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What is your opinion of .Mac?

DerChef

DerChef

macrumors 6502
Original poster
I switched to Mac recently and I have been more than pleased with everything including my painless move to Tiger.

All except for one thing.

.Mac 😡

I bought the subscription to this mainly because of the bundfled software Virex and Backup.

Well Virex sent my new Powerbook to hell and back when I was running Panther !! and I believe it does not work at all with Tiger and had now been dropped. This is surely false advertising 😕

Also only 256 Mb of email storage for a "service" that costs so much and they then want you to buy more ohhhhhhhh please 🙄 when you can get 1 Gb free with Yahoo.

The final straw was the iSync and its bugs when I switched to tiger. Tried all the resetting ideas in the support forums and nothing has worked on a permanent basis.

There is no hope that I will renew my subscription I really feel a fool for forking out so much money on this 🙁
 
i could never see the value of .mac. virex? um for what.....and backup? OVER THE INTERNET? yeah right....isync could be cool. yeah i wouldnt renew either.
 
Whilst I'd love a mac.com email addy i just cant justify it.
Gmail is fine for what I need and even hotmail too I suppose though it pisses me off that I cant import into Mail anymore!

As a service i just see enough justifaction for £70 a year and that's put me off more than anything.

Drop the price Apple!!!
 
I recently renewed my .Mac subscription.

I think you will find that Virex 7.5 isn't compatible with Tiger...
but 7.2 is. I grabbed it the other week and put it back on my PB.

Did read over at Version Tracker that 7.6 is out - but no sign of it anywhere yet - or if it will come with .Mac.

I renewed my .Mac account for a number of reasons:
convenience of the all in one arrangement...
handy (and cool email address)
Software (Virex / backup / plus hopefully more member only deals)
online storage (iDisk / Backup)
iSync
web based email / homepage

I am disappointed that iCal publishing hasn't been improved much. I would like to display all four of my calendars on the one page - like I do in iCal!
I would like to be able to easily publish my calendars securely within .Mac so I can see them but the rest of the world can't.

The speed of iDisk / and actually most things in .Mac always seems slow.

The price is still I think too expensive... but it is Apple afterall.

Also I'm disappointed at the very few member specials / software / options / widgets / services.

Anyway there are my initial ramblings... I'm hanging in there in the hope it will continue to improve... oh yeah and due to the recent promo / price drop!
 
I had it for one year, but didn't renew.

Virex is a joke. First of all, you have to manually scan, it doesn't scan new disks, downloaded files etc. Second, there are no viruses for OS X.

The things I miss are:
Easily made photoalbums directly from iPhoto.

That's about it, I guess..

Had I had two Macs, one at home and one at work, then I'd get .Mac again. Right now I don't see the value of it..
 
I like the concept of .Mac, but it's proven a lot less useful to me than I thought it would. iDisk is abysmally slow and notoriously flakey (not even counting the most recent bug that hangs your Mac and requires you to reboot it). Oh yeah, there's no way to separately password-protect individual folders either, which limits its usefulness for any sort of business purpose. Email generally works OK but I've had some problems recently where I cannot send mail from my .Mac account from my own home. Tiger seems to have major problems with sync: still can't sync on two fresh Tiger installs (one G4 PowerBook, one dual G5 PowerMac). And there's a bug that affects many people with corrupted iCal files that also prevents all sync services from working. Finally, the Backup application rather sucks. There aren't enough options for things like overwrite policies or saving overwritten files to a folder, some syncs fail because of what appears to be privileges (including my own ~/Library folder), although it doesn't tell you why, and OS X Tiger install can't even use my backup image as a settings transfer source. Overall, .Mac is a good idea that has not completely lived up to its promise. Whether it's worth $100 a year to you is for you to decide. For me, it's right on the edge.
 
I've several times been on the verge of getting a subscription, but I've never gone through with it.

The integration with OS X seems kind of nifty, and iDisk whould be useful, but it's just to expensive with too little diskspace. Most of the the other stuff isn't interesting to me anyway.

Sticking to Fastmail for e-mail and filestorage for the moment (no iDisk/WebDAV, but 50mb attchment size helps)...
 
HiRez said:
Whether it's worth $100 a year to you is for you to decide. For me, it's right on the edge.
Click to expand...

Thats another thing OUR price does not equate to $100 on flipping my little currency widget 😀 🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁
 
.Mac is the dumbest subscription thing I have ever heard. I never tried it, hell I dont even have a Mac...


