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?"

Comments

It was free

[FuzzzyLogik]

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

Re:Umm.. No?

[E1ven]

They did.

The Nag screen has been gone since Quicktime 7, which came out a few months ago.

Re:Umm.. No?

[adamfranco]

I was actually hoping that Apple would release the server side items necessary to allow independent hosting companies to host .mac-like services. Apple would still be able to sell iWeb as the means for easy desktop publishing and still have it's own .mac accounts.

As far as I know, much of .Mac is just a WebDAV server with Apple's own additional authentication added onto it. These instructions tell how you can spoof your Mac (with your own IP for mac.com) into thinking that your own webdav server is .Mac.

I ended up setting up an 'rdiff-backup'-based backup system instead, so I never bothered to do the .Mac thing, but it looks pretty do-able. I just wish that Apple would make the setting of your own WebDav/.Mac server an easy configuration. Those of us who already paying for our own hardware aren't going to fork over more $$ for .Mac, so just let us do our own thing without hassle.

- Adam