take it easy on the newbie! I remember that it took me six months to realize one could search the fourms and how to do it properly. (my pet peeve- it needs to be more obvious...like the search on the home page, but for forums. currently it is difficult to find and know it is there.)
.Mac, is it worth it?
Another .Mac thread
daveg5 said:
just try it for free and learn how to use it correctly and see
🙂
This might work if this was not a new Mac user, but if they are buying a their first Mac (as they stated in their post) then they can't try for free AND still get the .Mac rebate thing at $69 or whatever it is now.
I ran into the same issue. I wanted to try it, but didn't have OSX so couldn't get a real fee for how I would use it, etc. so I had to just pay the $69 to try it. Now I love it for most everything it has to offer. Sure, if I put in more time I could do some of the stuff for much cheaper, but Apple has worked their magic and made backing up easy and syncing bookmarks, mail, etc. easy as well.
I would go over the Apple.com page and become familiar with what .Mac can do, decide if these things are things you would use and the go for it or not. I would say the only thing I think doesn't work well based on what Apple claims is Backup. the CD/DVD part works flawlessly for me. The online backup is slow, but I think that is because I have a DSL line that has incredibly slow upload speeds...slower than most DSL upload speeds. It seems to work fine, just slow the first time you back up. The weekly backups work well and quite fast.
I also take advantage of the referral program. I have knocked the cost of next years .Mac price from $99 to 39 due to three new .Mac users that put me as a referral when they signed up. They give you 20% off for each referral...5 referrals makes it free for a year. (By the way, if anyone wants to support a very poor grad student [who has two kids and is going to be just as poor after graduation because I will be working in public education] just put me down as a referral and I get another 20% discount. My email is
flyfish29@mac.com which you simply enter it in the referral box when signing up for .Mac.)
😀
Good luck deciding.