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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? :-)
.lnx
Apple is a corporation and they want to make money. I think the real question is: "Why WOULD they set .mac free?"
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
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
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.
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.
News for worms. Stuff that cavities.
.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.
with your .Mac subscription
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.
And the fact that I own an iBook has no influence on my opinion.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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
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 bought a macmini and I got a mac.com account free for 30 or 60 days. Saw what it was about. Got some "you should pay $100 to keep this" spam, and let my account lapse.
It was very cool that they gave me a free shot at it so I could see what I was getting into.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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.
The article states that there are a million subscribers at $99 each. That's $100 million that Apple makes from .mac
Sorry to nitpick, but that's actually $99 million.
Bradley Holt
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
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.
"Sorry to nitpick, but that's actually $99 million."
It's $100 million for extremely large values of $99.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Hear hear! I am so bloody sick of everything being covered in Ads these days. I'm a .mac subscriber and the lack of Ads is a big deal. I don't want to subject my friends/family to more ads just to view my content.
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?
"My grocery store gives free coffee.
I think you might notice he was talking about coffeeshop's giving away free coffee and grocery stores giving away free groceries.
Way to read your examples!
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...
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
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.
.Mac gained about 400,000 customers last year to reach 1M customers. That is a fairly substantial growth. At an attach rate of $50-75 per account this represents a $50M revenue source a year. Not to mention people who buy iLife ($79) for its iPhoto, Mail and now iWeb integration.
Give that away for yet another ad ridden "portal" with a Me-too consumer experience? D'oh.
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.
#-#
Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars