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Apple Discontinuing Legacy .Mac Homepage Viewing

Truer words were never spoken, tod. Whereas I'll stick with Apple for the foreseeable future, there seems to be a rush to kick "computing" to the curb, in favor of mobile everything. I understand it, but I don't like it, because the aim has less to do with simplicity for the user than it does for locking the user in a system.

The fun seems to be going out of the whole experience, regardless of which OS one prefers. I hope I'm wrong about this, and something new will help rejuvenate the Internet and computing.
 
Apple only has a billion dollars in the bank. They obviously have to cut costs somewhere for all the R & D on new iPhone/iPad designs. :rolleyes: :eek: :eek:
 
I wonder though the actual number of people who used the website hosting feature as a percentage of the over all .mac customer base. I also question really the viability of such a feature these days given that so many of these features are free of charge in many cases - are there really enough people out there willing to pay for something they can get for free elsewhere? I'm assuming the cancelling of web hosting just simply balance up the number of people using the service and what was required to maintain the service.
 
Chupa Chupa said:
But you didn't have to buy a new Mac to get iTools, you only had to use OS 9, so hard to claim it was a feature of a new Mac or that people paid for it.
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That's true, but it was Apple that was making the claim. I distinctly remember buying an iBook and it said on the box Comes with iTools, Comes with iLife, etc. It was already a free product, true, but Apple still made the claim. I know it's a grey area when you say a product comes with a service, because a service is different than say a button, and Apple never said it comes with iTools forever, but iTools was part of the experience people were buying their Mac for. I honestly don't care at this point obviously. But I do think iTools/dotMac/MobileMe, though very useful, hasn't been an area of business Apple has handled the best throughout the years, maybe because it's an area where they have the least experience.
 
tod said:
I was impressed with Apple beginning in the late 90s, when Jobs took the company down a new path and created some innovative products. Everything since the iPhone has taken a much darker path. If his vision succeeds, there will be no wild west in computers, where you can buy your hardware and do what you please with it. You'll do it Jobs' way or not at all. Even when I agree with some of his design principles, I do not agree with having them forced on me. And while nobody forces me to buy Apple mobile products, just think about this: they will not allow me to install whatever software or OS I choose. Yes, you can hack it, but it's not exactly easy for most users, and Apple is always defeating those loopholes. They're too busy trying to perfect their "experience" to consider that maybe a few of us just don't care for it, and want an "advanced mode" switch to let us access the hardware. It's too lucrative for them, because most users are too stupid to notice that their freedoms are being taken away... look, multi-touch! Apps! Other companies are going to follow Apple's lead, and I don't think it will be confined to mobile devices. We face a future where all hardware is locked down and restricted, where there is no freedom in computing like we're used to. Where all the makers of computer hardware will sell it to you only with restrictions -- you use it with our software, our way, or not at all. This is why after years on the Mac, I switched to Linux. I am fed up with the direction that mainstream computing is taking.
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It's not just Apple, of course. I see more and more push to either regulate or control the Internet, computers themselves, force the requirement of backdoor invasive "monitoring" so that the FBI/CIA/Interpol can read/hear EVERYTHING you say or do in the name of hunting terrorists or whatever BS they want to make up to invade your right to privacy. I can see a future where if you speak out against something the government (largely run by or for corporations) results in your being rounded up and locked up as a potential terrorist as they find out by reading your e-mails, watching your message board replies and listening to your internet based phone calls. It's all in the name of keeping the rich rich and the poor under the rich's thumb. History is full of this type of behavior. The Middle Ages are a good example of what happens when the top 2% control most of the world's wealth. Sadly, this is the road civilization takes over and over again and it's all due to one thing. GREED.

I remember watching the Jetsons cartoon and thinking how great the future will be with computers and robots doing most of the work while mankind can kick back and relax. There would be enough food, shelter and time for everyone to enjoy themselves. Well, how stupid could I be to belive in some Utopian dream? The reality is that technology is used to make the ultra-rich even richer and force even more productivity out of an already over-worked under-paid work force. Since more jobs are taken over by rich corporate automation there are less jobs in general which leads to people fighting over the few jobs that are left, which means those jobs will pay LESS and require more productivity and therefore even more work. I think you can start to see the cycle of how greed + technology = more misery not less for mankind. People like to hold up posters and what not on TV crying that "socialism" is EVIL and the rich powers that be love it. That means people are rallying against any kind of Utopian future where people can work less and relax more because machines work for mankind instead of just the ultra-rich and it means these same people are pushing for even more competition, work and misery for even less money and calling it things like the American Dream when in reality it's more like the American Nightmare.

