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Should Apple make .Mac free?
Moby Cock writes "The recent display of iLife '06 at Macworld showed that the suite has a very fine integration with .Mac, Apple's subscription-based web portal. In a recent post to his blog on ZDNet, Dan Farber argues that a .Mac subscription ought to be included with the purchase of an Apple computer. There is no doubt that web portals are huge revenue engines, could Apple be missing an opportunity here?"
.Mac comes with webhosting and a variety of other costs.
If they gave that to everyone who owns a Mac, they'd have significantly higher costs.
Just the webhosting alone would put a dent in their profits.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'd love to see .mac free again, as it is still a very useful service. $99 is not all that much for what is all offered, but Apple is already getting away with charging for it, so eh. Don't think they are going to all of a sudden change their mind about it now...
Why on earth would Apple want to change that?
(I mean yahoo's portal is only 5 billion)
Yes! (what else can I say)
Mac toys and accessories blog
yes, who would pay for it now? Well actually I guess lots of people. But to me it isn't worth the price they are asking.
d00m to all.
....as proven by the fact that AOL is having difficulty signing up subscribers to run what is basically a portal with Net access (or in some flavors, a portal where you supply your own Net access). If .Mac was free, they could generate revenue from page clicks, advertising, etc. just like Google does.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Sure, include a subscription with a new Mac but with the price you are paying for the Mac in the first place, shouldn't you also have enough money for a subscription? But on the otherhand, I do see a revenue opportunity by getting people hooked on .Mac with a free subscription. Norton Antivirus use to be free too, remember? :-)
Hummmmm..... For the PRICE of a MAC, they should at least give you a few free days! You know, just enough to get your money's worth!
.lnx
Apple is a corporation and they want to make money. I think the real question is: "Why WOULD they set .mac free?"
it isn't free already?! Good grief!
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Uhm... I don't think this is even a relevent topic. It used to be free. Then it started costing them too much money so they started charging for it. I'm sure slashdot covered it. Oh... yes they did
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
Am I the only one who find web portals pointless?
Free, legal music for iTunes users.
Not saying this is a bad idea, but it's an odd suggestion when anyone who has used Apple products for years knows that Steve is stingy. He's stingy about batteries, stingy about updates... That's just Apple.
So it's kind of a suggestion on par with: "I think Microsoft should give up on Explorer and support Firefox."
True, but... ya know??
I think Apple should offer a free basic package that would include email, limited photo hosting and iSync support with a decent, but low (say, 250MB) amount of storage space with the purchase of the boxed version of iLife. I haven't used any of the iLife apps that came with my Powerbook G4, but a free .Mac account would certainly give me a reason to upgrade and try them out. I love the idea of iSync, but I'm not willing to shell out $99 for the privlidge.
The government's moral compass is controlled by GPS.
In times of crises, they alter it to suit their needs.
Yup.
The smartest man in the whole, wide world really don't know that much. - Mose Allison
It used to be free, I know several people who dumped it when they started charging.
$100 is a rediculous price for what it gives you. $10/year would be more appropriate, if they're going to charge at all.
imeem launched the mac version of their application at mac world and it has a lot of features in common with .web, except you don;t have to have a .mac account. As long as .mac costs then there'll be companies that can take advantage, anyone remember which company created the dashboard concept before it was copied into tiger, as soon as that happened they were doomed right.
with mac being the hit fashion of the industry, they wont make it free just because its not necessary for them to make it free. simple as that. people will use it anyways to show off their hip and trendy .mac address.
News for worms. Stuff that cavities.
...what really ticks me off is buying OS X at full price and then being expected to pay more to get full functionality from QuickTime.
.Mac is worth $99, but I think 'free' is unrealistic too. I'd settle for $50 a year and some actual terms of service (for bandwidth usage) set out.
And then having to pay again every time there's a new release, or lose all the functionality I had already paid for.
I don't think
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
.Mac continues to cost Apple money, as users continuously use bandwidth and disk space. On the other hand, software and hardware developing and manufacturing costs are paid for at the time of purchase. That's why I think it's fair to charge a yearly fee for the service.
.Mac could go free and then benefit from online advertising. I'd rather have it free from advertising, thank you.
.Mac. It's really annoying to get new stuff and find out you have to buy more stuff to make it work the way it was intended. Apple could easily rise the price by the at-cost value of .Mac to the hardware cost and no one would notice.
.Mac to function. Such as multi-mac syncing. Rendezvous and wifi could easily keep my two macs in sync when they happen to be in the same room. It's stupid to send it to apple's sites then right back down. In fact, rendezvous syncing is much faster, so I could keep larger things like my entire documents folder in sync.
Plus, many are arguing that
OTOH, it should come free for, let's say, a year, with purchase of a new computer. 6 months free with iLife or any other software that links to
My biggest complaint with the service is that is has exclusive features that don't require
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
The best value in .mac is the integration with Apple's applications. It's as simple as point and click to publish content to your .mac account. It doesn't get any easier.
.mac a commission. I'd expect to see a lot more of this.
Also, Apple offers developers that integrate their applications with
I'd hate to break it to you folks, but *nobody* does this better than Apple. The hardware/software/services integration that Apple offers is unmatched.
Apple should make the following components free: email, synchronization, limited disk (say 20M) for iWeb, storage, backup, etc. If I needed it, I wouldn't mind paying extra for storage beyond 20M. It irks me to pay $99 per year to (easily) synchronize contacts and calendar between my multiple macs. Synchronization should be free because I've been a good customer and bought enough (two) machines to need the service in the first place.