But here is my explanation. If you goto godaddy.com you can spend your 100 dollars a year for your OWN SERVER! As many email accounts as you want, much more space, and your own domain so you dont have to try to make some account like john3282787617.

.Mac's service is definately not worth it. Especially with these days how Gmail is giving out memory so willingly. Most of the time when I need to back up something I just save it to my gmail account. Never failed me yet!
 
.mac is appalling value. It's quite a nice service, and maybe the $99 fee was worth it a couple of years ago. But now, that price for what you get is daylight robbery.

I encourage anyone who has it not to re-subscribe to .mac - if people just keep subscribing to it, then Apple will have no reason to improve the service. Only if people start dropping off will they have any impetus to add more features.
 
I like my .Mac account only 27 cents a day, most of us probably spend that much a day on tips to the dunkin donuts employees.

I like having a stable email, with the ability to have the aliases, another place to backup my address book and bookmarks, discounts on software.

It is totally worth it for me, since 99 dollars a year is ungodly cheap.

Especially when i go out and spend 70-100 dollars on sushi a month.
 
It is slow at times, and most of the features are available elsewhere for a better value, but I still like having it 🙄

I do back up my checking account info there just in case...
And I use the homepage feature, which is easy to publish some of my wife's pictures and that makes her happy.

Look at them here

Woof, Woof - Dawg
 
I have it and i really think it is necessary. I think its too expensive, but you should have it. Great for backing up contacts and bookmarks and transfering them to new computers. But it should really cost $60.
 
I have a .mac subscription too.

The most useful thing I find is the iSync facility. Greate for upgrading computers and keeping a copy on the .mac servers. I have three Macs in total so that is where iSync comes in handy. I don't use the email address as I have others, but it's always useful to get the Apple Marketing stuff through.

I have only recently played with the iPhoto stuff so can't really comment on that but it IS an easy way of getting your photos up on a website for others to view without any web programming knowledge.

I am not sure if I will renew my subscription next year, but I will be lost without the iSync facility. Unless, of course, this can be acheived with another piece of 3rd party software...
 
I recently bought a new powerbook so I thought I'd give it a try with their $70 subscription with a new Mac. So far, I've had pretty mixed feelings. I love having an iDisk that seamlessly updates work files between my g5 and my 12" powerbook. It's great to be working on something @ school, upload it to my iDisk there, and have it sync with my other computer when I get home.

.Mac syncing is so spotty right now it's hard to really judge it. In theory, it's almost worth the $100 a year alone. Having your bookmarks, calendars, address book, keychains and mail settings synchronized between computers is very nice and makes it a lot easier to keep things up to date. Now that they've opened the API, some people are working on 3rd party .Mac syncing services (Transmit syncs FTP favorites, for instance).

I'm really enjoying the iPhoto upload as well - I put up about a dozen photo albums for friends and family to see in under 15 minutes. I do a lot of web design, and sure - I could have put that all together myself and made it look a lot better to boot... but it's not really about that, it's just so easy and fast to do, and I love it.

I still have quite some time before I have to decide if I want to keep .Mac after the year is up. Maybe they'll hammer out any Tiger/.Mac related bugs they have and then I can make up my mind. But for now, I think it's been worth the $70. I just hope they double the space for the iDisk soon.
 
quite frankly I enjoy the service.

Apple has always been about "It just works". You can save all the data by many other means, but the seamless integration is worth all the shortcomings from a technical standpoint. 250MB is plenty to save the preferences of all you applications. Focus on capabilities, not arbitrary capacities that are unnecessary (for the purposes of the service. .Mac isn't (or shouldn't be) about web space, but rather the automatic retention of application preferences and data. The increased use of .Mac by third party utilities means that it fulfills that need quite well.

I do hope Apple extends and expands the service, as it truly has no parallel in the Windows world. This level of OS<->Service integration can never happen in that overly heterogeneous environment. It is a feature, thus, that Apple should invest in to provide for unique benefits in OS X that they can hype, vis-a-vis Windows.
 
wako said:
.Mac is the dumbest subscription thing I have ever heard. I never tried it, hell I dont even have a Mac...


But here is my explanation. If you goto godaddy.com you can spend your 100 dollars a year for your OWN SERVER! As many email accounts as you want, much more space, and your own domain so you dont have to try to make some account like john3282787617.

