This is so dead on. Syncing is the only reason I’m still there. And I’m helpless without it. As a developer, I have an embarrassing number of computers - home, office, seeds, loaners, etc. and am so used to being able to have my bookmarks, Yojimbo, and contacts (in that order) always there I simply can’t do without it. In my opinion, syncing is a platform builder and more or less unique (at least in execution). It is a clear advantage to having a Mac and it would also be an incentive to developers to provide SyncServices. As for email and chat, there are obviously great free services for those. I use my mac.com as my personal email but that’s a relatively minor inconvenience.

iWeb, for me, is a massive step back since it killed the homepage.mac.com iPhoto integration. All I wanted was a quick easy way to post photos. iWeb makes that entire process manual, and oddly is not as flexible. Therefore I now simply run Gallery2 on my home iMac Core Duo. And blog with Serendipity. Syncing is, sadly, crack to me so they’ll keep getting my money until I can find a better solution. Strange that it’s so contrary to their normal strategy (stressing integration and how seamless everything is).

Agreed. As with iPhoto and iWeb you can almost see the fight between the development group and the .Mac business group. I’d much prefer my Apple desktop apps to have better syncing - without plugins - with common solutions like Flickr or delicious, as they have emerged.

The one thing that .Mac is allegedly good for is withstanding a slashdotting, but how many typical home users need that kind of scalability from their hosting provider?

This comment will probably mean the end to this (relatively) sweet deal but…

Since having a .Mac account since before it was $100/yr. I have only once paid $100 for my account. (Forgive me; I was but a poor newbie at the time.)

I, too, have a hard time justifying the cost for the few features I use but I’ve made it a little easier on my psyche by buying a boxed version of .Mac every year at the lowest price I can find at the time. (Usually the price is $20-25 off the retail price of $100.) The activation key included in the box can be used to extend an already activated .Mac account by one year.

It may not be the best use of my time but it has become a pretty simple process and you need to get a good deal now and then to stay sane. 8-)

I am looking into other similarly priced plans that provide more website functionality like cgi scripts and form processing. I guess if I can’t find a retail box next year I may make the switch.

I have been a .Mac subscriber for 3 years now and everytime I think about quitting, it seems like something better “might” be on the horizon. Apple has added features to iLife over the years that only work well and easily for .Mac subscribers (although, in reality, I’ve never gotten Photocasts to work and iWeb-pages don’t work that well). But I always get the feeling that things will soon get better with the “next” release, in this case iLife 07. For instance, what if Apple decides to lasso other functionality from iTunes or iPhoto into .Mac? Leave now and change everything (email!) only to have to start again? Damn you Steve Jobs! I’m hooked!

[…] Merlin Mann has a post on 43Folders concerning the repackaging of Apple’s .Mac web offering.  I’m currently a .Mac subscriber and have been for a couple of years, but I’m undecided if I’ll renew my subscription again. […]

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve always wondered why .Mac isn’t free. They could easily charge a premium for backup storage (I’ve seen prices as low as $5 per month for 40 GB—Apple could charge $5-10 for increments of 10 GB and laugh all the way to the bank). But, Apple would reap torrents of goodwill, customer relationship warm fuzzies, plus considerable upsell opportunities. On top of all that, I’d be stoked to backup all my files and esp. iTunes content automagically. Wow, that’d be cool.

I disagree.

I use all the time or like being able to do… 1. iDisk - The system integration is great. 2. Backup - generallly to iDisk (janky? non…) 3. syncing across my four macs- flippin’ marvellous. 4. Having my bookmarks and addressbook on any computer that can access the net. 5. MacMail - I like it. the improvements are good, I especially like being able to use it to access other accounts too. 6. iWeb - yikes… I know… but a website my wife can edit too, without my involvement… now that’s priceless.

The other stuff I don’t really go near… My particular bugaboo is Groups (useless because only .Mac addresses can access, too much hassle) They should permit domain name linkage, being able to have www.mycompany.com point to your .Mac home address would be great.

Janky is a new word to me. From the context though it sounds pretty perjorative.

Which is odd really. Backup is the only reason I have a .Mac account. $AU150/year is a lot to pay though…

If I used two or more Macs I reckon iSync could be useful. Everything else is sheer fluff.

if i’m right, in 10 years i would have paid 1000 dollars for .mac

Dang. When you put it that way, it does seem kind of nuts.