The reason I don't use it is because I already have a free webhost and up to 10 email addresses with my ISP, why would I want to pay for something my ISP already gives me? Now if it were free, I might be advertising apples domain instead of cox! The OS X integration with .mac is nice but pay for it? I'll just ftp my files to the free webhost thank you. $99 is way over priced for place to put family photos and store a few files!
Apple should have a cut down free version for Mac owners, with lower bandwidth etc. Remove some of the features such as Groups, iDisk and Backup, reduce the webspace allocated for iWeb and Photocasting.
Those that want the extra features will be prepared to pay for it.
The current 60 day trial and then either stop using it or pay AU$139.95 is not really enticing to me.
with your .Mac subscription
I work(ed) at an Apple Retail store, and let me tell you, Dot Mac is a crucial part of their sales, in the sense that, it's a part of their selling structure. They push for "naked" sales, meaning without it being attached to anything, and AppleCare is included along with Dot Mac in the same selling strategy. If you think about it, all the extra Apple add ons are pricey. $349 for insurance on a PowerBook/PowerMac? $99 a year for Dot Mac? I'm glad I got my Dot Mac for free, but in any case, if they are beginning to integrate Dot Mac fully into OS X and the daily uses of iLife and other apps, a 60-90 day trial version would leave most customers pretty reliant on those services. Of course, it only applies to those that really use the services that Dot Mac offers, but with more features, they'll net more users and subscribers. I'm sure the only way Apple will gain considerable ground in market share would be a lowering of prices, but it doesn't seem that way for now or in the near future. By the way, my first slashdot post. Yay.
With Gmail, Blogger, Flickr, etc, who needs those services, or better yet, who needs to pay for them? I personally don't want to be lumped in as an apple user with everyone else just because they bought the same type of computer as me.
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
And the fact that I own an iBook has no influence on my opinion.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Of course, in each of those cases, there is something the company gets - Google gets to run ads, Yahoo Mail does the same plus hopes you'll spend more for other services, and Flickr hopes you'll sign up for a pro account (which I did so I'd have family members stop bugging me to email photos - now it's camera -> iPhoto -> Flickr, and they get them).
Apple could do something similiar with a tiered system, such that:
Level 1: Free, but you have ads, and ads inserted into the bottom of your emails if you recieve them via SPOP/SIMAP, only X number of photos you can upload at a given time (a la Flickr free account), and you have ads on your photo/blog site.
Level 2: Medium price - full email functionality, some limits on photo space per month, no apple ads.
Level 3: Have at it, kids - it's all yours, no ads on your site (unless you want to put them there to earn your own money), big file storage.
That would get people in - heck, I'd start with the free, and once my wife got into it like the Flickr, she'd have me pay the money.
Of course, this is all just my opinion - I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
no
Shouldn't it be AppleRot then?
GoDaddy = $8.95 / year (for .com name), $3.95 / mo. for basic web hosting service (5 GB space, 250 GB transfer). You get some builtin easy-to-setup applications (though probably hard to set up for the average user), 10 MySQL databases and PHP or ASP support. Total = $56.35.
So if you use the most basic plan of each, it's a $43 difference, whereas if you're working the disk space angle, it's no less than $198 for .Mac.
The difference is in those applications. Are iSync, Backup, Group Management, Photocasting and one-click publishing important to you? Odds are to most people here it isn't, but to their parents it might be. .Mac is certainly more cost-effective now than it has been, that's for sure.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
I understand why they didn't, and I know they added a lot of services since then, but as soon as they started charging for it I quit using it. The idea of paying for something I used to get for free just didn't sit well with me. While they added stuff, it didn't seem like the additions were worth $99 more than the free service. I understand this isn't exactly a logical way to evaluate it, but it appeared like they were screwing people. I'm sure I wasn't alone in not even considering to pay for it.
"You know why you do not see me styling wit my homies? Because I have no homies!!" -Mojo Jojo
I bought a macmini and I got a mac.com account free for 30 or 60 days. Saw what it was about. Got some "you should pay $100 to keep this" spam, and let my account lapse.
It was very cool that they gave me a free shot at it so I could see what I was getting into.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
As others have pointed out, .Mac costs Apple money for bandwidth, disks, servers, and so on, so not giving it away for free seems reasonable.
On the other hand, most of the functionality that you get from .Mac could just as easily be provided by free software solutions that might be provided by your employer, your (non-Apple) ISP, or even by you on a machine in your basement. Making it impossible (or at least nonobvious) to share things outside of the .Mac environment is annoying, as is continually bumping up against buttons labelled .Mac that take you to configuration options that only work with .Mac.
Wouldn't that just make their client base angry? "Get free .Mac; get spammed?" I would believe the ill will generated by that would not be worth the revenue from such a mailing list.
it is an expencive service to provide, they have to make the cost up, and maybe profit too...
If you think that I am not a subscriber because I have access to a unix server at school that meets my needs untill I graduate.
I'm a .Mac subscriber, and reading the suggestions here that it could be free if it showed advertisements makes me cringe. Am I the only one who will happily pay for something useful, and pay a premium to eliminate annoying ads?
It's like the iTMS video store. You get a decent quality episode of some TV show without ads for $1.99. If it had ads in it, they might be able to offer it for $0.99, but I'd still pay more to get the ad-free version.
The article states that there are a million subscribers at $99 each. That's $100 million that Apple makes from .mac
Sorry to nitpick, but that's actually $99 million.
Bradley Holt
The other services, that are useful to some, are also competively priced. What I think most analysts miss is that Mac useres are willing to pay for quality service, as opposed to PC users which tend to be more willing to sacrifice usability to reduce cost. For instance, the amount of 'other offers' on the Dell desktop is incredible.
