Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Internet Tools
What's wrong with .Mac
James R. Stoup at Apple Matters has posted a great article that explores just what's wrong with Apple's .Mac suite, and how he'd fix it. Among the problems Mr. Stoup notes: the measly 256MB of iDisk storage space, iCards, hompage and bookmarks.I can see his point. 256MB of online storage space does seem a little silly, as I have a keychain flash ram device with twice that, and it didn't cost me $100. I also agree that ecards are horrible, even if they do bear the Apple brand. I do see the usefulness of homepage and bookmarks, though. Not everyone who wants to produce a webpage or online photo gallery is savy enough to learn html (or could be bothered to do so), and homepage's integration with iPhoto makes it very easy indeed to get a simple gallery up and running. I've also used bookmarks on occasion.
All in all, however, I agree. .Mac needs a major upgrade, and Mr. Stoup's suggestions for improvements are great. It's a good read.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Twist said 10:01AM on 6-24-2005
.Mac is basically useless for savvy people like me. Limited storage, limited features, and high price. I get more storage, more features (PHP, CGI, MySQL, etc) at a lower cost ($48 per year) from a web hosting company. Being able to sync stuff between multiple macs is the only feature I am even almost interested in but 99% of my syncing needs to be done on my home network or even just to an external hard drive so their solution is not one that appeals to me.
Reply
iMatt said 2:51PM on 6-25-2005
My biggest complaint--aside from the wimpy storage space--is that there's no convenient way to view and change an iCal calendar remotely. I can view one on a special web page, but there's no link from .mac. And I can't revise it once I view it. This prevents me from using iCal from work or anywhere else on the road.
Reply
LD said 10:12AM on 6-24-2005
That was a fairly poorly written article. Nothing more than a single sentence on any one subject, not enough to truly analyze what's good, what's bad, and how to improve it.
Not much thought or analysis put into why this would increase .Mac sales "drastically". I also think the writer misses out on many other features that can be had for free online that would be compelling for .Mac users, even at a price.
Reply
Oliver said 10:13AM on 6-24-2005
I switched to using Spymac for my email/online disk/web hosting needs when iTools turned into .Mac. I've been thinking recently about going back because of the syncing capabilities, but I hear that Spymac v4 will bring these. So really, .Mac looks nice but it's really lousy bang for your buck.
Reply
namdlab said 10:47AM on 6-24-2005
I get .mac free through work, so I've been able to test it out risk-free. I mainly use it for publishing photos with homepage, but I recently found a plugin that integrates Flickr and iPhoto (through this Macworld article). It's just as easy, and I like Flickr ten times more than homepage anyway.
Reply
David Chartier said 10:51AM on 6-24-2005
The comment I left over at Stoup's silly article:
--------
iDisk isn't mean to be the Hard Drive to End All Hard Drives. 250 MB might seem a bit low for $100/year, but the one major thing you never pay extra for is bandwidth. You can sync, move, upload and download as many files as you need and you never pay an extra dime for your bandwidth. The iDisk is meant to store those documents you need at work on the way out the door, or those new songs a friend recorded, and then effortlessly (read: EFFORTLESSLY) sync then between two or 20 of your Macs. No usb keys, no firewire cables, no extra thought as to which file is the most recent and where. Everyone keeps bringing up Gmail but Gmail doesn't offer IMAP service, which is a painfully incredible value to those who need it. Webmail and POPmail can take a long walk off a short bridge; I got over deleting 5 copies of brand new messages from email apps across 5 computers roughly about 5 years ago.. and web interfaces? Don't even get me started - they're about as clunky and cumbersome as Windows. Yes, even our beloved Google's.
For $8/month you get effortless file syncing, fantastic IMAP email service (with features like aliases I have yet to see implemented as well) and a wealth of other "don't need to think or blink about it" web and file hosting services. .Mac isn't aimed at people who need 10 terabytes of storage with a dynamic flux capacitor and on-demand file reomgrification. It's aimed at doing a few specific things with an absolute minimum of effort, if any at all. You need to store your entire life's hard drive contents online? Go use streamload for that.
Reply
peeweejd said 10:55AM on 6-24-2005
My father in law (a total and complete n00b) bought .mac so I got to play with it a little.
There are some features that I would love to have, but am not willing to pay $100/year to have.
I would absolutely love to have a .mac mail account for not only me, but also my wife. I have web space on a redhat server, but I can't do imap yet.
The ability to keep address books synchronized across multiple accounts/mac would be awesome. And to have that available to my .mac/webmail from anywhere *drool*
The only thing I would use homepage for is bandwidth raping and picture pages from iphoto.
the bookmark think is actually pretty cool, especially if you are like me. I dump somewhat interesting pages into a sort of "temp" folder in my bookmarks. It would be neat to be able to access that from anywhere.
But alas, I have too many monthly/yearly bills to pay so I cannot justify $100/year for that crap.
