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Apple to Unveil .Mac Today
Steve Mason writes "Apple has put up a .Mac FAQ up here proving that .Mac will indeed be introduced at Mac World New York. .Mac will cost $100 a year as previous rumors had reported." Yes, this means that if you don't pay Apple, your mac.com URL and email address will stop working. Some have suggested that the "switch" in Apple's new ad campaign stands for the unfortunate part of a "bait and switch." Someone should mirror that URL, it might be taken down any second now.
You want it, they offer it, you gotta pay what they ask, or tell 'em to stick it.
I won't jump to any particular conclusions until I see stats about what proportion subscribe at this price.
However, if it's many subscribing, then that would reinforce the stereotype of Mac users having more dollars than sense, and if few subscribe then it would indicate that Apple don't really understand the market. Neither would be particularly big news - no offense to either side - as these are opinions that large numbers of people already have. Note however, that the flip-sides should _cancel_ the prejudice that's unfounded, but as we know it's almost impossible to get people to drop prejudices.
THL.
Keeping
And for that I get email, online file storage, and my own web site. That's cheaper than the dial-up account I have now that I never actually dial into. I'll sign up.
Then how do you access the Internet to get to your Mac.com e-mail account and your iDisk? Broadband? It's very likely you're already paying your ISP for these services already. Maybe not the online file storage, but almost everyone offers web space, e-mail accounts, virus scanning on the e-mail accounts, etc. I knew Apple users would be quick to dismiss this as no big deal. Apple could raise the prices on all their computers by $2000 and they'd shrug it off and say you get what you pay for. heh.
They list the required browsers at the bottom of the FAQ as Netscape Navigator 4.7x and up on the Mac or Netscape Navigator 5.x on Windows. I'd be curious to know exactly how many users of Netscape Navigator 5.x there actually are in the world, since they never released one.
And for that I get email, online file storage, and my own web site. That's cheaper than the dial-up account I have now that I never actually dial into. I'll sign up.
...all of which you get in the UK for free, on a free dialup account.
It seems that what Apple wants to concentrate on is a feeling of class and exclusivity - which it certainly will get if they provide expensive services like that. Apple's market is pretty much a captive one - many Mac users simply love their Mac for the way it works; in the graphics industry, Macs are still used, because they're the best at what they do. Those iTools users will probably cough up, because there's no alternative, unified service.
I'm not sure of the commercial sense of the fact that 1GB of additional storage costs $350 a year to add - a 20GB external USB drive is $150 on Amazon.
In any case, it's always been the way: Macs are more expensive than PCs, but they do things in a much nicer way. Similarly, iTools/.Mac/whatever does what so many other services do, and sure it's more expensive, but it does it a little more nicely.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
Bought individually, comparable products would cost you an estimated $250: What?
Anti-virus: $50 Once - not yearly
Backup: $40 online backup - does anyone do this? Whats wrong w/ burning your 'keeper' stuff to a CDR? You certainly wont have room to store your apps/OS, whats the point?Besides, to you want Apple in possession of your personal data - they have nosy admins also you know...
100MB of online storage: $60 there are free hosting companies all over the net..
15MB of email storage, forwarding and POP/IMAP access: $40+ Free with my ISPBR
Home page creation and hosting: $60 Arent there template-style HomeSite(Builder) sites w/ free hosting on the net..? Again, free
I doubt they'l just be completely cutting off @mac.com addresses - you've only got a few hours to wait for the real news instead of guessing.
The only thing I want is the email, and I don't think I'm alone. I'm on dialup. Backing up to a web service is ludicrous and the iDisk is painfully slow. I've never used their shitty web hosting service and I certainly don't need Anti-virus software. Sell me the email, leave it with a 5MB cap (I am capable of storing my email locally) and I might pay $20-30 dollars for it. Might!
$100 is a joke. I'm an Australian and they better not be considering charging me nearly A$200 a year for 15MB of email space.
Throwing a fit about a 20 dollar OS upgrade? Were they insane? It sure beats a 199 dollar upgrade to windows XP Pro :).
Dave
especially the anti virus
It's a mac - anti virus isn't worth having. I've had a mac for years and have never had any viruses. The rest of the 'idea' is what they were providing for free anyway. The only thing I really want is the mac.com email address but that isn't worth $100 a year. I have some pics up on my free mac homepage but they can be moved to my ISP's if Apple start charging - hell I can host them from home they're only meant for friends and family so DSL provides enough bandwidth.
If this is the big announcement at MWNY then it's going to take one hell of a reality distotion field to swing this one past the faithful.
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
I thought I paid for my mac.com email account when I bought the computer. Those of us who use Macs paid a premium, and I thought that the iTools services were a perk.
Oh well, I have an ISP and a backup system. No need to use iTools anymore.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
You could be right - take a look at the '.Mac - FAQ' title graphic. Notice the poor font quality - especially the 'M' - this looks like someone has taken the Garamond font and condensed it ~80% to get something similar to Apple Garamond.