And I agree. I think email accounts can start as these low-threshold things, but in time, you’re very reluctant to risk abandoning an address and all the people that know it as your primary contact. And that’s a real hook for whoever that account is with.

Slightly related: this is a good reason to ALWAYS hang your own domain on a hosted account from day one. I’ve been off TypePad for a year, and I still see, via referrers, how many people are navigating here from the manual redirect pages I built. Dumb 2-YO decision to ever have anything but my own domain.

a few months ago, when i bought my first mac, the salesperson was pushing hard for me to get .mac. but, as i told him, most people want e-mail services to be something they use for a long time. no one wants to constantly switch to brand new e-mail providers (this is different from having multiple accounts with multiple providers b/c those accounts are still of long standing). if i’m right, in 10 years i would have paid 1000 dollars for .mac (assuming no price increases). even the salesman had to blink at hearing that.

My .mac subscription will expire soon and I won’t miss it a bit. I’ve switched to google for just about everything. Gmail for webmail [calendar included],picasa for photos, google-earth for mapping, etc. etc. I can’t see paying $99 for a service that I can get free elsewhere and with more storage. Gmail’s GUI seems much more effecient too; i.e. the way addresses are handled, message threading, filter settings, etc. I don’t really sync anything other than music, video, and photos with my iPod, however I can see the advantages to using the syncing features of dot.mac, but $99 just seems way overpriced to me. Also, I wish apple would integrate other contacts and calendar apps into the itunes/sync features. For example: sync contacts from Mozilla Thunderbird and/or Opera. Even more so, sync my Thunderbird contacts with my webmail account. That would be great. The redownloading of previous purchased music would keep me subscribing. I have a lot of music that I’ve purchased [and backed up to cds of course] from iTunes that would be way more convenient to download rather than reimporting everything disc-by-disc when moving/upgrading to a new machine.

Value for money? I think not - in the UK .Mac costs the equivalent of $128 p.a.!

I’m with Merlin on this one. I need dot Mac for a couple of things (like syncing gCal with my Palm via iCal), and the iDisk is handy for moving stuff between work and home. Yes, a USB drive is handy too, but I’m far less likely to lose my iDisk. And I don’t have to hunt around looking for my iDisk, either. It seems I lose more time looking for the USB drive than I actually spend using it.

But for me one of the biggest gripes about dot Mac is the lack of spam filters. Yes, in Mail.app we can sue things like the brilliant SpamSieve, but when I’m checking email via a web browser, my inbox is chock full of spam. GMail has impressive spam filters, so we know that it can be done.

But right now, the only thing saving dot Mac on my credit card is syncing gCal with my Palm by way of iCal’s subscription abilities. As soon as someone makes it simple to sync my Palm with gCal, then I think it’s over. I can duplicate the iDisk feature easily enough via a utility.

The point of this poorly written diatribe is that Apple could be doing more to make dot Mac a valuable part of being a Mac user. A fresh web interface is nice, but it’s cosmetics without any real substance.

Geez, can’t you think of something else to get angry over?

I have been an “edge case” for the last 3 years. The first year, I stayed because I had given everybody and my mom the .mac email address—I signed up early enough that I got to use my first name. Then thought I wised-up and signed up for a gmail account and started forwarding my .mac mail there, and giving that out. I told myself, next year, I’ll be poised to leave. I used .mac to synch between my home computer and work computer. I love that iDisk keeps a local copy of files, but then there was the time that my files at work were overwritten by the local copy of my home files—so I stopped relying on the iDisk in any meaningful way. I am using the janky Backup utility (to an external drive, ‘cause there ain’t no way that all my files are gonna fit on .mac.) Of course I want to set up a subversion repository on my web host and should probably be using Super Duper, or rsynch but I want to spend time with my kid, watch the mini-episode of BSG, go train for that marathon, blah, blah blah. Between the OS/iLife suite integration (what do you think I used to post photos of my new kid when I didn’t get any sleep?—iPhoto to .mac) I barely had to think about it. The .mac equation looks something like laziness + data lock-in + OS integration = renewal. For those out there that haven’t jumped over the edge and renewed you can save $20 bucks by purchasing .mac from Amazon and entering the code. I hate that I do this every year and I do; where’s that piece on busting bad habits, and while you’re at it, that rsynch to tutorial? Nevermind, gonna go do that run. ;)

