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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?"
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
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.
.Mac? No. It's not worth $100/year to me, but it is to some people.
.Mac service quietly rolled into every Mac purchase I make.
I'd rather not have the cost of three years or so of
Quicktime Pro, on the other hand, really should be made free. Charging $30 for a non-crippled version of their media player is a silly nickle-and-dime-us-to-death move, and beneath a company like Apple, which prides itself on charging a few extra bucks for a premier product.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
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.
I don't care either way if Quicktime Pro is free or not, but they should get rid of the damnedable nagscreen that displays every time you run the free version. Show it once or something. You know there's a problem when the most desireable feature of the 'pro' version is the lack of nag screen.
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.
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.
Many people, such as myself, do not install this piece of shit product because of its super annoying "features", like the nag screen and the constant updates. The fact that it is so bloated and slow does not help either. The Apple developers need to take control of Quicktime back from the marketroids and strip some of this crap out, which would result in more marketshare as people like me become willing to install it.
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 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
Here's the member benefits that come with paying for .Mact _Overview_20060109.pdf (4.7MB PDF)
.Mac offers is ad-free web pages + picture & video hosting, 1GB online backup w/a 10GB transfer limit.
.Mac added a lot of additional benefits when they switched away from providing a free service.
http://www.apple.com/dotmac/features.html
http://images.apple.com/dotmac/pdfs/DotMac_Produc
It's one thing to be able to handle a slashdotting , but I think it's another thing entirely to have to pay for ~2% of the PC market's hosting on a regular basis.
A few of the things that
If you take away the $99 a month, how do you recoup those costs without adding advertising? GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo... all have advertising when you access their services.
My understanding is that
But I don't use a Mac, so I could be wrong.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I still think they should have a free version. Just give people who pay a lot more.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
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.
You joke, but I was thinking the exact same thing. I would definitely use .Mac if it had a limited free version. I don't need the hosting or another damn email address or any of that... but it would be nice to sync ical, addressbook, and safari over it.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
I've been hoping for this for awhile. Apple could release it to only run on OS X server, there by giving them an extra hardware/software sales, it also becomes a point where ISPs will begin advertising that they support "OS X Sync Services" or whatever Apple calls it, thus increasing the mind share of potential customers.
Also, I'm sure that there are lots of groups (hospitals, military, etc) where that type of data is considered confidential, and thus can never be transmitted to Apple's servers. By selling the services as part of OS X, these potential customers may be able to use their Macs to the full extent...
Doh!
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...
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-- Ryan Stiles
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.
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