Apple Relaunches .Mac for Tiger

[MacRumors]

http://www.macrumors.com/images/macrumorsthreadlogo.gif (http://www.macrumors.com)

Apple has updated their .Mac site (http://www.mac.com/WebObjects/Welcome) to reflect new features offered by integration with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).

Extend your Mac experience to the Internet -- and unlock powerful features in new Mac OS X v10.4 "Tiger." An annual membership to .Mac gives you innovative software and services, plus exclusive discounts, free downloads, and online Apple training.

Tiger offers tighter integration/syncronization with .Mac (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dotmacsync/).

[ImAlwaysRight]

just another reason to update!

[StarbucksSam]

I don't understand why they won't offer .mac on a month-to-month basis. I would consider it under those circumstances...but really.

[J-Squire]

Come on! Give credit to the man.
Reported very recently in the Toger Shipping thread:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=1419036#post1419036

I am very suprised I was the first to see this, as I RARELY use my .mac account. I use the .mac email address, but use entourage as my email client, so I don't log in to the .mac site. It just happens to be THE ONLY web-based email that my company's proxy does not pickup, so I logged on at work to see if my tiger seminar email was there.

[Koodauw]

I've been thinking about this, and this might just push me over. The .Mac webpage looks easy to create. Could be fun. now if only they dropped the price.

[Winston Smith]

A quick look at this gives me far more info on the homepage, relevant to my account.
And yes another reason to get Tiger - only 12 hours to go!

[broken_keyboard]

I love how they make use of my widescreen monitor by squishing the 3 columns together vertically. Good thinking! Not.

[Mudbug]

and it *still* doesn't seem like it's worth the money to me.

[thecombatwombat]

Does anyone know if .mac will be jabber compatible?

I'd been assuming it would be, but I got my copy of tiger going today, and jabber doesn't seem connected to .mac at all. It uses its own buddy list and the .mac configuration doesn't mention it at all.

[Freg3000]

The Downloads (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/) section under Mac OS X also received a major overhaul, and now has the place where you can download Widgets and such.

I thought the QuickTime page would be updated too, but not yet.

[swissmann]

I was skeptical about .Mac when I first signed up for it but have found it to be as valuable to me as the internet is itself. Its integration with iLife is incredible. I put together a photo album send it to .Mac and email all my old friends and say if you want to see what we've been up to check out this site. If I'm doing some work for someone and they need to proof it I upload it to .Mac in (soon to be h.264) form and say check it out. If my mom needs some pictures or something I have send them to .Mac and have her access my .Mac folder and download them. Also there are things like common database sharing and publishing iCal calendars so my family can coordinate our schedules. I couldn't live without .Mac. I know it sounds like a commercial but I really do love the service. Sounds like it will become even more useful in Tiger. I'm all for it.

[Ja Di ksw]

.Mac seems like a complete waste to me. Both before and after one of my friends got it so I could play around on hers. Not even close to worth the money. It annoys me that they are going to have .Mac exclusive widgets, but whatever, they're a company that is out to make money, they don't owe me anything that they didn't promise, and they never promised I'd have access to all widgets without .Mac.

[Dr. Dastardly]

Great, now lower the damn price or up the storage to at least a gig.

[PlaceofDis]

Great, now lower the damn price or up the storage to at least a gig.

yep, either one of these happen and i would probably sign up, come on apple!

[mad jew]

Count me in...

Once they include a gig of storage/email that is. The changes are promising but they're still a little lacking. :(

[munkle]

Has .Mac not been shamed into offering more storage yet?

[SaleenS351]

i think they dropped the proce to $69.00 till May 12, that's what i paid for it.

[dobbin]

Has .Mac not been shamed into offering more storage yet?

It went up recently from 100Mb to 250 Mb.

Another jump to ~1Gb would be nice though.

[dobbin]

Using my .mac aliases from within Mail will be much better than having to go in through webmail. :)

And sharing address books with my wife's account will be great. I currently have to export & import all contacts to keep us synced. :rolleyes:

.mac continues to get better and in my opinion is worth the money. I'd like to see storage increase though, and I'm sure it will soon.

[munkle]

It went up recently from 100Mb to 250 Mb.

Another jump to ~1Gb would be nice though.

That was last year and still a bit pitiful when you see Google bumping up Gmail to 2GB. I realise that .Mac's storage is for webspace as well and not just e-mail, but 250MB is still weak I'm afraid.

[Rod Rod]

I love how they make use of my widescreen monitor by squishing the 3 columns together vertically. Good thinking! Not.
A webpage designed for your widescreen monitor would look horrible.

I like the new design. It saves a lot of clicking around by giving current network status and mail count (as Winston Smith alluded to).

[leenoble]

I can't find any mention of the dynamic DNS system that was supposed to part of .Mac and Tiger.

I'm certain I read that it was going to be possible to access any user account on any mac anywhere in the world by using a url of a format like:
mydotmacusername.mac.com/~myusername
or something similar.

Can anyone confirm whether this was dropped from the final release?

