What's wrong with .Mac

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.

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.

The writer might as well throw in a few free trips on Steve Jobs' jet. Yeah, .mac should come with that as well.

Oops, forgot the image mockup. Here: http://www.iinet.com/~cfenison/images/dotmac.jpg

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

.mac sux. Syncing is nice, but extra storage would help. But 100GB? Not going to happen