RUMOR: Apple to make MobileMe free

Apple MobileMe Internet ServiceWe have received a tip that we cannot confirm, hence our “RUMOR” designation, that nonetheless has at least an air of credibility about it that says, “Apple is planning to make MobileMe free.”

MobileMe is Apple’s $99 per year service (it can be purchased for less) that keeps your email, contacts, and calendar information in the “cloud” and uses push technology to keep everything in sync across your iPhone, iPad, Mac, PC, and the web automatically. MobileMe also offers MobileMe Gallery for sharing your photos, Find My iPhone and Find my iPad, which helps you locate your lost (or stolen) device, Remote Wipe, which allows you to remotely delete your personal information and restore devices to their to the factory settings, iDisk, for storing, accessing, and sharing files online (starts at 20GB), Me.com, a suite of ad-free web applications — Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery, iDisk, and Find My iPhone — all accessible from a browser on any Mac or PC, Back to My Mac puts any Mac OS X Leopard- or Snow Leopard-based Mac you use within easy reach from anywhere, Secure iChat, which lets you protect your chats with robust, 128-bit encryption, the free iDisk app which lets you view files on your iDisk right on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, share content from iPhoto, iMovie, QuickTime, and Aperture, seamless iWeb integration, personal domain name hosting, and more.

MobileMe was originally launched on January 5, 2000, as “iTools,” a free collection of Internet-based services for users of Mac OS 9. iTools was relaunched as “.Mac” on July 17, 2002, when it became a $99 per year subscription service. .Mac was relaunched as “MobileMe” at WWDC 2008 on July 9, 2008.

No timeframe was given for MobileMe to go free, other than: “sooner than later… depends on certain facilities going operational.”

That’s all we have at this time.

Again, this is an unconfirmed RUMOR.

121 Comments

  1. I just signed up for my 60 day Mobile Me trial, and despite the fact that I can’t seem to figure out how to EASILY sync all of my email accounts, I like it a lot. If I could get it for free that would be fantastic!

  2. At $99 still a bargain! It ties everything together so seamlessly that it’s an integral part of the Apple platform. With the new server farm, Apple should be able to offer more and faster. Best of all, I basically trust Apple … unlike some of the other clouds (think G).

  3. This would be a big shift and I tend to doubt it, but if you consider the direction of “cloud” computing coupled with Apple’s iAds, it could be possible. iAds on MobileMe? Microsoft has lost the could game, maybe Apple will be the real competitor for Google there.

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