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.Mac a success?

Show me a service where as Joe consumer I can:

•without going into the accounts section of Mail, automaticly use my email
•with a single click the mouse put my family photos online so grandma can view
them from across the country
•even with ease (and one day with a single click of the mouse) put a video online for grandma to see
•easily create a fairly nice website without having to know HTML or a web development application
•get easy access to some third party updates, demos, and drivers without having to search the web
•get an anti-virus application
•have an easy way to set up online file sharing
•get at least 15MB of storage for my first email account
•get at least 100MB of online storage for the family photos and videos


Yes some of you may not use all of these things and others may b***h about the bandwidth limits of homepage but this service is for the general consumer.
If you need a higher bandwidth limit for your sight then you should go and find a professional hosting service.

If you only want an email account then go out and find an email only service, .Mac is set-up for the general consumer so they don’t have to go out and find these services themselves.

If you are complaining about the speed of upload and download from iDisk, I know of two ways to make it quicker, you can use the WebDav feature in Adobe Golive or a shareware app called Goliath which also uses WebDav.

And all I have to say to those of you still b***hing about the so called “iTools free for life” garbage,
apple terms and conditions
” Apple may change, add or remove any part of this Agreement, or any part of the .Mac services and features, including price, at any time. If it does so, Apple will post such changes on the .Mac site. IF ANY FUTURE CHANGES ARE UNACCEPTABLE TO YOU, YOU SHOULD DISCONTINUE USING .Mac. YOUR CONTINUED USE OF .Mac NOW, OR FOLLOWING THE POSTING OF NOTICE OF ANY SUCH CHANGES, WILL INDICATE YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF THIS AGREEMENT, AND ANY SUCH CHANGES.

…Apple may change, suspend or discontinue any (or all) aspects of .Mac at any time, including the availability of any .Mac feature or content.”
Click to expand...

The terms and conditions were fairly similar for iTools
 
I bought a huge dot mac account. I like IMAP based email and dot mac not only offers a large iDisk, they also offer up to a 200 MB IMAP email storage account. I can leave all my mail on dot mac, use any computer I want and see every sinle mail folder, every singe sent message, everything without configuring anything other then my name and address for standard clients or just using the web browser.

The storage is very handy for me as well. The new idisk tools lets me set access to the iDisk where people can leave me files too large to send via email.

Yeah you could argue the same could be done for less with a domain account and I could use my own domain name. I just find those more of a hassle. Dot mac has been very easy and for broadband sDSL users such as myself the service is great.
 
Re: iDisk slow

Originally posted by bbarnhart
One reason why iDisk may be slow is upload speeds for DSL and cable modems is not nearly as fast as dowload speeds. Same is true for v.90 56k phone modems.
Click to expand...
But it's slow on my university 10Mbps connection (uncapped upload/download) as well.
 
Yeah, but how many NEW users?

These are conversions. The truth it for many it seems that .Mac is worth $50/year. I know many users, including my wife, who thought it resonable to at least pay for the first year. It will be interesting to see how many people renew thier .Mac account next year at $100. Hopefully they won't misunderstand this conversion success as a reason to rasie prices.
I wonder how many new subscribers, paying $100/year as of now there are?
 
Originally posted by Shrek
With such high prices on Macintosh computers, .Mac should be FREE as an incentive--a thank you for buying a Macintosh. Why isn't it?! :mad:
Click to expand...
Because the thank-you for buying is that you get a Macintosh. Bandwidth, maintenance, and disk space for something like .Mac is ongoing and costly. While I'd like to see it a bit cheaper (like $49.99 *normal* price), it's a bit unreasonable to expect them to make it free for all time, IMO.

mark
 
Originally posted by MacArtist
The terms and conditions were fairly similar for iTools
Click to expand...

Actually, what iTools said was that you .mac email address was yours, free, for life. Just the address, not the account. If you ever come back, that name can be yours again. AOL does the same thing.

Of course, the address without the account is useless, but it's free, and yours, for life....
 
How about....

Kinda surprised no one has suggested it yet, but if 45% is the number Apple is tossing around, maybe its because they're still only expecting 10% of the total user-base. Which means they're at 45% of that 10%. Or 4.5% of their previous total user-base. That wouldn't surprise me at all, because of all the people that will pay, 1/2 of them aren't really that quick enough to know that they're losing over a month of preview time. While the other half is slick enough to milk everylast day out of it.


Truth Hertz....
 
Originally posted by jayscheuerle


Actually, what iTools said was that you .mac email address was yours, free, for life. Just the address, not the account. If you ever come back, that name can be yours again. AOL does the same thing.

Of course, the address without the account is useless, but it's free, and yours, for life....
Click to expand...