.Mac's service is definately not worth it. Especially with these days how Gmail is giving out memory so willingly. Most of the time when I need to back up something I just save it to my gmail account. Never failed me yet!
Click to expand...

I LOVE my .mac account. Do I wish it were cheaper - that's sort of a dumb question. Yes - if they offered it for $20 instead of $99, that'd be great. But I get the most use out of the homepage feature - easy to use - tons of family pictures up on pages that look great with VERY little effort. I don't use the mail or other features. Could I spend money on a golive and get a cheaper webhost? Of course, but the .mac is better for me - great family photo pages with no hassle while acting as an off-site backup for those valuable photos.
 
Can we please make a sticky of this or any previous versions? This topic comes up so often I could set my watch to it 🙄
 
5300cs said:
Can we please make a sticky of this or any previous versions? This topic comes up so often I could set my watch to it 🙄
Click to expand...

Sorry for being such a "typical Newbie" and starting this thread 😡 . .Mac is such a wide topic that it does not neatly fit into a one size fits all mammoth post 🙄

There are the cost issues 😡, email and photom services 😱 ,bugs and possible fixes and , 😡 Bundled software 😡 😡 😡 , tutorials 😱
 
^^Even so, there really aren't too many things to discuss, but whatever.

Anyway, you should smile more.


.Mac is useful for rich folk. If I had the money, then sure, I'd take an account. Why not. I have all my contacts, iCal events and tasks, and everything backed up on my iPod and mobile phone.

It's also plays music portably, something that .Mac doesn't do. 😉

To me, the .Mac service is worth $20, but even at that price, I wouldn't put up the effort to enroll with the service, set up an email account, etc.
 
I like .Mac. I upgraded my account to 1 GB of storage, using as much of that as Apple allows for iDisk (seriously, I have no need for 15 MB of email space - I would gladly trade 10 MB of email space (taking my space down to 5 MB, which is still WAY more than I ever use the vast majority of the time) for 10 MB of additional iDisk space (bringing my space up to 1019 MB) any day Apple lets me do this.

My only complaint about .Mac is that iDisk is too slow to transfer - the local iDisk option helps, but doesn't fix the root cause of the issue.

I use the synching features all the time - they're the other reason .Mac is worth the price to me (even though I only have one Mac).
 
 
eva01 said:
I like my .Mac account only 27 cents a day, most of us probably spend that much a day on tips to the dunkin donuts employees.

I like having a stable email, with the ability to have the aliases, another place to backup my address book and bookmarks, discounts on software.

It is totally worth it for me, since 99 dollars a year is ungodly cheap.

Especially when i go out and spend 70-100 dollars on sushi a month.
Click to expand...

The fact is, if you could find sushi for free you would be complaining about spending the amount you do.

Gmail, Yahoo etc give you a over a gig of storage (gmail is currently at 2.3gb going up every second). You can just email stuff to yourself to back up like iDisk! And it's faster.

IMHO I doubt .Mac will last much longer, like a previous poster said, there just aren't enough incentives.
 
i think your point was well made, but i never gave my 2 cents in any of them, but i think .mac is worthless, and those a**holes at the mac store push it to no end (i helped a friend get a mac i told him, what ever you do DONT get it). but anyway here are my reasons why...

- i have my own web space ($35/yr) 500mb space, 10gb transfer, unlimited everything else (includes email, sql databases, php etc...).
- gmail is free
- those bundled apps are a joke
- the only time i connected to a public iDisk, it was to slow to even mater since the finder is a joke in that aspect (but you might be able to use Transmit with an iDisk, but i don't know)
- the ability to back up my contacts/book marks is not that big of a deal is it?
- those iPhoto pages suck (you can make a better one in 10 minutes in dreamweaver)
- sure with the mac mentality, @mac.com is a nice email to have, but who cares, get your own domain and email, it looks even better.

so for a grand total of less than $50 a year, i can get more and i don't look like a tool to the man (who rips you off ever so blatantly because all .Mac offers you isn't even worth $60)

lastly, the guy in the apple store said you get unlimited bandwidth with .Mac, this is a lie. i don't know how many instances i have heard of people receiving emails from apple to source the files from somewhere else or to remove them all together.

sorry for the rant... its just when a rather large, new age hipster with holes ripped in his jeans with flamboyant patches sewn from the inside and cuffs cut off a long sleeve shirt around his wrists, it bothers me a bit especially when he ever so distastefully tells me he doesn't work off of commissions, which i find hard to believe.
 
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