Anyway the whole point is really silly. A free one year subscription would raise the overall costs of the computer, which is a disservice to those who do not want or need .Mac. Anyone who wants to can already get a free 60 trail, and if they find the service useful pay for the year. As long as Apple continues to raise the value fo the service, without raising the price, I am happy.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
How dare a company charge people for a service they provide? Ridiculous.
Looks like almost everyone that owns a Mac has posted!
Kickass Cheap Web Hosting
Let them charge, they have a lot to make up for since giving all of those schools Mac computers in the 80's and 90's. The IPOD is giving them new life but they need all of the help they can get. Also, it just helps Microsoft the better Mac does - Microsoft investment dollars at work.
Skyscrapers, leaderboards, popups, popunders, I don't care. I use FF.
I don't think it's right to suggest that Apple should give away the .mac service for free -- after all it does cost them money. Bundling a year or more of subscription time into the cost of new machines is ridiculous too -- you only need one .mac account if you have 3 computers, plus what about the people that don't want it? You can't have a product that you force-sell to people (even those who don't want it) and expect them to be content with it. Other bundled software like iLife is different because there is not a huge unit cost for apple associated with bundling it as there would be with .mac.
.mac free by selling the server side as an installable package for OS X server (and other typical server platforms too) .. I mean .mac backup is nice, but what if I have 100GB of data to back up?, what if I have 2GB of email? What if I don't care anything about having a .mac email address and just want to continue to use the one I have had for years? Sell me the server software and I'll buy it. I probably wont be buying .mac.
.mac off.. Every time I go to the connect menu or use iSync I'm reminded in a not so subtle manner how nice this computer works with a service I don't want. If Microsoft tried that they'd be raked over the coals.
However, they should SET
At least give me the option to turn
$100 a year - that's only around $8 a month. People pay more than that for other (and worse) hosting services all the time.
Apple really should not "require" tie to .Mac for certain applications such as backup, iweb, sync. These applications should also work with industry and apple standards. For example two macs should be able to sync calendar and contacts using bonjour without .Mac. For example iweb should also support WEBDAV.
.Mac for possible enhanced/bonus functionality of these applications.
.Mac to be two tiered:
.Mac customers as it is now
.Mac and a regular web hosting account, where the latter fills in these missing pieces.
Apple "should require" tie to
I would like the break discussed above for basic functionality of the above mentioned applications. I would also like
1) for basic/current
2) for power users requiring DNS hosing, server side email enhancement such as spamassassin and procmail, and so on. I would hate having to have both a
Pay more for the second tier but then dont have to have two "internet hosting" providers.
Thats $100 for a very nice network-shared drive (1/2 GB of data, with 10 GB transfer/month limit), web hosting, email hosting, and VERY nice synchronization.
Its the synchronization and the large network-backed-up shared disk which is why I decided to pay $100 for the service: Being able to maintain universal calendaring etc across several systems is useful.
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An opportunity to lose 99 Million a year? Where do I sign up?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
What is so bad about asking a fair price for a service? why should apple give it away?
Look at the features here: .mac hosting -- what geeks have been doing for a long time, made possible to the grandmothers and busy soccer parent set.
***1gb mail/web/media content, not much for geeks but more than plenty for most.
***1TB/Mo of throughput -- these two features alone would cost a headty price from a Serverbeach or prohosters or rackspace or any of the like
***Syncing, roaming bookmarks: two features that I have yet to see anywhere else on the consumer level.
*** iLife integration, and photocasting along with
So it aint free, well it is ad, spam, spyware, tracker and all-arround garbage free and it works seemlessly with OSX. Seems to me that a lot of people here are just being bastards about it.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, the resteraunt has to buy the food it is giving you so it costs someone along the line
The integration of Apple's suite of software with .Mac is nice. It would have also netted Microsoft another DOJ lawsuit if M$ had done it with MSN back in the day. Apple can only get away with it because their market share is not as extreme as M$'s.
.Mac is NOT A PORTAL ! Sheesh.
.Mac that is crippled in capacity so that I can use a minimal set of utilities and such- backup, iSync, etc. No .mac mail or other bandwidth sucking and disk drive crunchin stuff needed, just enable your darn iWhatever applications ! I miss my .mac, but I could not justify the expense. I pay enough for ISP access, and I get all the tools for free as in beer via other providers (yahoo, google, etc.)
Oh, and
All that said, I would LOVE to see them go back to a free or 'cheap' version of
If Apple wants to provide a free service that is crippled, and happily shows Apple adverts all the time, that would be fine with me. Then I'd buy up if I needed the extra space.
They need the money, and if you wanna buy apple, why not keep Mr. Jobs in black?
.mac is a non issue for me. I left Apple for UNIX back after the "Apple // forever", came back for the Newton and Rhaposody on Intel "RedBox", then left after the Steving of the Newton. Apple is as trustworthy to look after my interests as Sony, Disney, Microsoft, Enron or any list of firms.)
(Apple's charging for
Perhaps the ability to have a free mac.com email address for life with the purchase of a new Mac. That would be cool.
.Mac subscriber, there are a lot of great features to the service that it's nominal $99 a year price justifies. iSyncing is great. The ability to have my bookmarks on all 3 Mac synced is awesome. Along with my schedule and address book. Plus, I could do my email as well. I can back stuff up. And I can even do a webpage with iWeb now.
But, being a
I'd happily pay for it again. What does Microsoft offer?
