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gonnabuyamac

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 26, 2006
412
0
I'm new to the Mac world, and just curious what uses or advantages there would be to getting a subscription to .mac.
 
I'm new to the Mac world, and just curious what uses or advantages there would be to getting a subscription to .mac.

Short answer: no

Long answer: nope

Seriously though .mac is a weird one. Although it does have some nice features and allows you to do much more with iLife. With a little digging around you can get everything .mac offers for free. I trialed .mac a few years ago and it lasted about 3 days until I just stopped using it. I thought I would give it another go just recently now I have 2 macs so I can make use of syncing etc but I found I never really needed to sync stuff. I already have freewebspace from my ISP along with free webmail for when I am away from my own mac. For me its not worth it. Others will argue differently but not very strongly.

Also it is VERY slow connecting to the servers and there is a lot of downtime (apparently). Im not one for scaring people away from Apple products but this one should be avoided in my opinion. :(
 
Well, hang on a mo', Booby, ol' fella. .Mac should arguably be a lot cheaper/free but a lot of people find it useful. It hosts my photos/movies from iWeb and lets me sync my two Macs. For me it's pretty useful. Depends what you need.

EDIT: OK. Just saw your addition. If I'm not mistaken, if you put up your web pages elsewhere don't you have to save to a folder and FTP them up like regular HTML pages? For me I prefer the convenience of just clicking 'PUBLISH' for photos/movies pages. Also, you only get the funky slideshow with reflection with .mac. ;)
 
Well, hang on a mo', Booby, ol' fella. .Mac should arguably be a lot cheaper/ free but a lot of people find it useful. It hosts my photos/movies from iWeb and lets me sync my two Macs. For me it's pretty useful. Depends what you need.

I did edit my OP quite a bit so you may have missed this while you replied:

"For me its not worth it. Others will argue differently but not very strongly."

:p
 
EDIT: OK. Just saw your addition. If I'm not mistaken, if you put up your web pages elsewhere don't you have to save to a folder and FTP them up like regular HTML pages? For me I prefer the convenience of just clicking 'PUBLISH' for photos/movies pages. Also, you only get the funky slideshow with reflection with .mac. ;)

I have an automator app setup to upload the folder when I double click the app. So I can upload in just 3 clicks. The third click gets a bit tiring though :D

The crappy (non .mac) slideshow can be replaced with a few files found on the web. Theres some really good ones too. I would think someone will have recreated the Apple slideshow by now.
 
I need to sync 5 Macs. And my parents are on my .Mac family plan. To me, it's worth it. Without the syncing capability, though, it wouldn't be.
 
I need to sync 5 Macs. And my parents are on my .Mac family plan. To me, it's worth it. Without the syncing capability, though, it wouldn't be.

For 5 macs though the price difference is not relative to the increase in number of macs so it obviously works out cheaper and having .mac 'work harder' means you are getting even more value than a single license.
 
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