgraded my iPhone to 2.0 software, upgraded wife’s iPod Touch to 2.0 software and was doing other important things.
It’s a new week, so let’s get back to dissing M$.
The reliability of this service will be something to watch. If they don’t improve over .Mac, they risk alienating customers. It’s way to early to tell though. We need to get through the transition process.
I agree with the first poster about dot Mac. In the years that I’ve had it it has been beset with problems, mainly very very very very very slow transfer bandwith up to and down from my iDisk.
I use if for their Sync features mostly, but even that doesn’t seem to be working correctly at the moment, even with the latest updates.
How can people complain about not working on ie6, its like saying a horse saddle should fit on a dinosaur. Frankly ie6 should be put out of its misery.
The Syncing was down, and that was a bummer. I couldn’t sync Wednesday till Friday. It started working again Friday. The email, I can’t say……..I don’t really use it, and it’s forwarded to my Gmail account.
But, now that it .me is up, it works great.
my .mac email never went down but nothing is pushing and my contacts and calendars aren’t syncing between my pc, iphone and mac as advertised.
i don’t want a refund. i just want apple to acknowledge the problem and give us an idea when it will be fixed.
I don’t understand this – ‘nearly one week without access’? One week? C’mon, it’s since Friday the the new me.com site went live. I know I’m bad a math, but that feels like only three friggin’ days – grow up. And what did you not have access to? Mail on a web browser? Here’s a hint – check your Mac mail on your Mac until things calm down and the kinks are worked out.
Oh, and all you PC complainers about me.com not working – read the system requirements once in a while. I’m sure they state that PC users will need to use at least IE7. Better yet, just download Safari – even if you don’t migrate your bookmarks, you can have it as a ‘stand alone’ browser just for your mobileme account.
Magic Word: Beyond
As in: Why people need to complain about the small things and cry out for a $1.90 refund is beyond me.
I agree that Apple should extend everyone’s service by 1 week.
I find it incredible that Windows users are so adamant, in light of the fact that they let Microsoft crap on them forever and the only thing they did was open wider and bend over further.
A week extension would be nice. My core services were only down for a day. I’ve not had any problem with iDisk.
I think a week is a bit much but if will satisfy customers, so be it. We were only down two days so a week would be a good faith gesture. Not that two days didn’t seem like an eternity for some of us.
So far as of late MobileMe is working pretty good, at least for me. Did not try it with Windows yet (a necessity given my work computer, unfortunately). But despite some delays the sync is pretty quick from iPhone to Mac, Mac to MobileMe, Mac to Mac, etc.
I was a .Mac subscriber. My contacts weren’t working on .Me last night and my emails don’t seem to be synching very well. Anyone else with this issue?
I am still using Tiger… Maybe the issues are Tiger related. Aside from Back to my Mac what features of .Me aren’t included with Tiger?
Whilst it doesn’t bother me personally I must say that there ought to be an alternative basic interface at least for email because even some of the world’s biggest employers insist on crappy old IE6. People want to be able to access their .Mac/MobileMe email at work and now they might not be able to unless they know how to set up a workaround such as using Gmail to collect their emails.
It’s great that they’re using modern web standards but surely it wouldn’t hurt to provide some basic access to the service for those who are stuck at work with a crap browser with no ability to upgrade.
I don’t remember reading anywhere in the Terms and Conditions for MobileMe that it was a fail-safe mission critical piece of software.
All .Mac member were warned in good time that the systems would be down. OK, it wasn’t for 6 hours like they said, but like I said in my opening sentence, this isn’t mission critical stuff.
People need to chill, and more importantly look at the bigger picture… in 6 months time we’ll all wonder how we got by without MobileMe. Mine is working now, syncs are going well and the web interface is fast and easy to use.
I do agree that Apple should keep people more informed. Staying silent about forthcoming products I can deal with. Keeping quiet when services people pay for and are told will be working by a certain time when they clearly aren’t is quite appalling.
How about another Open Letter Steve?
i agree with dot mac being lame
i had it a few years ago for hosting images
then discovered all the free and MUCH FASTER alternatives
I forgot to add that iDisk is working a lot faster for me now than it ever did with .Mac and Web Gallery also seems to perform better.
The new web apps also work speedily for me now.
I’m in the UK with a standard ADSL service and MobileMe is very useable now. It’s by no means perfect but it’s getting better all the time.
Why all the complaining, except for Friday when NOTHING was working, my MobileMe account is working great… things are pushing, even my iBank is syncing correctly… sheesh people!
Whilst the delay was irritating, and perhaps too long, I wasn’t one of those people who insisted to try and use the service for the entirety of the upgrade process and were repeatedly hammering the service every 5 seconds trying to log into things just to see if they were working yet. I did my syncing before hand, my mail seemingly worked throughout and I left it alone. It’s all well and good complaining about poor service but it does irritate me that so many of the people complaining seem to be people who probably contributed in some small way to the whole thing taking so long.
Personally, my expectations of .Mac/Mobile Me are not high, if it was just me then I would not use it, but to sync 4 accounts of family members across 3 machines it is a relatively fuss free solution and doesn’t cost a lot when you divide up the cost.
I personally don’t see why people seem to think it should be free. Perhaps it is expensive, perhaps even more so for the quality of service, but that doesn’t mean it should be free, it means it should be better, or cheaper, or both. GMail is free but you get ads with it, and that’s why it’s free and why Google offer it, they don’t do it (just) to be nice, they do it to make money. If you deem it to be unworthy of the cost then don’t use it, it’s quite simple really. Just because you’re a Mac user why should it be free?
AJK:
I agree, .Mac was way better and IE. .Me blows on IE and for some of us who use it at work have no other alternative. If Apple wan’ts us to use .Me then they need to fix this. Otherwise, I might as well use my ISP email or Gmail.
All this about shouting about losing 2 days worth of service.
2/365 x $99 = 54 cents. It isn’t worth the time it takes to write a complaint.
If .Mac was better than MobileMe, it’s because MobileMe is 3 days old. I too was frustrated on Sat/Sun. But it’s really because I was looking forward to what seems to be, as of this morning, an incredible sea change in the way I manage my ‘stuff’. MobileMe may have a few drawbacks, but it’s on a trajectory to be something really fantastic… that Mac and Win users don’t want to live without.
So give the moaners their 54c back for the problem days. Plus, when the service is more than they contracted for – charge them $1.00 a day.
I use iDisk to serve up professionally produced video for corporate clients.
Thursday we cut together a piece and uploaded to .mac, no problem. Friday, as expected, we were locked out of .mac due to updating. Today, we’re back on line with mobile.me.
If patience is a virtue, we could all stand to be more virtuous in that regard. Its gonna be all right. Really.