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Is .Mac a Good Buy?
- Thread starter LaMerVipere
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A lot of what .mac offers you, you could setup with a simple Pentium PC and a Copy of FreeBSD/Linux, but heres where its got me:
I have a bluetooth mobile phone, it syncs with my mac every night, if I take my phone out and the battery is dead, simple I logon to the nearest pc and pull up my address book (which is sync'd to my mobile phone) so i have my sim card online! its fantastic!!
Mail is a little shabby for such an expensive item, but they should have a online calendar with mail and addressbook... that links to your ical
If im out and want to upload a file to my iDisk so i can pick it up at home, i can do.
Heres what apple REALLY need to improve to keep users paying:
* Up the mail storage to at least 500mb or 1gb,
* Give users 10 free mail accounts for the family, this can be shared across the 500mb or 1gb.
* Make iDisk work with windows, idea here is portability, if im at work i can upload to my idisk. hey saves money on those horrible little usb pen things
* Please upgrade your servers, they are painfully slow compared to other services when it comes to homepages.
my oppinion anyway, personally never used the free stuff in the idisk because it always hangs the finder.
I have a bluetooth mobile phone, it syncs with my mac every night, if I take my phone out and the battery is dead, simple I logon to the nearest pc and pull up my address book (which is sync'd to my mobile phone) so i have my sim card online! its fantastic!!
Mail is a little shabby for such an expensive item, but they should have a online calendar with mail and addressbook... that links to your ical
If im out and want to upload a file to my iDisk so i can pick it up at home, i can do.
Heres what apple REALLY need to improve to keep users paying:
* Up the mail storage to at least 500mb or 1gb,
* Give users 10 free mail accounts for the family, this can be shared across the 500mb or 1gb.
* Make iDisk work with windows, idea here is portability, if im at work i can upload to my idisk. hey saves money on those horrible little usb pen things
* Please upgrade your servers, they are painfully slow compared to other services when it comes to homepages.
my oppinion anyway, personally never used the free stuff in the idisk because it always hangs the finder.
Actually, iDisk is supposed to work with Windows- at least with XP.
From Apple's site:
The cross-platform advantage
In addition to the Mac platform, you can also open your iDisk using Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Windows 98. As a result you can use the Documents folder in your iDisk, for instance, for files you need to touch at both work and home or when you don't have access to a Mac. For added convenience there's even a downloadable iDisk Utility for Windows XP that makes opening your iDisk on a Windows XP machine especially quick and easy.
However, I had trouble with that program in XP and ended up giving up.
Squire
<edit> By the way, I totally agree with your suggestions, especially the additional email addresses.
From Apple's site:
The cross-platform advantage
In addition to the Mac platform, you can also open your iDisk using Microsoft Windows XP, Windows 2000 or Windows 98. As a result you can use the Documents folder in your iDisk, for instance, for files you need to touch at both work and home or when you don't have access to a Mac. For added convenience there's even a downloadable iDisk Utility for Windows XP that makes opening your iDisk on a Windows XP machine especially quick and easy.
However, I had trouble with that program in XP and ended up giving up.
Squire
<edit> By the way, I totally agree with your suggestions, especially the additional email addresses.
Squire said:Yeah, I guess I should have read my own post more carefully.Just because iDisk Utility is available for XP, I thought that meant iDisk was only compatible with that version of Windows.
Squire
They emphasize XP on the site. I don't even thing that they mention win98 or 2000 until you get inside, even then it is small and not emphasized... easy to overlook. Odd thing is that you don't need any additional software for win98 or 2000, wonder what changed in XP.
Maybe what they should do is offer the current for around $60 to $75 and then make a bigger bundle of things including more space, more email addresses, more iDisk space, etc. for $100+. They should stop nickel and diming us for a few more MB of space and email addresses. I do pay an extra $10 or so for my wife's email address because we liked the reliability so far with .Mac email as well as the address book and web access online. Just was simpler for us to do it that way than deal with multiple email address suffixes, systems, etc.
