Re: 45.00 fo first year is reasonable!
Originally posted by liven2
I got mine the week it came out! Get used to it folks everything online is going to be this way some day!
Unusually expensive? While I agree that we're going to see more and more services becoming subscription based, with the exception of the $49 introductory fee, .Mac is rather overpriced for what it offers (except possibly for those users whose needs mean that they squeeze every last possible bit of use out of those 100MB).
It's also the case that in the majority of services that *have* become subscription-based, they've had the sense to offer a "lite' version for free, to act as a draw to potential new customers. The problem with .Mac trial accounts is that the feature that most people have been using in iTools accounts (the mac.com e-mail address) isn't exactly something you can usefully try out for 60 days, it's more of an all-or-nothing proposition. It's like offering a subscription to an online newspaper that lets you read the gardening, financial and lifestyle sections, but only contains month-old information in the current affairs section. It's there so that you can see what it looks like, but not actually a lot of use. Oh, and the sports section is off-limits completely until you sign up for the full thing. Once the initial group of former iTools trial accounts expire, most people using the trial will be doing it to investigate iDisk and Backup.
Personally speaking, $49 *was* enough to justify signing up for me (and for those who wonder why I didn't wait until later, I was doing a system rebuild and expected rather more of the Backup program than it actually delivered - my bad, really, given the "quick and easy to use" nature of most .Mac services, a reasonably powerful backup program was too much to expect). I also have a hunch that by this time next year they might have added enough (*) to .Mac to make the $100 worth paying then.
Al
(*) Assuming all these additional .Mac services they promise don't all turn out to be "for only an additional $25 a year..."