Sorry folks, we live in a "global economy" and that means you have to work for less to compete against slave labor due to free trade policies that don't account for completely different infrastructures, costs of living and labor. Tariffs are the only way to equalize these differences and keep jobs in modern countries, but that would mean less money for certain companies and boards of directors and CEOs so forget about it. Go take out another loan to learn another trade until those jobs too go to somewhere like India. You'll be in debt forever and the excuse of a global economy will be thrown back in your face again and again. Get used to it. We're all screwed. People protest government spending instead of against the people that lead us into this place in the first place.
 
deeply disappointed

I wrote this letter to Apple about this terrible decision:

Dear folks at Apple,

I am deeply distressed by this message.

I have been a loyal Apple customer for close to twenty years and I feel like I've been kicked in the gut by you.

Worse, it feels like my house burned down and I lost all my photo albums.

I imagine that you must be aware, if you pause to reflect, that this is the one thing people are usually most concerned about after their loved ones – whether the photo albums were saved or lost when someone loses their home.

Making and collecting photos has been a central part of my identity since I was a child half a century ago. I may be unusual in the depth of that obsession, but I know I am far from unusual in placing a high value on preservation of the photos I've taken and saved in my life.

When I enthusiastically switched from film to digital seven years ago it was because I was placing my faith in Apple's HomePage web albums as a superior and secure replacement to the shelves full of print albums I'd lovingly added to and tended for years before then.

Since 2003 I have maintained a membership to not just one, but two .Mac accounts – one for my personal albums and one for my elementary classroom albums.

The former comprises 187 albums averaging probably 30-40 photos each and the latter 150 averaging a similar number each. I would estimate, conservatively, that each of those albums took at least a couple of hours to select the photos, order them, write captions for them, publish, proofread, and correct. More likely it may have been double that or more.

I am devastated to think that the company I believed all this time was the opposite of Microsoft (which you creatively parodied in that famous 1984 commercial) instead has become it's equivalent – not only in this level of incompetence, but worse, in it's arrogance – the kind of arrogance that Bill Gates (whom I actually went to school with at Laurelhurst Elementary School in Seattle, Washington in the 1960's until he transferred to an expensive private school after the fifth grade) today exhibits in his Billionaire Boys Club dictation of flawed educational policy that threatens the public education bedrock of our democracy with the corporate-driven distortions of the insidiously-named "No Child Left Behind Act".

But aside from the aggravation of these latter realities, I am simply appalled, as a loyal customer of your once-revered company for nearly two decades now, that you would treat said loyal customers in such a flagrantly disrespectful manner.

The suggestions you offer for recovering Homepage albums before they disappear entirely in just one month are hopelessly inadequate.

It is not just the photos that need to be recovered. It is the editing, ordering, and caption-composing that went into all of them as well. As I have pointed out above, that is literally hundreds of hours of effort on the part of this one loyal customer alone. Multiply that by how many I don't know, but the cherished product of these hours that you are sending up in smoke with this move is truly criminal. Think of every newspaper article you've ever read about people losing their homes to disaster. After the people, isn't it always the photo albums that people mention next as what they are either grateful or crushed for having saved or lost?!

Heretofore I thought this company had a conscience (that's certainly what all of your advertising purports to portray). But does that square with this picture? If Apple truly does have a conscience, it will recognize that you owe it to your patrons to devise some software that will translate these untold thousands (probably millions) of about-to-be-disappeared Homepage albums into at least a more readily recoverable format, if not actually directly into the successor format of iWeb albums.

Please reconsider this dastardly "business" decision before it causes untold distress and ill will towards your previously highly-regarded company.

Sincerely,

Steve Catton
20-year Apple computer user
 
OK, relax

The announcement only pertains to web pages created with .Mac's old HOMEPAGE system. Sites created with iWeb will still be available and it appears sites you created with other HTML editors and uploaded to the Sites folder will still be there (they referred to the old FAQ saying those sites would be fine).

While I am disappointed that my old galleries and pages will be gone, Frankly I haven't used them in over 3 years. As long as my self-published web pages (web hosting) remains, I am fine with that.
 
Why are people crying and whining? I just moved all my contents from the Sites folder to the Web/Sites folder. All's good now and my web address is shorter to boot.
 