I too would like to see iCal on a clickable link in my mail system online...I guess I could put the bookmarks in my bookmarks online, but would be nice to just click the iCal link and get my own icalendars to view and edit, then sync with my home ones. Editing them from the web would be big...of course would be password protected.
I too would like to see iCal on a clickable link in my mail system online...I guess I could put the bookmarks in my bookmarks online, but would be nice to just click the iCal link and get my own icalendars to view and edit, then sync with my home ones. Editing them from the web would be big...of course would be password protected.
Apple seems to have chucked .mac a baseball cap and some new sneakers and just told it to stand there and look as cool as possible while everyone works on the iPod celeb. I think Apple are just letting it stand as it is for a while before they jam it full of new features, make it an integral part of the OS (so you don't open it through Safari but the Finder and what not) and then Steve will work his reality distoriton field and before you know it, 90% of everyone on MacRumors will be subscirbed.
well I don't need it becuase:
I know my brothers password to .mac so I get all of the free stuff
I have my own mail server with several gigs of free space
I host my website through my school's T3 with as much space as their RAID array can hold ~3500 gigs
I have an iPod, server, laptop, website, DVD's etc for backup
I don't use iCal.....
the list goes on and on
I know my brothers password to .mac so I get all of the free stuff
I have my own mail server with several gigs of free space
I host my website through my school's T3 with as much space as their RAID array can hold ~3500 gigs
I have an iPod, server, laptop, website, DVD's etc for backup
I don't use iCal.....
the list goes on and on
Machead III said:
I don't think Apple is trying to sell this to Macrumors typical user...maybe the non-power users, but not the others. maybe eventually they will have a service for consumer and power users with different stuff for each. that would make sense. I would also think the more .Mac email addresses there are the more advertising it is for apple.
Javabear90, sorry to hear you don't need any of the .Mac stuff...oh wait...I guess you do, you just don't want to pay for it. (see post...says he gets all the free stuff) Note to Javabear90....this stuff is only free to .mac subscribers. It is people like you that make companies not want to sign marketing deals with .Mac and other companies. they fear their marketing deal with be abused. the purpose of the .Mac free stuff is advertising...advertising a game company, advertising a photo printing web site, advertising Norton, etc. I am sure some of the companies would not mind you using the stuff as they get more exposure, but there are probably just as many that don't want people taking it that are not paying for the .mac service.
Just go with doteasy.
Less than $100/year, 1gb online storage, domain name, 100 e-mail addresses, has photo publishing software (coppermine i think?), moveable type support, etc.
It's .Mac minus the crap, plus a .com name. I've used them for a short period of time and have known long-term users who love them. Only problem - no IMAP support for e-mail, which is only a problem if you use more than one computer
Less than $100/year, 1gb online storage, domain name, 100 e-mail addresses, has photo publishing software (coppermine i think?), moveable type support, etc.
It's .Mac minus the crap, plus a .com name. I've used them for a short period of time and have known long-term users who love them. Only problem - no IMAP support for e-mail, which is only a problem if you use more than one computer
trudd said:Only problem - no IMAP support for e-mail, which is only a problem if you use more than one computer
If I only knew what IMAP or POP stood for I might think of going to all that work to save a couple of bucks...ummm...on second thought....that would be a NO.
Just like everything in life, one thing can't work great for everyone. It seems like Apple is doing well with it, but hopefully they are not just sitting still on it and worrying only about iTunes, music and such. Hopefully this summer we will see major updates to .Mac in time for back to school or at the very least the holidays. Until then I will still keep working on getting .Mac for free by getting referrals which give me 20% off per referral. Right now .Mac is only gonna cost me $40 for my second year as I have three referrals that have given me $60 off the annual price.
Squire said:
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I've never had ANY trouble using iDisk on either XP or 98...in fact, that's one of the few reasons I'm hanging on to .Mac, for the use of iDisk as a crossplatform transferring device. I don't, however, use iDisk utility; I just use the "Connect to Network Folder" command or whatever it is in Windows.