[coolfactor]

and it *still* doesn't seem like it's worth the money to me.

Okay Mr. I-Only-Know-How-To-Complain,

Got any suggestions for Apple? You know they take feedback.

[coolfactor]

Great, now lower the damn price or up the storage to at least a gig.


Honestly? Has Google really changed the world that much that everybody now has a gig of [junk] mail lying around? I think it's all marketing BS and the complainers are sucked in.

.Mac has tremendous *value*, with or without the rediculous amounts of storage space.

[munkle]

Honestly? Has Google really changed the world that much that everybody now has a gig of [junk] mail lying around? I think it's all marketing BS and the complainers are sucked in.

.Mac has tremendous *value*, with or without the rediculous amounts of storage space.

No but people do have GB's of music and photos lying around. I use my GMail account for storage, not just e-mails. Some people have even taken it a step further and have figured out a way to mount GMail onto their desktop (I think it's Linux only at the mo), effectively giving them a 2GB iDisk for free.

[Machead III]

Okay Mr. I-Only-Know-How-To-Complain,

Got any suggestions for Apple? You know they take feedback.

That's the point, nobody needs .mac, it's horrificly expensive and you don't get ****. What happened to the good old days of iTools when this stuff was priced correctly, ie. FREE.

[Sav]

That's a rather sweeping statement to say NOBODY needs .mac. If you dug deeply you could say NOBODY needs anything other than a local stream, a spear and the ability to make fire!!!!

I have been a .mac member for about 2 years. I got it as a very easy method of posting an iphoto album and imovie creation to a webpage so fellow stag night revellers could see the antics we had got up to. Don't ask for the links - they were removed shortly after to spare the groom's blushes!!!!!

Since then I use the .mac email address extensively and find it is such a nice email address to have - the aliases are very nice too - and if Tiger allows me to send email from an alias via mail (rather than logging onto webmail) all the better.

I often upload photos from iphoto very quickly to a webpage - I have a busy work/home life so have nowhere near enough time to create my own webpages from scratch. The upload from iphoto is so intuitive it could only have been done by apple.

If I have entries in my address book or calendar or safari bookmarks - all entered on my home imac - I can access these from my work PC with no problems. And I find the .mac webmail interface easily the best webmail I have tried (I have tried ntl, wanadoo, lineone/tiscali, yahoo, hotmail). It even deals with writing a huge email and not logging you off because it has taken so long nicely by asking if you need more time. Other webmails have frustrated me when I have written a long email - clicked send and then been told I had been logged out due to inactivity - thus losing everything I had just written. Because it is IMAP rather than POP I can see very old emails in my inbox online and it just seems so much nicer than others

As you say - I don't NEED .mac - but I find it aids me in getting things done quicker and more effectively - and I for one find it tremendous value £69/year (less than £6 a month - that's like 3 vaccuum packed sandwiches from work, which I could definitely do without). Yeah more space is always nicer but I am only using 130M of my space now and that is without having to worry about trimming email down aggressively.

I am on the verge of getting a new imac (not in a rush so waiting for any upgrades to the spec) and .mac with Tiger sounds like it will make switching between this and my existing mac effortless if all my email, address book, etc is kept nice and synchronised.

So you can count me as one happy .mac member

Sav

[iGary]

Much.Freaking.Better.

Thank you.

[chibianh]

No but people do have GB's of music and photos lying around. I use my GMail account for storage, not just e-mails. Some people have even taken it a step further and have figured out a way to mount GMail onto their desktop (I think it's Linux only at the mo), effectively giving them a 2GB iDisk for free.

slow as molasses though... at least the last time i tried it.

[chromos]

Much.Freaking.Better.

Thank you.

I agree. It looks great.

Of course it's always subjective what something is "worth", but here's a list of what I like about .Mac:

- fast webpage creation from iPhoto (end result much more pleasing than albums in say Ofoto or Snapfish)
- email aliases and the security it brings
- syncing between home and work computers (and will be even better with Tiger keychain sync)
- uploading recent pics to .Mac screensaver so my mom can see what's up on her machine automagically
- doing a quick iDisk backup from my Powerbook wirelessly (using Backup), instead of having to hook up the external firewire drive

YMMV :p

[dobbin]

Totally agree with everything Sav says above. I have even used the sandwiches comparison myself to show how little it costs!

I am the only person in my group of friends who always put photos on the web after weddings, stag nights etc and everyone is always glad to see them. Noone else has the ability to do it easily, and so no-one else bothers. Being able to make a webpage in less then 5 minutes makes .mac worth the money for me.

[Noiseboy]

I too am in the can't do without it camp. I got it when it first arrived and have used it regularly ever since. It's perfect for quickly uploading files, photos and music for my friends and relatives including the few PC users I know and my group of work colleagues all use the calendar sharing to know what we're supposed to be doing and where.
I was going to ask why anybody would need 2 Gigs of email storage (and I still can't imagine that anybody could actually need to keep that much) but as Munkle points out, Gmail can be used for (slow) storage for other stuff. It would certainly be good if Apple upped the space but it's still an invaluable tool for me.