Here's what would make me swing into .mac
* more uptime
* an option to turn the .mac into a regular apache server (or keep it in n00b mode)
* php/mysql/perl all that jazz
* more storage space (a gig or 2 would be nice)
* unlimited mac.com email accounts (or at least like 5 or 6)
* a reasonable amount of bandwidth
For that, I would ditch my current $50/year host and switch over to the $100/year .mac in a heartbeat
You know what would be cool too? if they could include a message board like the support.apple.com board but skinnable. The accounts could be universal across all .mac/apple.com sites. You could even make a flickr type deal by combining it with homepage/iphoto and make it super easy to make a blog on your .mac site.
I should work for apple :-)
Reply
spk said 11:04AM on 6-24-2005
flickr + blogger + iSync + 1GB storage + Backpack = decent .Mac!
Reply
jake said 11:38AM on 6-24-2005
.mac sux. Syncing is nice, but extra storage would help. But 100GB? Not going to happen
Reply
Uncle Tim said 11:51AM on 6-24-2005
I currently have a .Mac account that is due for renewal in August. I'm going to drop it then, because the cost doesn't justify what it is worth, anymore. If .Mac were $30 a year, I'd reconsider. Or if they were a la carte, I'd buy what I needed. But most of what they offer, the software and the syncing? Not worth it to me.
I could see it might be if I were working in two (or more places and needed a common repository to back up to or to exchange files, but for someone who had more email address and back up drives than you can shake a stick at... eh. I guess I'll be reverting to Yahoo or Gmail for email only.
Reply
Random said 11:46AM on 6-24-2005
Some of what the article's author asks for is supremely ridiculous. To offer some of those options like the gigantic iDisk (100 GB?), the price of .Mac would have to go up. And then think through what he wants... It would take forever to upload gigs of files to an iDisk. Local iDisk syncing would have to be removed, because it would take hours to download from the remote server and then scan for modified files.
If you need 100gigs of storage space to back up all of your files, buy an external hard drive. Again, it would take AGES to download a full backup from an iDisk server.
1 gig to all users might be more reasonable. And then, add an additional gig for an addition $50 bucks a year.
Unlimited email addresses? You get 5 aliases, which more or less function as full email addresses.
And iCards is free to all users. It's the Address Book integration that is part of .Mac.
I love .Mac. For the mail, syncing and iDisk alone, I think this service is worth it.
Reply
Ryan said 11:49AM on 6-24-2005
My .Mac subscription is ending and I just yesterday bought a hosting package from a seperate company. Here's the major problems I see with .Mac:
The iDisk is a bit too small, it needs to be at least 512 MB. It is also slow as all hell, taking forever to upload or download a file (which makes .Mac webpages also slow).
There is no PHP on .Mac. There is also no FTP, an offence which is simply unforgivable.
The little extras you get are sort of nice, but there are better solutions to stuff like Backup and Virex got totally dumped. Those .Mac-exclusive widgets we've been hearing about since before Tiger came out? Still MIA.
The integration into iLife is nice, but limited. For example, you can create a photo album in iPhoto but you cannot add photos to an existing album.
I paid $95 for a nice FAST hosting package (1 year, including domain, setup fees waived) at bluehost.com and so far it seems I'm getting much more for the money than I ever felt I was getting with .Mac.
Reply
LD said 11:51AM on 6-24-2005
To "fix" .Mac there are a few things that would make it much better.
- Multiple email accounts, say 5.
- Web mail
- iTunes streaming from anywhere. One should be able to access their iTunes for streaming from any computer, PC or Mac.
- Video streaming - same as above.
- Orb offers this for free. If their Mac at home is always on, why not allow .Mac users a way to stream their multimedia?
- Along those lines, access to any shared files on their home Mac.
- Exclusive content like trailers, specials, discounts, coupons, etc.
- Web Portal (does it have this?)
Most of this can be had for free anymore so I think they also need to drop the price to $49.
Reply
Chris Fenison said 12:06PM on 6-24-2005
I think .Mac needs to be able to sync iTunes libraries across multiple computers. Not necessarily the songs, because I can see the problems with that (bandwidth, piracy, etc...), but the ratings, play-counts and other metadata associated with each song. I've got a couple of other ideas too. Read up here: http://www.chrisfenison.com/article/441/what-mac-needs
Reply
Chris Fenison said 12:08PM on 6-24-2005
Oops, forgot the image mockup. Here: http://www.iinet.com/~cfenison/images/dotmac.jpg
Reply
Bruce McL said 12:45PM on 6-24-2005
The writer might as well throw in a few free trips on Steve Jobs' jet. Yeah, .mac should come with that as well.
Reply
James R. Stoup said 1:15PM on 6-24-2005
It's nice to see so many comments on my article.
Some of you gave your responses some thought, and I appreciate that. While some of you went with a slightly less cerebral path. No matter, I enjoyed all of your comments.
Reply
The Jeremy said 1:33PM on 6-24-2005
How about for starters it comes with an antivirus program that's compatible with Tiger? Me thinks Symantec would be knocking on Apple's door over this by now.
Reply