That may be true about the yourname@mac.com being yours for life, but as it clearly states in every Apple Terms and Conditions agreement Apple may change, suspend or discontinue any (or all) aspects of the agreement at any time, to paraphase a little.

And yeah it sucks when the agreement does get changed, but that's the nature of the beast.

And you're right, an address is useless without the acount.

All of you whiners should really start reading the T&C of your software and services before you complain about something.
 
I was always lead to believe that iTools was free for life.

That's fine with Apple who loosely translated this to mean the life of iTools...

:mad:

I'm not paying on principle - screw 'em.
 
Ugh.
If you want RESULTS and you want at least mac.com e-mail to be free, start a class-action lawsuit.
Obtain UNDENIABLE PROOF that someone at Apple said (like Jobs at a Macworld or something) or wrote that iTools services would be free for life.
Start a list of iTools members interested in joining the lawsuit.

It got results for old iMac owners over DVD performance, why not try it for .mac?

Whining - especially on a unofficial Apple message board - will get you nothing.
 
Arn's comment about throw-away accounts made me think back to when I was working for the idiotic defunct web services dot-com some time ago. Any such usage statistics, in my experience, would be based strictly on the active userbase, generally defined as something like "people who have logged in within the past month." I think it's probably safe to exclude the people who set up an iTools account and never used it. Admittedly, statistics being what they are, it's reasonable to assume that they adjusted their definition of "active user" until they got a conversion rate they were happy with. This is the kind of thing marketing drones are paid to do.

As far as paying for it, I personally went ahead and upgraded. $49 is not an unreasonable price for what they're offering right now (100MB of download space, with no stated bandwidth restrictions, is by itself worth more than $49/year as an augmentation to my existing web hosting elsewhere). They've promised more services over the coming year, and in a year I'll reevaluate whether the services they offer at that time are worth $99. With regard to my decision to upgrade now instead of in six weeks, I thought about it, and the bottom line difference between the two is less than ten bucks. Big deal. I plop down three times that on a whim to buy a DVD. Maybe some of you (particularly students) don't have that kind of cash lying around, and in that position I would wait too. But the way things stand right now, it just doesn't bother me all that much.
 
Re: Re: 45.00 fo first year is reasonable!

Originally posted by iwantanewmac


Maybe you have a pile of cash somewhere in your closet.
We are NOT whining. They said it would be free for life.
ah but that's typically apple.
Maybe you feel that it's worth the money.
I certainly don't.
Click to expand...

Please stop saying "free for life" when to date, not a single person has managed to produce any hard evidence that they said so.
 
Re: Re: Re: 45.00 fo first year is reasonable!

Originally posted by Nebrie


Please stop saying "free for life" when to date, not a single person has managed to produce any hard evidence that they said so.
Click to expand...

Ugh...

Apple said your e-mail was "free for life". Essentially, it WAS.

BUT...

It was only FREE for the life of iTools, which has now ceased...

And THAT is how they can get away with it. They basically broke no promises, so their statement still stands true. It's just unfortunate that we didn't read into their statement's ambiguity.
 
Re: bull

Originally posted by Arcady
I don't think any revenue that .Mac might generate is worth the ill will and lost sales that Apple generated with this whole $100 a year fiasco.
Click to expand...
Actually I think any revenue generated is going towards paying for all the bandwidth, disk storage, electricity used, etc. Does anyone have any idea how much this must cost Apple a month??
:eek:
 
Re: Re: 45.00 fo first year is reasonable!

Originally posted by iwantanewmac


Maybe you have a pile of cash somewhere in your closet.
We are NOT whining. They said it would be free for life.
ah but that's typically apple.
Maybe you feel that it's worth the money.
I certainly don't.
Click to expand...

They never said it would be free for life. Find where they said that. Steve said something like it's your email address for life, meaning that if you switch ISPs, you still have your mac.com email address. iTools was free, but it's been discontinued. .Mac is not iTools.

And that pile of cash is about $8.33 a month, or .27 a day. I don't know about you, but I sometimes spend more than $8 a day on lunch, and surely more than $8 a week on stupid stuff.

I think Apple should drop the price to $50 a year, and at either price should let people pay monthly, not in one big payment. But no one is forcing us to pay for it if we dont want it. I'm still on the fence on this one, but I'll probably do the $50 for the first year and see what's next.
 
Re: 45.00 fo first year is reasonable!

Originally posted by liven2
WHAt a bunch of BABIES!!!!!:p
Click to expand...

Oh goody, here we go again.

Anyone who says something bad about Apple is a troll, anyone who defends them is a zealot.

And we're all whiny babies because we think this isn't right.