.Mac is totally replaceable. I stopped using it as soon as I would have had to pay $100/year - I was an “iTools” user and signed up for the first paid year at the “special” discount rate of $50 + $10 for a second address for my wife. I get by now using the Firefox+Google Browser Sync combo to keep my bookmarks and cookies in sync between my MacBook Pro, my wife’s iBook (for the occasional browsing session when my computer is busy crunching some media or just downstairs) and multiple Parallels virtual machines (Windows XP and a couple different flavors of Linux). For file sync or storage, how about a USB “thumb” drive or a free (or low-cost) internet file storage service or even your own web host? Use Gmail or Yahoo! (or your own web host again) for e-mail - Gmail supports POP access for free (although you can only download the messages once) and Yahoo! has POP access for only $20/year, which is way cheaper than Apple’s $100/year for .Mac.

P.S. Check your CSS against Firefox, the text in this box is not readable at all (like 5px or something crazy)

Ditto to almost all of the previous comments…I’m just barely hanging on, and have been for the past few years. I struggle every time the renewal comes up. My last excuse was that the web hosting isn’t that much more expensive than other places, plus I get a few extra perks.

As a former Mac Specialist, I think that .mac is crap. Yeah, I use it (iDisk and Backup), and yeah, I’ll probably pay for it next year, but the sales goal is 40% of all computers going out the door. Does every grandma, college kid, and businessperson need .mac? Hell no.

AppleCare was an easy sell and a product I believe in after some disasters. Selling .mac and ProCare, however, makes my soul hurt.

Tommy W is the only one who’s mentioned the uselessness of .mac Groups, so let me add my rant: I had a project I wanted to set up a .mac group for, but then I found out that it would mean all of my friends would have to sign up for .mac trial accounts in order for them to use the group. Not only is this process more hassle than the usual site regristrations that people are used to, it’s ridiculous to force PC users to sign up for a service they can’t possibly use. Apple should establish a .mac groups id, and/or allow an itunes id to be used for groups login.

[…] 43folders had a piece on the stagnation of .Mac and I find that I concur with most of the post (I know I should say what I really don’t see eye-to-eye on, but I’m a bit tired from drinking coffee today). Until then, perhaps I share what I am using instead of Apple’s connection with the digital life. […]

I’ve never thought .Mac was worth the asking price. Sync is the only bit I really appreciate. For several years I’ve just opened a new free trial .Mac account every 60 days.

True Merlin, $1000 for 10 years is a lot, but $8.33 a month isn’t. I was previously paying $6 a month for my own domain, and while it was functional, I hated it’s webmail (and it was POP3, which meant once I fired up Outlook, it wasn’t online anymore). When I got my Mac, I got a year of .Mac for free and was absolutely hooked on IMAP mail. Start an email at work, save it to drafts - bam! - it’s in Mail.app (or vice-versa). It works perfectly for the GTD email system you’ve laid out (and I also copy the archive to an off-line folder for back-up). Later, I started simply saving all my documents in idisk, which is much more convenient than a thumb drive. Later, I started using iweb too.

Plus, it was easy to keep my domain name - I just set up a redirect (and did the same thing with my email address).

I think it’s a great deal - they should just publish the per-month cost.

dot mac should be free for all the existing features and they should offer paid enhanced features. i’d love to see a P & L breakdown on how much dot mac actually adds to their bottom line. seems the added value of giving it away with the purchase of new hardware may well produce enough additional sales to justify making it gratis.

It seems like there’s a real business oportunity for someone to come up with a good way to synch between macs without using .Mac or being a UNIX geek. I am another person who can’t give up on the synching. Acually, my bookmarks are in delicious and I use gmail and google calendar and other things available on multiple machines. It’s just the address book and Yojimbo synching I need. And I could let go of the address book. I wish barebones would offer me yojimbo backup/synching for less than $100 a year. I’d love to say goodbye to .mac.

I’m starting to think more and more that synching should belong to the mac system itself. People who work on laptops while on the road, in a cafe, or office, and then return home ought to have an easy way to sync everything built in by now. Using an iDisk for data sharing is pretty piecemeal, and only covers some data anyway. Again, if I understand OS X Server right, the technology is there to synch it all, preferences, passwords, data, all changes made on one computer to another. I’d even pay for it if Apple decided to have a normal version of Leopard and a kick-ass version for 50 bucks more. I just think it’s a matter of time before total synch becomes built into comuter systems, why not bring it along now? All those paying dot mac subscriptions might be a reason….