johnny_b said:
Didn't think this forum had so many socialists. You must be european :p
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Nope, I'm just an American fed up with corporate interests controlling this country when it's supposed to be the other way around. Government is supposed to serve the interests of ALL the people, not be corrupted and co-opted to serve just the top 2-5%. This country used to be more regulated (that hardly made it socialism) and we used to have more and better jobs, cheaper health care and standard of living high enough where one parent could stay home and raise the kids properly, not letting them run wild to grow up to be hoodlums because their parents had to work all the time just to make ends barely meet. What good is capitalism if you destroy the country that provided the opportunity to compete in the first place? These corporations enjoy the protection of the US military and the have the freedoms to exist in the first place due to the ethical laws enacted by its founders. But there is nothing patriotic about moving jobs to Communist China. That is helping the enemy of the freedoms we enjoy to grow and eventually destroy us. Patriotism is dead. Money is everything. The religious right claim to have conservative values yet they vote for money every time. You cannot serve money and God both. The only difference between China and the U.S. today is we are at the short end of the stick. Instead of a Communist government, we have a corporate interest controlled government. I see little difference between the two. The jobs go to China due to their lower standard of living. But if these corporate interests had controlled the U.S. all along we would have no wages either. We would have no safety regulations. We would be little more than turn of the century slaves working 16 hour days for less than what it cost to live (a dire reality in the early 20th century for people like miners who were paid in company money only good at company stores, to keep people working like slaves in conditions unfit for a dog). And THAT is the direction the U.S. keeps heading again every time it votes for less regulations, less worker protections, less wages, etc. all to "compete" against slave labor in another country like China. Since when have the American people wanted to be like China? I'd prefer the French system of having 3 days off a week, but now even they are having to cave to pressure to make money for other people constantly. Forget the Jetsons and the easy comfortable live everyone seems to enjoy there. We're heading to back to the Stone Ages. Work more for less and don't get sick or you'll be fired.
 
Basically your .mac homepage doesn't look as slick as the Apple of today wants, so they're kicking it to the curb. If they were able to trash your 5+ year old mac for not running snow (insert cat name here), they would.

To calm the almighty Apple we should all get an ipad/phone/pod/doodad today and never speak of anything before 10.6.
 
ravenvii said:
Why are people crying and whining? I just moved all my contents from the Sites folder to the Web/Sites folder. All's good now and my web address is shorter to boot.
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Because Apple specifically promised that it would remain viewable. And now Apple is going back on their promise.
 
Recurring Date

I cannot believe that this, among three other notable events, are happening on my birthday, November 8th. It was cool when Conan said his show is starting November 8th, and an awesome WP7 phone is coming to AT&T 11/8, but this is a tad much. Or maybe it's all a complete coincidence and contains no importance whatsoever.
 
bizzle said:
Unless they pinky-swore on it I don't think it was a legal binding promise.
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I don’t even think that is necessary. I am willing to bet that .Mac and Mobile Me’s TOS included terms that basically said that they can discontinue, change, or take down any portion of their service at any time without any recompense to the end user.

Heck, I bet that most companies that provide services like this have terms that aren’t that far off from that.
 
What? The maybe 3-dozen people that actually used this service think that this is how Apple is going to kill the computer? Give me a break.

If you really thought .Mac was the "wild west of computing" (as someone put it earlier), then you probably shouldn't be mucking around on the interwebs. Enjoy your Linux rig.

The fact of the matter is, there are a multitude of *better* mainstream options for just about everything this service did- and a lot of them are free. Most mac users go to them first. .Mac's a tremendously small niche in the community of mac users and it doesn't make sense to keep this thing on life support much longer. The number of people paying for it gets even smaller every year- they could scuttle the service and keep the old server up but then they'd always have to answer for why there's a select group of homepages up on Apple's servers. And then what, they just keep charging these accounts? They'd have to keep a branch open just to deal with a bunch of old subscribers without taking on new ones. It's just dumb.
 
Precisely!

thejadedmonkey said:
Because Apple specifically promised that it would remain viewable. And now Apple is going back on their promise.
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Precisely! I'm glad somebody gets it!

Maybe this will make it clearer for those who don't:

(a reply to a fellow Mac-user who offered help, if I could be clearer about my dilemma)

Thanks for your offer, but unless you're familiar with Homepage, and something of a programmer, I doubt if you can help me.

Homepage was Apple's first version of creating web-based photo albums on a .Mac account and it existed from 2003 through June 2006, when they introduced iWeb as a replacement to Homepage.

They did not create then, or at any time since, a way to migrate the Homepage albums to iWeb, but for a couple of years you could still update or alter Homepage items from the Homepage application, which I did some, even though I'd switched over to making newer ones with iWeb, which is definitely superior. However, what I did not appreciate was that from 2008 they ended Homepage as as an application and froze all the previously-generated Homepage albums – leaving them intact but inalterable or migrateable. This would have been at least tolerable, if they weren't now announcing that they will eliminate them from their servers without offering any assist in translation to a newer format. This is what I regard as a dastardly business decision, for the reasons I explained in my letter.

I think at the very least they owe people who invested significant amounts of their own creative energy – as well as the $100 annual fee in maintaining them on Apple's .Mac web server (in the understanding that this was a new and superior way to preserve photographic memories at a safe remote location viewable by family and friends at a distance) a way of recovering or translating them intact. To simply break their contract with the user and disappear them, without offering any solution (i.e. software/code designed for fluid translation, or at least recovery of these previously created albums with a linkage of photos, their order and captions in such a state that they could be republished in the iWeb format they switched over to) is in my view a breach of their contract with subscribers, morally at least if not in some arcane reading of the legalese of it which their lawyers would probably resort to if someone had the time, energy and money to start a class action lawsuit. It is their failure to do this that I object so vociferously to.