Look, we all agree that you get a lot for what you pay for, but for all of those who just wanted e-mail, it's way too much. And technically you can get the same or similar features with your ISP or Web Site host. It's just not as cool.

For the record, it was "e-mail for life". Free was only mentioned at the time. Nothing said "Free for life". Very carefully worded, but kinda shady and easily misunderstood. I don't like the way Apple did this, and like it or not (Zealots, I'm talking to you) a lot of people are (rightfully) pissed and mistrustful of a company that seemed to be trying really hard to try to steer people away from a company often accused of this same type of thing.

Sure 10.2 and .Mac are worth the price, but people feel like they've been suckered (I've heard terms like bait-and-switch a lot lately) and rightly so. No upgrade path, and "guess what, unless you pay us $50 (and $100 every year after that), you don't have a .Mac e-mail anymore". Yours for life, if you pay for it.

If you don't like whining, don't come here. You're the troll if you say stupid (yes, I said stupid. You called us names, I'm lowering myself to your level. Are you happy now?) things like that and expect NOT to get flamed. It's my $$$, I'll spend it how I want, where I want, when I want, (when I can). $100 PER YEAR can be a lot for some people. Plus ISP, sometimes site hosts, phone charges, etc. Macs are expensive enough as it is, not all of us have money to throw around, especially in these hard times.

I love Apple computers, but Apple Computers are still a large, greedy corporation that can suck sometimes with their idiotic business tactics. And they should stop pissing off their users, new and old. You're a business, besides making money now, you want people to be happy with you so you can make money later. At least if M$ pisses people off, you can just build your own El Cheapo with Linux, or old copies of Win 9x, and they still have a billion customers. Apple doesn't have this luxury.

And for the record, I won't be getting .Mac, but I love the new Towers. Even if they do look funny.

And for the love of God, STOP telling people to go buy a PC if they don't like it. YOU'RE NOT HELPING. Duh. Because that's exactly what they do. We want people to buy Macs. And we want people to whine and b*tch and complain about stuff they don't like. Vote with your $$$ people. Do we really want Apple to grow complacent and take us for granted and turn into (shudder) an M$ like Monopoly? Complain people. That's how we get better stuff cheaper (how else do you think we got the iMac, or the eMac for that matter, in the first place?).

Now shut the fsck-y up.

Unless you're b*tching, then go right on ahead.
 
think about this

.MAC is expensive right....

what is it worth.... 20 50 bucks

Soon apple add a new feature, and another and another...


should they charge 20 now and raise it by 10 bucks every time they add a feature...

Of course not

It'll get better and the price will stay the same

If you don't want it thats your choice but I bet by this time next year it'll be a whole lot more enticing....
 
Can anybody confirm the quote?

Can anybody point out an independent source for that quotation "It will be free for life?"

45% is nonsense. This is not an official Apple statement. Maybe they're brushing up their math by only counting, let's say, users who used iTools, say, every day. Now, if I do this, it's obivous that I might upgrade to the pay-version.

I think the pricing is not that bad. However, I don't neet .mac because I already have webspace, my own domains, and an affordable, blazingly fast, and reliable ISP. The additional @mac.com email address "was nice, but now it's gone". And I don't see the bandwidh issues with iTools (over here in Europe) resolved in Jaguar.

Besides, I'm amazed and delighted that most content and services on the internet are free. From what I know, those people who provide the content, and the services, need to eat, don't they?

Just my $0.02.
 
Clever Wording or Common Sense?

As I see it, the Apple Financial guys (and girls) who were sent a copy of the press releases etc would have been in dereliction of their duty if they hadn't said "Look, you mustn't EVER say 'free for life' because there's no telling what you'll be letting us in for. BE CAREFUL!" That's why you won't find the incriminating quotes.
And secondly, if it was going to be actually free until hell freezes over, why would they ever improve it or add new features? If Apple rolls out a few more features into the standard $100 mix, it will be well worth much more money by the time the full-price becomes due, and I expect those features will add value and functionality to many existing applications as well.
 
i have to disagree with these figures. 45% may convert over before the trial expires, but certainly not by now.
if 45% have converted now, I would figure almost every iTools user has paid up. this goes more towards Apple's rather "inflated" number of users speculation. I myself had 4 iTools accounts, which I am cutting back down to two come September (one full paid service and one email only conversion).
45% maybe an accurate figure of how many users will switch. .Mac feedback in general has been pretty good lately as people are starting to get over and rationalize the fees. People are figuring out the value of .Mac and getting over that initial sticker shock.
I do plan on paying the $50 bucks for the first year. I have a feeling that .Mac will evolve over the next year into someting fantastic. If it doesn't then I will just move my email and web site elsewhere and not pay the $100 renewal fee.

Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.
 
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