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
There is no way it is worth it to me. To take the features point-by-point ( http://www.apple.com/dotmac/ ):
.Mac offers nothing I can't get much cheaper than offered by Apple--and often the alternative is free.
1. "Effortlessly" publish a) blog, b) photos, movies, etc.
- I have a hosting account and my own URL for this. Mine is cheaper and offers more bandwidth too.
2. "Photocasting". Sounds like (1) with an RSS feed.
- Don't care. If I did, I'd use flikr, so I still wouldn't care.
3. Exchange files from anywhere.
- See (1)
4. Sync iCal, Safari bookmarks, etc.
- Don't use Safari, have network drives for oft accessed files. Syncing iCal would be nice if I had more than one Mac, but I expect there is an OS solution for this somewhere.
5. Email, iChat, etc.
- GMail, and others provide this for free.
6. Network backup.
- Off site backup might be useful, but anything that's that important I have in multiple places already anyway. My other hosting account is backed-up regularly, and has a decent restore interface, so I'm not missing anything here.
7. "Bringing groups together"
- Whatever this means. Besides, I'm a geek -> I don't like being social.
The short version?
Do I want the cost of a service I won't use anyway rolled into my purchase price? No. Should Apple offer the service for free? I'm not sure they should offer the service at all, but as long as it stays profitable for them, who am I to argue?
Here's a proposal:
Plain .Mac (1 year), or plain iLife: $60.
.Mac (1 year) and iLife: $90.
.Mac (1 year) when bought with any new Mac: $30 first year.
The baseline bandwidth and space would be lower, and most people who wanted to really get something out of it could pay $30 extra per year to get up to today's standard. This seems like a better solution as currently a lot of people don't want everything .Mac has to offer.
No, I don't think .Mac should be free.
On the other hand, it should also be possible for all .Mac enabled functions to use a third-party webserver with either FTP or WebDAV. I mean the .Mac features are nice but not nice enough for $99 a year especially if I already rent another webspace that could be used for this purpose. It's a stupid lock-in squish-the-last-penny-out revenue generation that I don't like. It shouldn't be free but there should be a choice whom you want to give the money to.
i want my new iiMac to be free as well.. but that's not bloody likely to happen either, is it>
Now, if they simply raised the price of every Mac computer $25, then i think that would be the best way to hide the costs of it, thereby making it free.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
"Sorry to nitpick, but that's actually $99 million."
It's $100 million for extremely large values of $99.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Anyway the whole point is really silly. A free one year subscription would raise the overall costs of the computer, which is a disservice to those who do not want or need .Mac. Anyone who wants to can already get a free 60 trail, and if they find the service useful pay for the year. As long as Apple continues to raise the value fo the service, without raising the price, I am happy.
.Mac at the moment, so I'm ecstatic that I didn't have to pay for it in the price of my PowerBook. There is no such thing as something included "for free" with the purchase of a computer...that's basic economics. Unless all you geeks out there want to believe that I'm really getting Windows "for free" when I buy a Dell.
.Mac offers, but obviously the needs of users will vary. Some would probably pay more. But please, Apple, do not listen to the naysayers. Continue to let us have the choice.
.Mac is worth $100 a year. I can say that because people pay $100 a year for it. It isn't worth $100 a year to me, so I don't. But Apple's goal is not, and should not, be to get every Mac user to subscribe to .Mac...it should be to maximize profits. I have a feeling there are people working at Apple who have probably done a lot more computation, market study, and analysis on the subject than the average Slashdot reader, or even Dan Farber.
Amen. I have no desire for
Didn't think so.
At the moment, I'd say that 8.33 a month seems a little pricey for what
I think it is funny when people suggest that anything Apple sells is "too expensive." As if the market is in some way broken, allowing Apple to charge whatever they want for anything while other companies have to compete on price. Apple computers cost more because they are worth more, plain and simple. Whether that value comes from ease of use, beauty of design, or whatever, they are most definitely worth more. Whether they are worth more to an individual is up for debate, as is whether an individual can afford it.
Right after I came back from a month in Italy in 2002 I could whisk a bunch of photos up on the web to impress my new girlfriend.
Of couse, she ran off with another chap last year, but that's another story and not .Mac's fault. I don't think.
My PowerBook was robbed from my flat over the summer (ouch - just purchased and no insurance yet). When I bought a little Mac mini to get myself connected again, the sync services dumped my address book, e-mail (where I keep a LOT of my writing drafts), system prefs, iTunes playlists, etc back on my computer.
Although I'd rather not be charged ANOTHER USD$100 or so for a new edition of iLife that provides some quick n' dirty ways to author offline, I suppose I'm going to shell out the cash.
I keep thinking that Apple should release iLife for Windows Vista. Granted the iLife apps are a unique advantage for the MacOS X platform, but wouldn't the revenue garnered from all those Windows-based subscriptions MORE than make up for it? I wonder ...
And hey, this is my slice of .Mac!
They really should offer more than 1GB of total space. I can use my Gmail space to store files on and its at 2.6GB... the kicker is that GMAIL IS FREE!
I think if they want to a attract more people they might want to lower price just an bit. An free service will attract undesirable people and Apple will have no incentive to innovate new feature for .Mac.
To get the the full value out of .mac, you have to upgrade your iLife every year as well and $178/year ($99 + $79) is a bit pricey. .Mac would be more compelling if I received a free iLife upgrade with it.
Apple doesn't say, but I'm guessing that maybe its not current, but all together. I dropped my account because for what they provide, its just not worth it. iDisk absolutely sucks big time. The Homepage editor sucks too. The email was nice but for $100 a year, I should get more than 1 account. Why shouldn't my whole family get email accounts for this price? No, Apple wants to charge you $179 or $199 for a family pack. Crazy.
