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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
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
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.
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.
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
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".
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
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.
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.