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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...
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? :-)
Apple is a corporation and they want to make money. I think the real question is: "Why WOULD they set .mac free?"
Am I the only one who find web portals pointless?
Free, legal music for iTunes users.
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.
.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)
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.
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
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.
Your comparison is reasonable -- for you. While no one will dispute that alternatives to .mac services are available, I'd argue that few are as easy to use as the .mac implementations. The other night I wanted to post a short AVI video to my website. Opened iMovie, opened the movie, clicked 'share', and it was converted to a QT movie and uploaded to .mac. Took 3 minutes. Could I have done it manually? Of course. But that's not the point of .mac. It takes these services and makes them easy. I have 4 OSX machines with synchronized bookmarks, contacts, and calendars. Amount of effort required to keep them up-to-date: none. It just works. For me, $100 per year is worth it for the convenience...it might not be for others. But to suggest that the .mac services should be offered free (not in the parent post, but a key topic in the thread) because there are free alternatives neglects the fact that most of .mac's value is in the implementation.
Some places already do. Ever been to a Sam's Club?
Way to pick your examples!
Oh and, many people give away free samples as a means of advertising. So you're extra silly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.