.mac offers is just dumb.
No, with gmail, flickr and plenty of free blog services, paying $100 for services that
Their backup protocols and means of transitioning the home directory and user preferences is very nice. It'd be good if I could setup a server at home on my main server that allowed me to sync the basic prefs.
.Mac-alike?
Is anyone working on a FOSS
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
NAH...
to Microsoft-ish
Keep in mind though that $100 million comming in is not pure profit. They still have to pay for the bandwidth, employees, servers, development, and other things I don't know about.
I use it for mirroring my open source projects and the yearly cost is reasonable for this purpose. I don't really use many other .Mac features because I always hopping from OS X to Linux to Windows depending on what I am working on. (BTW, pardon an obvious suggestion: if you also need to use several systems, try what I do: set up a CVS (or subversion) server and keep **everything** you do under source code control: this makes it quick and easy to sit down at any box and get your environment).
Apple either needs to start rewarding people who buy the retail versions of these "mini-suites" by allowing them to upgrade to newer versions for a lot cheaper or, similarly, offer the same reduced prices to .Mac customers, considering the amount of integration they're working on.
AFAIK, there is no policy in place for someone who, for example, buys the previous version of iWork a month before the new version comes out. That's crazy, and even if there is some avenue for appealing that, people shouldn't have to search out said avenue.
How so? By connecting iLife and .Mac? Have you used iLife apps lately? The tie-ins are massive - my proposal just makes the connection a bit more opaque and the whole deal cheaper.
This is Apple. The lack of goofy random stuff like this is a huge part of the Apple experience. You pay a relatively small amount of money (about 2 lattes per month). It just works. Game over. No meaningless decisions to make, no asking people to decide between three different versions of the same product, heck, no need to work with ad agencies. Simplicity. Functionality. Relatively cheap price. What is problem?
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
$100 is bad value for what you get. There are good apps in there, like backup and iSync, but they aren't work paying $100 over & over again. You can buy 3rd party apps for less, and pay once.
I would expect that for the price charged the storage would be much, much better. I have unlimited storage on my Smugmug account, no ads, and pay only $30 per year. That is a good deal. I was happy to pay for it.
2GB of storage for $100 is a rip off. Give us unlimited storage. Make it really easy to buy great stuff like the albums, maybe limit bandwidth to control costs (they do now, anyhow).
The right price (in case anyone asks) is $50, unlimited storage, no ads, with all of the bells and whistles offered today.
I wouldn't want it to be free, because free portals have ads, and I hate ads (yeah, yeah, I know about ad blockers. But I don't want to torment less savvy visitors coming to view photos, etc.)
What opportunity is Apple missing? The chance to fulfil your sense of entitlement?
the problem with a tiered system is that apple doesn't want to become a web hosting company.
.mac" with certain limitations, who's gonna explain to the new mac user that his site has just been slashdotted and is over his "bandwidth allocation?"
.mac. i'm glad that apple realizes this. and seriously, is $99 bucks a year really that much to pay for what they offer you? it's like changing your oil, you could pay someone 50 bucks to do it for you, and save yourself the trouble of doing it + taking care of the old oil, or you can do it yourself and save some money. apple has given you this choice by not bundling .mac into the price of a new computer.
if they offered "free
"but i was only using 50 megabytes on the server!" he'll yell, confused.
it's either all or nothing with something like
"There is no doubt that web portals are huge revenue engines, could Apple be missing an opportunity here?"
Missing an opportunity by making a now-for-pay service free?
Ok, we get it mr. I-just-read-off-the-calculator-with-no-regard-for- significant-figures.
I could go into detail with regards to error, propogated error, and whatnot, but significant figures is a sufficient approximation, especially when you're talking about approximations anyway.
quick lesson on multiplication, and significant figures:
there was only one significant digit in "a million subscribers" so there should be only one significant digit in the answer. Unless one of the multiplicands has ZERO significant figures, but then the answer is nonsense anyway.
sorry to pick nits on your nitpick, but your nitpick was wrong.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I've always felt that the problem is that there is psychological barrier when people are required to pay the $99 subscription fee in one lump sum. I think if it were a monthly fee Apple could possibly charge more (say $9.95 a month) and pick up more subscribers.
if they ran it on those "electric" trees to save on costs?
Without a doubt the best strategy would be to limit .mac access by FEATURE rather than time.
.mac account with some baseline service that's slightly feature poor (decreased space, limited features, etc) but has some handy features (like address book backup and "cheap" stuff like that). Then offer an enhanced package for a charge.
.mac more appealing to buy. Users then are more aware of these features because they are already using the base version.
As in: all Mac OS users get a
Apple and consumers win on this because:
1) Apple wins because more initial users will log on and try it out. I never sign up for time limited services that could possibly auto-bill my CC if time runs out, or cancel my account and lose my data if the service expires.
2) Consumers win because Apple is forced to innovate on features that make
Charge for .Mac and include a copy of the latest iLife. You're always up to date if you have a .Mac subscription.
What they should do is open the API used for many of hte .mac features, so I can use the webdrive and isync stuff with my own servers, rather than using up apple's bandwidth.
So I'm idly glancing at Slashdot, not really reading.
I pass over the word 'ServerBeach'.
Which gets parsed as 'BeaverSearch'.
I'm hopeless.
The time is now for the Apple to rise and show goods it can provide mankind with - Apple is in certain focus now, it has not been for a while, it might not be once again for a while. Keynote was great, but what then?