Also take a look at the page source: it's very sparse; no comments etc. Now take look at the HTML source of an Apple Press Release notice all the comments, META tags, DOCTYPE et al. I guess we won't know for sure until Jobs speaks but this announcement should be taken with caution for now.
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Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
well done for bringing up Hotmail - I remember back in '96 or '97 thinking how great it was - free and easy as it was. Now? You can pay for an upgrade to make it vaguely useful in terms of capacity, but the spamming is so extreme that if I look at my Homail inbox now I see 608 unread messages, 604 of which are spam and 4 are messages from hotmail telling me my account is full. Even better, my Junk folder shows ANOTHER 571 instances of spam. By contrast, apart from ONE very regular (twice a week) Korean spammer, my iTools has been COMPLETELY spam free for nearly 2 years. That's a service worth paying for, even if it isn't worth $100.
That was classic intercourse!
If I remember correctly, Apple customers were not "required" to pay $20 for the OSX upgrade... you only had to pay if you wanted the upgrade on CDROM. I've always updated my copy of OSX through the Software Update application for free. It's nice on broadband but a little painful on a dialup connection- but it worked and was free.
Additionallly, one of the other stereotypical characteristics of Mac users is that they are huge
whiners and severely prone to knee-jerk reactions. So many of "us" simply forget that Apple is a corporation out to make money just like thousands of other corporations around the world. It's also a sad fact that so many people think that everything should be free. If the dot com crash taught us anything, it was that it's nearly impossible to build a business where you give away your services or products for free.
I don't have aproblem paying for iTools services if it helps to keep Apple in business.... just like I don't have a problem paying premium prices for Apple hardware. The quality and experience is worth the extra expense.
Iff you're willing to have your email, web pages etc plastered with advertising, then by all means go get it free. I don't use macs so mac.com would not be the first thing I'd go to but as near as I can tell they're offering a decent service. Many moons ago I used the e-world service that was basically a mac-centric clone of AOL (same software, for all I know same network and services). IMX Apple did manage to provide a better (larger) signal:noise environment.
The boom year+1/2 of internet-hype surely led a lot of folks to expect they could get services free on the net, and the fact that most of the businesses offering these services were underwriting operations with checks written by investors (i.e. diluting shareholder's equity) meant that *all* services had to be offered for free in order to get customers.
The flip side of this existential coin of course was that the users data was being collected, on the theory that fine-grained tracking/profiling would create lucrative new abilities to target customers.
I for one quickly tire of emails from yahoo et-al subscribers plastered with spam trailers. Mac.com addresses don't have these, so if they're now having to charge for it, then those users will get to make a choice between a relatively higher quality service and annoying people like me who absolutely abhor commercial adds in private emails.
In motorcycling we say 'if you have a $50 head, by all means use a $50 helmet'. If your web pages / content / email doesn't look worse for a commercial trailer over which you have no editorial control then a free+advertising service is the the thing you want.
Linux is Linux, if One need clarify their dist: <Dist>/GNU Linux
bsds are of course just BSD
OS 10.1 was a heck of alot more than a SP.
Besides, usually MS charges for updates as big as 10.1 was.
It was like the jump from WinNT 4 to Win2000
Um... 14 bucks x 12 months = 168 bucks a year.
Which is more than Apple's asking for (99.95 bucks a year). Or am I missing something?
I really can't find any place in my heart to take sides with the people yelling about having to pay for this service. I run a fairly well-sized free hosting service that offers some similar functionality, and I know personally how much work, time, and money out of my pocket goes into running this sort of system. I know that as my userbase grows above its measely 1500-user count it's at now, there's no way I'll be able to afford to continue the services I'm offering completely for free. Apple is in the same boat - They're obviously paying a number of people to run the iTools service, paying for hardware and bandwidth, and raking up a huge bill. Sure, the iTools system can be a great community-builder, but it can still be a great community-builder when their users are paying only about $8 a month for the services being offered.
To those of you who bitch about services being generously provided for free, get a clue. Better yet, how bout you try to set up a service of similar caliber and see how much it costs you to run 'for free'? You'd probably gain a little bit of respect for the amount of work that Apple has put into their system, for you.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
Slashdot is a quick latest news and rumors site, and discussion. Its a pretty good one. It isn't a news source. It isn't journalism. It isn't fact. Take everything (including comments) with a grain of salt.
If the editors took the time to verify all 'news', it would come up days later. Half the stuff we see would never even get reviewed. And the editors aren't good journalists. They're not even good edtiOrss. They are good at getting stuff up quick, which I believe was their goal.
Yeah yeah mod me as a troll. I like the current format though. I think if they tried to make it more journalism, it would suck.
Like momma told you a million times, don't believe everything you hear.
I am so one thousand three hundred and thirty seven!
I really hope Apple comes to their senses soon -- .Mac is a neat idea, but charging money for it?
