.Mac To Receive Substantial Upgrades Next Month
Create a website. Stay in sync. Collaborate online. All with drag-and-drop simplicity and a few clicks. With powerful online services like ad-free email, backup software, web publishing, and more…
That’s how Apple currently advertises its $99.59 a year .Mac online package. For that price you get a ‘whooping’ 1GB of combined email and file storage including some additional services such as syncing across multiple mac computers, backup, and iDisk. In the advent of Google & Co, it’s no surprise that .Mac has received some harsh criticism over the last year. The package has immense potential with its tight integration into the operating system, however, it has simply fallen by the roadside as of late.
All of this is about to change in the very near future. During today’s ‘All Things Digital‘ appearance with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs was criticized by host Walt Mossberg for not paying attention to its .Mac strategy. Jobs in response, quickly admitted the company’s faux-pas in terms of its .Mac history.
“I couldn’t agree more, and we’ll make up for lost time in the near future.”
Make up for lost time? That statement sounds like a guarantee promise for a much more substantial upgrade than last year’s overhaul of .Mac’s mail application, which finally received a Web 2.0 facelift in October.
In addition, this is the second time this month, that Steve Jobs has publicly recognized .Mac’s shortcomings. During Apple’s annual shareholders meeting on May 11th, Steve Jobs Jobs admitted that .Mac had fallen behind. “We have not achieved our full potential,” he said, adding that the company planned to soon release a new set of initiatives for .Mac.
Jobs also indicated that Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference would shed more light on the subject next month. As a matter of fact, Apple has already announced some new features for .Mac in Leopard, including the syncing of Dashboard items across multiple Macs.
In the meantime, what could Apple do to improve the .Mac experience? For starters, it needs to increase the storage capacity to match competitors such as Google while at the same time lowering its annual fees. Furthermore, Leopard needs to take full advantage of .Mac and tightly integrate the service within the operating system and Apple’s forthcoming iPhone. Last but not least, Apple needs to fully open .Mac to third party developers. Yes, some applications already do take advantage of basic .mac features (such as backup), however, developers need to be able to tightly integrate their products into the service to make it a truly exciting experience.
Whatever Apple decides to do with .Mac, I think it’s safe to assume that we will see some substantial upgrades to the service by WWDC in June.
What do you want .Mac to do for you?
What could they do to improve it?
I have a short list, if I met mister Jobs I’d shove this list in his face:
1. Like Google, offer a free email account. So people can use their Mail.app out of the bloomin’ box.
2. Make the existing .Mac service with an additional Gig of storage $29.99 per year.
3. Offer a pro service for $99 per year, which make the existing service look like baby food.
That’s all for now.
(1) why doesn’t .mac fix their addressbook share. i’ve found if you make multiple address book changes in a relatively short period of time, not all the changes ever make it. i’m not talking about additional address book entries, but changes to existing address book entries.
the only work around i’ve found is to unshare the calendar and reshare it — on both sides.
(2) answer your customer’s email and problems. the above problem ticket i opened with .mac, caused them to initially answer with items on deletiing and reading the share. after that they didn’t answer or respond for 2 months. i called everyone i could find, including my apple sales person. then i finally got a response.
I’m a recent switcher from Windows to OSX, but I currently haven’t taken up the .mac subscription mainly because of the price Apple have placed on the convenience, not so much because of the feature list.
1) For me, a UK-based person, it would cost £69 (US$137 @ 20th June 2007 rates). I don’t think this is fair considering that US users are paying about half that, for the same thing.
2) Secondly, i would only ever take it on when it can back up a bit more than 1GB as standard. I understand that this is set to change, so i’ll keep an eye on it and see what it grows to.
3) I appreciate that certain services and products are developed as Mac-only, but some of these things are what makes the Macs seem cool, and it’s a shame that i hav to pay so much to take advantage of features like this. A good example is iChat, where the very features that lure you to it are mostly locked up in a .mac subscription.
I would take up .mac if the price came down to something reasonable like £49/year (US$ 97.50 or so), with minimum 10GB free storage, and as much in the way of synchronization options as possible, including the obvious personal display settings, widgets (rumored to come with Leopard), bookmarks for multiple browsers, address book, iCal etc
We’ll see how the updates go come Leopard launch, eh?
Hey Ronald,
I can definitely understand your frustration with the price difference. Have you looked into purchasing .Mac from the American Amazon account? It’s on sale for only $79.99. You can check it out here.
Try and see if you can create an American account. I know Amazon does ship international at pretty fair rates.
Good luck and let us know.
Would there be any differences in support issues etc if i purchased it from the States? Surely Apple has looked at this loop-hole..
Hey Ronald,
no, there wouldn’t be any differences. However, you are right, Apple has locked up the loop-hole: Amazon doesn’t allow this product to be shipped out of the states…
If you have a friend in the U.S., however, you could ship it to him. All you need is the activation code anyways.