One thing that would be great for dot mac to do would be to sync a user account across a network. To sync all user data, not just bookmarks and mail, so that browser cookies, program preferences are all in sync. I think that technology is available in Mac OS X Server, which costs 500 bucks, and is known as something like ‘home directory’. After five years of paying for dot mac at the full price, that’ll indeed be 500 bucks. But I don’t think people with two, or even three computers should need to buy server software. Why don’t they borrow that functionality from OS X Server and build it into OS X for dot mac users. Even better, why not just add that functionality to OS X? I bet lots of small businesses, freelancers would love it. Bring your laptop home, access the network, then login to your Power Mac and everything is the same as on your laptop. That functionality just ought to be there. I don’t think it’s asking for much, since the technology is already there. It’s probably a matter of Apple getting something out of it. If it has to be for a price, let it be, but give us the full functionality, total synchronicity.

For those who are comfortable with the terminal, there’s already Unison (freeware) which, I believe, will sync a user across a network. But, it’s not for me. I’m not much of a techie.

People rip on .Mac all the time. I used to, too. I recently bought a .Mac account, though, and I love it. I am a multi-Mac user: laptop at school, iMac at home. .Mac is really, really awesome for me.

1) iDisk is really really cool. It keeps a local copy of itself on each computer that you use it with. This is better than box.net or Strongspace, which you can only access over a network. I keep all of my notes, papers and outlines on iDisk.

2) Also, .Mac includes IMAP mail. IMAP allows me to use Mail.app on both machines, and from the web. Full email archive everywhere. No rickety Mail.app here, Gmail there solution.

3)You’d be surprised, but something that works as well as iCal syncing is very hard to duplicate with free services like Google calendar. You can have an iCal that you publish through a free WebDAV account, but then on the other computers, it is read-only. And if you use Google calendar, you can only change it in Google calendar. With iCal syncing, I have read/write through iCal on the laptop and the iMac. And then I can still publish.

4)The other syncing. Address book and Safari. Safari syncing allowed me to quit using Firefox+Google Browser Sync. (The Google Browser Sync has nicer features, and Firefox can be nicely tweaked out. But I am a big fan of the OS X spell check and dictionary panel, which means that Safari still wins.)

5)Web hosting. You don’t get a nice domain name, but the iWeb integration is really freaking slick for simple pages.

Anyway, compared with the free web services, sometimes it seems .Mac is not worth it. It probably is to expensive. But iDisk + IMAP + iCal syncing + web hosting still makes it viable.

If an eventual iPhone ever features .Mac syncing, you guys will all be singing its praises. The essential idea of having a server that keeps all of your information, while at the same time hanging on to a local copy, is really, really good. It gives you the advantages of using real applications like iCal and Mail.app while still giving you access to your information over the internet from foreign computers and the like.

(As sweet-ass feature would be allow iTunes to share music with other computers over the real internet if those computers are signed in to the same .Mac account. A kind of automatic VPN between computers on the same account. I mean, I can already stream music to myself using tunneling,etc, but it’s way too annoying.)

Allowing .Mac subscribers to re-download iTunes Store purchases in the event of a system crash would be huge. No need to back up the actual bits, just tweak Backup so it compares your purchase history to your iTunes library.

.Mac == AppleCare for your music/tv/movies? Please?

I agree with everyone here, but I’m more optimistic, or maybe just less fussy.

—I think the new .Mac mail looks great, and should be able to outclass Gmail with its easy integration w/ Address Book.

—Syncing is KEY for me and my three macs.

—But the more I sync, the more I need disc space, and I think it’s time for Apple to kick it up to 3GB with no increase in price. If Google can do it, with ads as its only income source, then Apple can do it for $99, for goodness sake.

—Although I see where Merlin is coming from, I’m not quite the “edge case” that he is, but for me I would be sold on .Mac if it had an equally major “2.0” overhaul of the iCal integration that 1) allowed me to modify calendars online (e.g., at the office) and still integrate w/ iCal, which despite its limitations is still fun to use. Google calendar is a good tool, but integration w/ iCal is clumsy. I want an Apple solution.

—I want more iCards! (ok, I’m kidding on that one)

A timely post from my perspective: I have been a .Mac user since back when it was free and called iTools, but I won’t be renewing when my time comes in October. It just isn’t that special for $100/year. I have been favoring my Gmail address for email and Flickr for photos for a year now. I do like accessing files from multiple Macs on my iDisk, but I can just do what everyone else does & email docs to myself while I figure out a better solution.