Apple has some superior stuff to showcase, but it is also about socially resonating sound, they could be creating by just throwing some things for free into their mission mix, not trying to make monkey business on every smallish occasion. Who is using all free GBs Yahoo! Mail or GMail are "providing with" (they can give that way rather easy hundreds of GBs with)?
For Apple, great designs, clearly intelligent choices and premium prices must be accomplished with great goodwill for winning ballance.
Google is ideal sample. Everything (?) they give away is free, how do they manage to live being monumental figure of the web presence? So, good luck, Apple, making greatest experience in the end is what your fellow clients expect and wish you.
I think my local coffeeshop should do the same thing - give away free coffee, and give people who pay a lot more coffee. Same with the grocery store for that matter.
Apple should let users choose their ".Mac" hosting provider. More choice, more competition, lower prices.
Another path would be to open the protocol. Currently, Apple provides dotmac libraries to Mac developers, so that third-party apps running in MacOSX can benefit from dotmac.
.Mac protocol. Anybody could build a .Mac clone, and charge whatever they want for it... More money, less money, nothing, nothing with ads, usage-based, etc. This could include enterprise versions, you know, that run within a protected intranet.
.Mac subscriptions, but they'd get more customers to actually use Tiger and iLife software to the fullest. And that's still the best method to make happy customers.
But this doesn't allow customers to use their apps with a different dotmac provider.
Imagine that Apple discloses the
Apple would likely loose some
--f
...don't cripple the OS so that I have to subscribe to .mac in order to extract the obvious ability to sync my addressbook between my home-Mac and my work-Mac.
My cellphone and 2 liters of diesel should not be the conduit for addressbook information between two Macs. Dinks.
My wife and I beleive Apple are shafting us by tying all OS upgrade backups to .Mac.
We lost our emails, contacts... and everything else on any apple shipped software when we moved to Tiger. We did my powerbook first and we both took turns with the complete backup of my system disk to move the data files onto Tiger so they would work. We searched the net for help. .Mac is the only way it seems.
Well we arent going to spend $179 for .Mac. Not now not ever. in fact it made us really reconsider our ownership of macs altogether. NOTE amyone planning on buying a Mac needs to consider this drug like addiction to .Mac that all Macs have.
Now we use GMail EXCLUSIVLY and addressshare.com EXCLUSIVLY. If anyone has any other suggestions for us to go to free web based services we would greatly appreciate the help. .Mac is a CON!
I haven't even used the "free" .mac trial, despite being on my third Mac and having Macs at the office. Why? Because I can not conceive of anything it could possibly provide that's worth $100 or even $30 a year. There are dozens of free, universally available, and frankly less ugly (my god, is that "carbon file sharing" the best they can do?) equivalents for everything it offers.
.mac looks like an obsolete prototype for the free services I'm already using, not something worth forking out real money for.
And it's not because I can't afford it (Macs ain't cheap), or because I won't pay for a service (I'm paying $40 a month for a virtual colo). It's because at this point
Apple shouldn't make .Mac free. There are a lot of great services there for ordinary folks. I think Apple should make the iLife apps, especially iWeb, export to other WebDAV or even FTP servers. By not having .Mac, you're losing a lot of the functionality for these systems. But having .Mac significantly improves the lives of everyday Mac users who aren't technically savvy enough to set up, as I have, their own WebDAV server and hosting account.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Shouldn't it be AppleRot then?
Why let one bad apple spoil the whole danm bunch?
May the Maths Be with you!
Well, they are not making $100 million unless the bandwidth, hardware and maintenance are free. I think the general idea is to lower the price so that it attracts more punters, especially given it seems so integrated into the software people are paying for. iLife06 loses much of it's appeal over 05 if you don't have a .mac account at a significant extra charge.
1.) GOTO http://www.mikeash.com/?page=software/qtamateur/in dex.html ...
2.) Download and install QTAmateur
3.) Bing! The nag screens are gone, as are the silly restrictions
4.)
5.) No, I'm not going to make a "PROFIT!" joke. Sorry.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I believe that either .Mac should be free or the iLife apps shouldn't remind you every time you start them.
.mac account now fuck off and leave me in peace" button.
iWeb really needs a "No, I don't want a
This is every bit as bad as Microsoft - this is Apple leveraging their dominance in one space (applications on OS X) to extend their market share in another space (web hosting).
I think it should append as soon as possible. There are many reasons, but the first one is the marketing advantages that can comes from it. For sure, if they gives it for free, many developpers should switch to Mac technology and give to Apple a bigger part of the market. Mac has a good technology and i think the people should swicth to it if they have Windows. But the fact is that Linux Rock's a little bit more! What do you think about that my friends?
Thanks for visiting my Web site! Post your comments on my forum!
While I am always up for more things being free, in this case I think having some cost, preferably variable, would make more sense.
.Mac account for things like the iChat programs, and the access to the news/information there.
I personally have never been able to justify the cost for the what I would get, considering that many of those services I already have from other sources. I do not need their email (have 4 of them already), do not need virus checking (have Symantec for that that), do not need data storage (have tons of space available to me at my various client sites and at home), and so on. However I would appreciate the
I think they should have a structured system where some users could elect to get all the functions for the full cost, others could have only a subset for a smaller amount.
That being said, if the entire service were say about $50/yr I would sign up for it.
Peter
Simplicity. Functionality. Relatively cheap price. What is problem?
Not a lot of functionality, at least that I can see never having used it, and from outside it looks really ugly. And you really can't test it without committing to pay, psychologically, because so many of the services are things like email that you know you're not going to want to shut down in three months.
If they made it so that the long-term commitment stuff, like the email account, was yours NO MATTER WHAT... even if you decided the rest of the service sucked, I'd be more willing to try it. But not as it stands. Even if it was free, trying it out takes time.
That's the problem. It's like the problem of selling people on the Mac in the first place, except that the value is even less obvious.
So.
Tell me why I should care. Tell me why I should spend my time even trying it out. What's the great functionality you get for the $100 a year?
.Mac won't ever be free. But the problem is, that all that .mac goodness is embedded in a bunch of apps, and you can't really use those features unless you have .mac. So I wonder how feesable it would be to "capture" all the .mac requests your computer might send out and redirect them somewhere. For example, I already have my own dedicated box with tons of hard drive space. So why use Apple's system when i already pay? When i click "Homepage" in iPhoto why not capture those requests and SFTP it to somewhere. All those settings could be set in that app that captures the requests. Just an idea.
JediLuke
-Do or Do Not, There is no Try
Maybe they should just start selling iLife as a service you pay $100/year for, instead of charging $80 for iLife plus $100 for .Mac and treating iLife as an annex to .mac...
They'd lose that $80 from the retail version, but given that they're bundling iLife with all Macs anyway... how many sales is that?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
As much as it's integrated into the OS, it would be great to have a limited free version that had things like email and the storage space (the iDisk). It's sort of annoying to just not be able to use something that pops up all the time.
Information wants to be free, just don't tell me you didn't know that.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
maybe the new Intel Mac has a 100,000,000 to 99,000,000 floating point error
I've been using .Mac for the last 6 months, and while it has a lot of great features, they badly need to be updated and refined. For example, your Address Book data is accessible through the .Mac web site, but it is very limited - you're restricted to certain data fields, and even though data such as birthdays, anniversaries, notes, etc. is synchronized to the server, it is not viewable or editable via the web. This seriously limits the usefulness of this feature for me - my need to look up someone's birthday or other info tends to come up more often than the need to say, find their phone number (which is usually in my cell phone).
Similarly, the Calendar publishing is very basic. It's read-only, the "location" and "notes" data is not accessible, and if you publish multiple calendars as one, they lose their color coding (e.g. work calendar vs. birthday calendar).
I like .Mac, and they've made some nice additions and refinements in the last year or so... But the ability to access my address book and calendar, all nicely sync'd with my Mac, was a key part of my decision to subscribe. The fact that these features are basically untouched from whatever implementation Apple had 3 or 4 years ago is disappointing and very limiting.
I've been seriously debating whether to continue my subscription when it comes time. In fact, if it wasn't for the new iLife suite, I would definitely have let the subscription lapse. iWeb looks promising though, and I may yet find other excuses to keep my .Mac subscription...
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
My advice, if you plan to keep posting to Slashdot :) is to never, ever read anonymous comments that aren't modded up to 2 or 3. You can set this in your prefs and message prefs (so you aren't even notified about replies from ACs). It'll save you the hassle of getting trolled.
Encrypted mail tunnel, free backup software, convenient 'built-in' web storage, oh, and free garageband loops. It'd really kick ass if they'd add WebObjects deployment :-) Hmmm, I think I'll go request that...
Suppose I buy a Mac because I like a lot of its features, many of which depend on .Mac. I figure on paying the price of the original purchase, plus $99/yr. Then, in the future, Apple jacks up the price to $249/yr. In that case, I either end up paying more than I anticipated at the time of the purchase, or I lose some of the features that motivated the purchase in the first place. Either way, I would feel kind of screwed.
Should Apple provide a way for subscribers to lock in a price for, say, five or ten years?
.Mac is not $99.00 per year. It's $99.95, which makes his point even more valid and yours just incorrect.
.Mac is not $99.00 per year. It's $99.95, which makes his point even more valid and yours just incorrect.
It's a joke. Anyways, his point is correct but he's the one that gave the wrong price? Huh?
Bradley Holt
I started out thinking that .mac was awesome. After all it came with a ton of stuff... there were freebies to download, virus software, mail, webhosting... etc. Well Virus software is gone that is a huge chunk of cash I now must spend elswhere to get stuff for. I am wondering if I will be seeing the same treatment for .mac web services soon with ilife 06. Spymac offers similar services much much cheaper with MORE storage. I have thus far liked how smoothly everything integrated but am not sure I will be able to justify the full expense much longer. Spymac runs at 25 USD/year. While .mac need not be free, unless virus protection returns as a service they offer, I think that the 99 USD price tage is QUITE hefty
I love my Mac, don't get me wrong, but I'm such a fanboy that I'll let uncool shit slide. I recall that Apple's old slogan for .Mac was "Free for life" or some such. I had a mac.com address back then... Then it all the sudden wasn't free anymore. Whiskey, tango, foxtrot... I'd certainly like to have it free again, even for just the multi-mac syncing and e-mail. I don't need any non-php, non-mysql, non-ssh webhost or anti-virus or all the other bells and whistles, whatever they are these days.
In Soviet Russia, Mac dots you!
.Mac features into OS X
1. Integrate
2. Give users 90 day trial
3. Wait for them to expire then subscribe, since they have already uploaded their whole collection there, and have no desire to learn anything new, now that they have finally mastered something.
4. Profit!
They don't want to be MSN.com, they want to be AOL. Hook them with a trial and "look how easy it is when it's all in one place!". The average user that is just now signing up is probably a Windows convert, and doesn't know "if Gmail will work on a Mac", anyways.
