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Should Apple make .Mac free?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the web-full-please-leave dept.

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?"

3 of 297 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Umm.. No? by hotspotbloc · · Score: 5, Interesting
    .Mac comes with webhosting

    .Mac comes with webhosting that can handle a slashdotting.

    --
    "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
  2. Re:Umm.. No? by TubeSteak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here's the member benefits that come with paying for .Mac
    http://www.apple.com/dotmac/features.html
    http://images.apple.com/dotmac/pdfs/DotMac_Product _Overview_20060109.pdf (4.7MB PDF)

    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 .Mac offers is ad-free web pages + picture & video hosting, 1GB online backup w/a 10GB transfer limit.

    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 .Mac added a lot of additional benefits when they switched away from providing a free service.

    But I don't use a Mac, so I could be wrong.

    --
    [Fuck Beta]
    o0t!
  3. Re:Umm.. No? by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.'"