[LaMerVipere]

Wow. That is one ugly page. :(

[wdlove]

This new .Mac, may finally be just the reason to purchase. I like the idea of a family pack. That way my wife and I could share.

[MagnaPalam]

From what I've heard/read, .Mac is no longer carrying virus software. For some reason neither McAfee or Norton want to mess with OSX anymore.

[visor]

no... there is a calendar on the side - but all it shows is the days of the month...
Might it need Tiger to enable editing a calendar? Or do they really think i don't have anything to add to my calendar when i'm not at home? :mad:

[billyboy]

Great, now lower the damn price or up the storage to at least a gig.

For extra bucks you can have more of everything, storage and accounts - if the naysayers can be bothered to check out what is on offer with .Mac they might find out it is a pretty comprehensive and easy to use internet service thst is great for non geeks. Sometimes it is worth paying for service. YMMV.

[makey]

Great, now lower the damn price or up the storage to at least a gig.

Yeah, really the amount of storage given is a joke. Look at Gmail they have more than 2 gigs they are giving away for free.

[daveL]

Yeah, really the amount of storage given is a joke. Look at Gmail they have more than 2 gigs they are giving away for free.
I see this statement so often about Gmail, but Gmail doesn't offer iDisk storage or Web content. What % of Gmail users even use 100 MB? It's a marketing ploy on the part of Google, nothing more. It's easy to offer 2 GB of email storage when you know no one will even come close to using it. Even if there are some people that can accumulate that much email, they are very, very rare. Most email has to traverse an unknown number of email servers, many of which have modest (5 - 10 MB) message size limits, so it's difficult, and slow, to send large attachments to fill such a huge mailbox.

Anyway, .Mac and Gmail are Apples and Grapefruits, so get over it.

Having said that, I wouldn't mind seeing Apple double the storage .Mac currently offers, but I think they would have done it yesterday, if they were going to do it any time soon.

[DrNeroCF]

I'll agree with the gig thing being nothing more than marketing bull. Why would anyone want to go through the hassle of emailing themselves pictures when sites like imageshack.us and photobucket let you share the photos and flash files for free? Sounds more like a 'my penis is bigger than yours' argument than anything useful...

[memphismac]

I'm using the 60-day trial of .mac, and while it's nice to have the iLife integration, there is very little flexibility when it comes to how your pages work.

I know enough HTML to do some basic things, so I like to upload my own pages, or at the very least modify the ones created by iLife apps. But .mac doesn't like you messing around too much with those.

With a brand new baby and family/friends scattered all over, I'm thinking about grabbing my own domain name and hosting it with somebody that has a lot more storage space. I won't have iLife integration, but I'll have a whole lot more freedom, and for a lot less.

Spymac has been suggested - any other alternatives to .mac out there?

[Kerry Sanders]

Yeah, really the amount of storage given is a joke. Look at Gmail they have more than 2 gigs they are giving away for free.

Yes, but Google is for email only. .Mac gives you so much more. I think the $69 is worth it for the .Mac account. I ordered it with my Power Mac that I ordered yesterday. 250 meg is a lot of space for mail, web pages, and minimal backups. iDrive is not something that someone would use for a large backup.

[Rod Rod]

The backup app called Backup that comes with .Mac is great because it allows you to back up huge files to a number of DVDs (to back up a 30GB file, for instance).

I'd like to know whether there are any other OS X programs that can span large files to multiple DVDs.

[lefty111]

At $8 per month, .Mac has been very useful for me. I suppose each to his or her own. Having my address book, calendar, bookmarks, and iDisk available to me at work (while I'm on a PC, yuck!) has been invaluable. Because information and files are accessible via .Mac, I find that I don't need to carry a flash drive or a PDA. Also, Homepage is great when I want to get something on the web quickly, and I only use a WYSIWYG web page program when I want to do something other than work with Homepage templates. The .Mac SMTP server offers options to get around the port blocking of my local ISP for sending mail. .Mac also hosts my weblog, and gave me free software (iBlog) to manage the weblog and back it up offline. Having a public folder for sharing files is great. Also, my .Mac webpage and its content have not appeared in Google or other search engines that I have checked (recently). Not a guarantee of privacy by any means, but I like the fact that I am a short detour off from the information superhighway.

[wdlove]

From what I've heard/read, .Mac is no longer carrying virus software. For some reason neither McAfee or Norton want to mess with OSX anymore.

I'm still using the Norton download service. They send me a notice weekly about an update via Version Tracker.

[ensee]

Ok, so I'm not a fan of resuscitating topics that are long dead but I couldn't find any other topic on this.

Simply, where the hell are my .Mac exclusive widgets? When I bought Tiger I, along with quite a few others, though 'Hey, why not get .Mac too'. It looked like a good deal with these free widgets and a virus scanner too but where are they? Have McAfee even posted a tiger patch for Virex.

The .Mac relaunch seems like a bit of a waste: a slightly nicer front page but its a been a bit of a let down...