The average person that uses these kind of services, uses them because they are branded the same as the other products they use (Internet Explorer, anyone?) regardless of whether they are superior or inferior.
.Mac gained about 400,000 customers last year to reach 1M customers. That is a fairly substantial growth. At an attach rate of $50-75 per account this represents a $50M revenue source a year. Not to mention people who buy iLife ($79) for its iPhoto, Mail and now iWeb integration.
Give that away for yet another ad ridden "portal" with a Me-too consumer experience? D'oh.
If you round 99.95, you get 100, not 99. So 100 is better.
How about:
MAKING QUICKTIME PRO FREE with every new Mac??! Son of a bitch if I don't spend $2400 on a new Macbook Pro only to be nickel and dimed for $30 later! You know, they update Quicktime enough that even if they gave away QT 7 with a new Mac, most users would probably opt for QT 8 when it arrives. And I can certainly see making PC users pay for it.
To me, this is the single most glaring thing about OS X on a new Mac. "Oh yeah you get iLife, iDVD, iEverything Else but if you want to watch a Quicktime movie... Oh, you gotta buy that. Simply STUPID.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Maybe instead of giving .Mac for free, for a year with every new Mac, Apple should create .Mac Lite.
.Mac service)
.Mac Lite with every new Mac purchase. Charge a yearly fee of $25 after the first year.
- 250MB of bandwidth per month
- 50MB of storage
--- 10MB goes to website (if you want more you need to get full
--- 10MB goes to email
--- 30MB goes to iSync (for iCal, Address Book, bookmarks, and documents which you specify)
Give 1 free year access to
I used .Mac for two years, and I didn't feel like I was getting value for money out of it.
.Mac off a bit, and thats probably because I'm not the target market. But its a novelty, not an essential, and its not a premium service, they're just charging like its a premium service. Everything .Mac provides can be provide for free, you've just got hunt a little harder. As for its easier to use... well thats as maybe, especialy as their cheating. iPhoto could provide the same service by defaulting to .Mac, getting updates from software update (the new stationary), but letting you point it at any ftp server in an advance menu, but there is less money in that.
I used iPhoto publishing for a couple of months. That was really neat, but when I was using it was ahead of its time... at least in the UK. Most people just didn't have a fast enough connection to make it worth their time looking at my photos.
The iDisk sounds like a great idea, but is just too slow. I have a 1Mb link, but I rarely got more than 30kBs down, less than a thrid of my pipe. If their going to sell to European customers, they really ought to get some servers over here.
Homepage? Give me a break. Most people can make a better web page with word.
Backup / Antivirus? The iDisk connection is too slow to make it useful for backing up anything but the essentials. I just couldn't figure out what those essentials should be. 750MB of storage sounds like a lot until you think that you've got 4GB of photos, 20GB of music and 2GB of powerpoint, word, pdf, excel, and code to keep safe. For a short period I thought it should be the things that I working on, ie my desktop, but that went sour fast when I was installing Linux on my old PIII and had gentoo, ubuntu and debian CDs sitting on my desktop (I just couldn't decide which I prefered). And then there is the time cost of getting that much data to your iDisk at 10KBs (I only have 128Kb up). Off site storage is a great service, if you have a symetrical connection, or a small amount of must keep data. Lets face it, that went out with the floppy disk, and has been trampled into the ground by the digital camera and the iPod.
The Mail was just a bog standard IMAP account, but I've replaced it with a gMail account. I do miss having IMAP, but personel email isn't worth £60 a year to me.
The other thing I finally found useful was synchronisation. I have a PowerBook and iMac. It was pretty neat to have my bookmarks synchronise before I got home etc. But again it wasn't worth £60 a year.
There is also the issue of billing. Why £60 a year in a single payment? If your a service, bill like a service! £5 a month is easier to swallow than £60 once a year. Or better yet £5 a quarter, probably closer to the real value.
I've slagged
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
I am a freelance musician/producer and have both a .mac account and 3rd party hosting for a couple of websites I run. .mac pretty important to the way I work.
I find
I love being able to log onto any mac in the world (that is connected to broadband) and be able to download my entire mail folders, sent items etc as well as internet shortcuts, website keychains and such.
It makes a huge difference to me when I travel.
Totally worth 100 a year to me as it is a minimum amount of messing about.
The reason many people subscribe to .Mac (myself included) is because Apple makes it easier to do Web and Internet stuff with .Mac than with anything else. That's not because they have magically figured out how to do a better job with hosting on .Mac, it's just because that's the main thing they spend any time on.
.Mac, the fact is that .Mac is a hidden cost from a Macintosh purchase, and at $100/year, it's not such a great deal. The solution would be to fix the apps themselves. There is no reason, for example, why iPhoto shouldn't make it easier publish to arbitrary web pages out of the box.
As long as Apple ties their apps into
I have a service that costs $30 a YEAR that gives me nearly the same functionality. For $99/mo I want to be able to deploy JSF/JSP/Servlet applications with multiple databases and built-in blog software w/ maintenance. With my own domain name. With .Mac I would get a mail account, basic website, some good bandwidth, and some storage space, but not enough to back up my system.
I'd do .Mac for maybe $15/mo, but even $30/mo is too much for what they offer.
I mean, I could almost buy an iPod Shuffle each month instead of having .Mac.
#-#
Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
You forgot to include the interest. :)
They would be better off freeing up an old edition of iPhoto. The latest release will not run on G3 Macs so no G3 owner can purchase iLife '06, so why not just give iLife '05 or at least iPhoto 5 for free ?
iLife '06 is free to new Mac users, why not make iLife '05 free to other users ?