If you are aware of some means of efficiently recovering the captions, along with the order of edited photographs from old homepage albums, in such a way that they could be then recomposed into iWeb albums – that would be of great help to me.

I do in fact have all of the original photos, but if the albums are disappeared from the web, I will have no way of recreating them in iWeb, other than simply starting over, which I could never do after this passage of time, even if I had the time to invest in such a project. Even a separate cut and paste of captions from each individual photo directly off of the web would be time-prohibitive, because I'm talking 337 albums averaging 30-40 photos each, in most instances each with their own caption, often of sentence length.

What I believe Apple owes it's .Mac members is sufficient corporate investment in the time to create some code which would extract this info from the old albums and at least put it into a format from which it could be used to easily re-create a replacement in iWeb format – since they are making a unilateral decision to erase a very large archive that was touted as a better, safer, more permanent way to create photo albums when they launched this service. The whole idea of computer code is that it is created by one or a few people to obviate repetitious labor by thousands of identical users.

To me this apparent cutthroat bottomline decision for profits, in willful disregard of subscribers to their service, is a clear demonstration that Apple has relinquished any formerly imagined title to being a superior company with a conscience, and it has become a bottom-feeder, purely-profit-driven, scum-of-the-earth kind of culture-destroyer akin to the military-industrial-complex and other such soulless entities.

Sincerely,
Steve Catton
 
Frakin' Cry me a RIVER!

SCOTTHORN said:
Once again Apple just decides, we are done with that. I just love the way they try to sound so nice about letting us have it for a whole year after they discontinued it. I am paying for it was not a free service they decided didn't work. Next they will be rid of the @mac.com email and force you to use @me.com. I am migrating away from apple web services I can sure use the $100 plus I spend on a .Mac....no wait I guess it is a mobileme family pack. Apple has become the Decider. Don’t even bring up the 2 times I had to pay for Quicktime pro
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Tell that to the 15 USA Million Deaf users on Sidekicks that tried to give GIN a try or whatever that half-ass Microsoft plan was and THEN re-code it to Windows Phone 7. sorry it was called KIN ... some 2 million dumb-asses that bought those. see how much 1984 apply's to them!!!!

You're STILL getting the option to move your account.
You're getting 1 less letter to manually type in your web address (ALWAYS a plus).
You're STILL getting the service you PAID for just migration instructions - because for whatever reason Apple cannot automate it and this leaves the ones on YOU.
 
Chupa Chupa said:
As with any web/Internet based service the user is always at the mercy of the provider. That is why I only use "the cloud" as backup. People that use "the cloud" as an alternative to local storage or traditional apps are asking for trouble since the plug can be pulled at any moment.
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Oh so true, this is also why I don't use steam for games either, flat out refuse to install the thing. Fed up with not being able to play the thing I paid for if I don't have internet access. I don't think alot of people think this far ahead though, they'll happily pay for and nstall anything to play it.... although buying steam games just means that publishers think it works and more are made. Just wait till the net goes down, that'll learn em'!
 
Prom1 said:
Tell that to the 15 USA Million Deaf users on Sidekicks that tried to give GIN a try or whatever that half-ass Microsoft plan was and THEN re-code it to Windows Phone 7. sorry it was called KIN ... some 2 million dumb-asses that bought those. see how much 1984 apply's to them!!!!

You're STILL getting the option to move your account.
You're getting 1 less letter to manually type in your web address (ALWAYS a plus).
You're STILL getting the service you PAID for just migration instructions - because for whatever reason Apple cannot automate it and this leaves the ones on YOU.
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Yes, indeed. When people buy Apple Kool-Aid, it's a good move because even though you were lied too, it's still Apple flavored lies! Yet when people buy Microsoft (Zune-Aid?), they are "dumb-asses". Amazing. :rolleyes:

Frankly, I've never understood the need for people on here to apologize for Apple (in this case for going back on their word). Why not let Apple apologize for themselves? The fact that they won't? I guess that's what fanboys exist for, to do the customer service standardized, "Sorry but you're just plain SOL" lines that Steve and Company can't be bothered to do. :rolleyes:
 
SCOTTHORN said:
... Next they will be rid of the @mac.com email and force you to use @me.com.
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scooterbaga said:
If that happens I'm done. Having 'mac' right in my email addy is the one solid thing that keeps me paying. (There are several other reasons, but they're more fluid.) I've been using and depending on it for far too long to bend over and accept the change...
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Looks like OS 4.2 does exactly this. I can no longer send mail from my .mac address.
 
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