Why shouldn't Apple charge money for their services? You say yourself that you've standardised your email around it. It must be worth something to you. Specifically, it must be worth $50 for the first year :)
Anyways, I don't understand what the big deal is. Apple has something you want, you have something Apple wants. That's capitalism. I can't understand how it could be a dumb move.
-Brent
I think that was the joke, I think we all know the jump from Windows 2000 to XP Pro was not a "major revision" at all. Just some pretty graphics for the kiddies.
Why shouldn't Apple charge money for their services? You say yourself that you've standardised your email around it. It must be worth something to you.
same thing with aol. we pay $10 a month for aol access despite the fact that we've had cable internet for over a year now, and regular dial up ISP for 3 yeare precluding that. my mom is just too "attached" to her AOL email address to give it up, depsite the fact that she probably hasn't used it in over 3-5 months. people are willing to and do pay for comfort. i'm sure you could make some sort of variation of the quote "give a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man to fish, he never goes hungry again" to fit this situation, roles reversed or somthing....... i dunno. i just woke up, and am in dire need of caffine.
moox. for a new generation.
After reading most of the posts here, this is even more obvious. Companies thought they could provide free services to draw volume to their sites and show you annoying adds to pay for it. Well, it clearly did not work. Unless you have a real product, that offers some real benefit, you're out of business today.
This is a real product. It my not be tangible, but it's there to make you're life easier. And even though you can't touch it, it cost money to run it, and to store your email, files, web serving, etc on it. It just doesn't come for free.
I think $99 is a bit expensive, but I will consider paying for this. I used to use Yahoo but they squeeze you as well. $19 here for storage, $30 there for POP, no web hosting, etc.
This is a perfect example of bad marketing. Rather than saying this costs $100 outright, which always upsets people, they should say this costs only $8.33/month.
It never ceases to amaze me how much we actually pay companies over time but never think about due to the fact that it's a monthly payment.
Think about it.
ISP ($20-$50/month) = $240 - $600
Cell phone ($40/month) = $480
EverQuest addiction ($9/month) = $108
So what's a paltry $100? Nothing. Apple just made the business mistake of charging for it upfront, rather than over time.
Precisely. $49 for the first year, breaks down to a little more that $4 a month. You can't pay that for the convenience of centering your email around it, having a convenient place to post digital photos, using it to sync your ever increasing digital lifestyle, post your calendar to, etc.?!? C'mon ... Apple's doing a smart thing by offering an integrated service that will appeal to a lot of folks that want to start taking advantage of a lot of the digital tools that are coming out, but don't have anything in common with each other, aren't designed to integrate with anything, etc. Apple's business plan is to simplify a person's increasingly digital lifestyle ... this isn't about using the computer, that's what Microsoft is centered around, Apple's philosophy is far more sophisticatedm, it seems.
I'm using iTools for about 2 megs of web pages and data. I also have it forward me any @mac.com email to my personal email address. The email stays on Apple's server about as long as it takes me to get gibbed when I play Team Fortress (Quake 1, of course). It's costing Apple next to nothing to keep a folder named "mactari" on their server. I'm not going to get $100 worth of service, and Apple wouldn't spend half that maintaining me if I stayed.
.NET [giving away free development tools and sdk's], "The first hit of heroin's always free."
What's more, Apple doesn't care if I go.
The bottom line of it is that if 90% of the iTools users leave, 10% will start plunking down money. As Maelstrom says when your bonus gets to nothing, "Twice nuttin, still nuttin" -- 100% of iTools users paying nothing is less revenue than *any amount* of the users forking over $50 [then $100].
I'm leaving iTools (and that's a pain in tha arse - - I'd just gotten my site linked too fairly well), and Apple doesn't care. Like Sun's CEO said about
It's all 0s and 1s. Or it's not.
Well, 95% of itools users use only email, and nothing more. $100 is lot for just email, for this money I can have email with unlimited size and at least 10 mailboxes with my own domain!
Also, as a European, I find that Apple is trying hard to make my life harder and harder. At first it was 10.1 Update, that wasn't available there. It had to be sent from US by friend for me. Now, not only $100 is a lot for email, but my bank charges $30 + 1% for wire transfers to US. Will I pay that for my @mac.com address? Not a chance in hell.
Apple have only a few things going for them.
- Microsoft Office. The downside here is that MS Office is priced too highly to be attractive to most users.
- Photoshop and Adobe's dependency. With over 30% of their revenues coming from Mac users, Adobe needs Apple.
- A brand loyalty second to none. Mac users love their machines, and some users even want to marry them.
Apple stand to lose their most important asset, their brand loyalty, by pursuing this new policy. Currently only 10% or 2.5 million Mac users have upgraded to OS X. With 25 million Mac users all told, and with an iTools storage capacity - including e-mail and webspace - of 15MB per user, Apple can easily keep all of this 375MB on a single machine. If Mac e-mail users were limited to only 1MB, they could still store up to 1,000 text-only messages, while the capacity requirements would be trivial.
Apple may need additional cash flow, but going after their loyal customers is not the way to do it.
Rickster
radsoft.net