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

Umm.. No?

[TubeSteak]

.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.

Re:Umm.. No?

[gb506]

If you take away the $99 a month

Well, it's actually $99 per year, or $8.25 per month. Not too bad considering the type of toolset and OSX integration you get. Considering Apple's market cap nowadays it's highly unlikely the company will be swallowed, so my .mac email addrs are safe, and they don't look cheap on a resume like gmail and hotmail accounts do.

Why not? How about why?

[th1ckasabr1ck]

The article states that there are a million subscribers at $99 each. That's $100 million that Apple makes from .mac - I really have no idea how much money similar ad-based services make, but I would be surprised if more than a few pulled in that much cash.

Apple is a corporation and they want to make money. I think the real question is: "Why WOULD they set .mac free?"

What is your point again?

[yardbird]

What a strange little article. The guy answers his own question: "Apple doesn't want to see ads for Dell or Victoria's Secret on .Mac." Apple's market is people who will pay extra for things like an uncluttered interface.

Nor is .Mac a Web portal with all the external content and Web services-a missed opportunity.

Am I the only one who find web portals pointless?

One year free

[rritterson]

.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.

Plus, many are arguing that .Mac could go free and then benefit from online advertising. I'd rather have it free from advertising, thank you.

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 .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.

My biggest complaint with the service is that is has exclusive features that don't require .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.

Re:One year free

[DECS]

The peer to peer sync you describe (like rsync) would be an entirely different service and product than the sync services used by .Mac; your idea is closer to the Portable Home Directory sync built into Mac OS X Server, which is "free" for people who have access to a Mac OS X Server Open Directory.

When you sync using .Mac, your bookmarks, contacts, calendar, etc., are kept in a offsite location, and you can also access them from the web, from any machine. With .Mac, after hosing something in my sync engiine, I can upload a clean version from .Mac. If .Mac gets hosed, I can selectively upload/overwrite the broken bit from one of my client Macs. This has proven a livesaver to me several times.

If I rsync from Mac1 to Mac2 as you describe, and then Mac1 gets messed up, my system automatically contaminates Mac2.

I think Apple should productize an "Xserve mini" as a household server that provided central file storage, Directory Services, and Portable Home Directories. That would be cool.

I disagreed at first

[Dark Paladin]

And then this one part hit me:

Nor is .Mac a Web portal with all the external content and Web services-a missed opportunity. It has many of the applications that users get for free on other services and with more storage capacity. Apple charges $99.95 for .Mac because it can, but millions of loyal, fanatic Mac users are not using .Mac Mail or iPhoto and instead have well Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr etc. Why should they pay Apple for email and bunch of other ancillary services.

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.