Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Internet Tools
Apple should offer option of .Mac as separate services
Apple's .Mac service has been quite the coffee talk discussion topic throughout the Mac web since as long as I can remember. We've even covered the service's slow death, some ways it could really hit a home run and even some things .Mac gets right, just to be fair. However, as I was paying for a renewal at the Apple Store yesterday, I realized .Mac could benefit significantly if Apple were to offer the option of purchasing its three major components a la carte. Let's face it, there are a lot of users out there who would love certain components of .Mac, but don't want to pay the premium Apple is charging for the full package. Following is a summarized breakdown of where I believe Apple could separate or bundle their .Mac services to to make them much more appealing to a far wider audience.iDisk
Besides some of its shortcomings (such as the occasional slow syncing), the iDisk is arguably one of the coolest features of .Mac. Yes, there is a great selection of services out there that offer more space for free, but the iDisk's unique ability to (now this is the clincher) automatically sync in the background as opposed to clunky file upload dialogs - with no user interaction needed - is where it truly shines. It's an automated file syncing and backup system that I believe could stand on its own easily for anywhere from $30/year to maybe even $50 (though at $50, I too would echo the requests for a tad more space). This feature is also a source of criticism from power users, however, who are quick to point out that they can build a 200GB syncing WebDAV disk with their own hosting for $0.15/decade. The thing we all have to remember is: the iDisk isn't exactly aimed at the 1337 h4x0r amongst us. I have my own hosting at DreamHost and I've used a WebDAV drive too - there's just a few key ways the iDisk shines above the rest, and those features can be key to many of us, 1337 or otherwise.
Application Sycing
One of the other killer .Mac features of which there are few competitors (aside from examples like Plaxo for contacts) is application syncing. This is made even cooler with 10.4 Tiger because of the open Syncing Services platform for third parties, so everything from Yojimbo to Transmit and more can get in on the fun. I frequently see this feature alone cited by everyone from John Doe bloggers to developers themselves as the *one* reason they hang on to their .Mac account - so why not spin it off and potentially beef it up? I bet Apple could snag at least $30/year for this service alone, and after splitting .Mac up (and marketing the heck out of the new darling), I'm sure the .Mac service and its support from 3rd parties would receive their own significant boosts from users and the developer community, causing both the iDisk and Application Syncing to gain extra value.
Hosting and email
These features probably ride backseat to the two I've already mentioned, primarily because hosting and email are so easy and cheap to come by these days. I also bundled these two since that's more or less the standard now. But Dave Caolo already touched on how .Mac could really shine here - by offering killer website building features both online and offline. iWeb 1.0 was a nice effort, but by giving 2.0 a big upgrade at Macworld 07 and infusing Homepage with some real web 2.0 power, Apple could finally have a chance of at least stacking up alongside the free competition.
The other half of this optional .Mac service is webmail, set to receive a promising refresh which could help boost their reputation and draw as a web services leader. After all, how much does it suck to send someone to such an ugly URL as http://something.googlepages.com/? By contrast, mac.com/steve is clean, short and simple (of course, this would require the .Mac team to remove the silly 'web' prefix of .Mac URLs - hint hint), while an @mac.com address admittedly comes with a coolness factor of its own.
All of this web functionality already comes with well-integrated desktop tools, and if storage space would rise to meet the respectable 10GB/month bandwidth limit for regular accounts, I'm betting Apple could snag another $30-50 for this bundled service.
Putting it all together
There you have it - my simple plan that could allow Apple to offer their 'take it all or leave it' .Mac service in profitable (hopefully) and bite-sized portions for users with specific needs. On the low end my pricing means .Mac would cost $90 (hey, a price drop couldn't hurt), but on the high end Apple could still sell their all-in-one bundled package, claiming it's a 'more than $X value!' for their nice round $99.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go wait for my call from Apple's business strategies department while you get your coffee talk on.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
takaaki said 8:13AM on 10-23-2006
Yijimbo?
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bryan said 8:27AM on 10-23-2006
I use .mac mainly for keeping my contacts and bookmarks in sync. But i do still use the email, web space and iDisk.
The iDisk storage limit is very small, especially when shared with email, groups and web pages. With me its either backup everything to iDisk or back it up elsewhere so I have a few files up there (mainly for sharing)but I would like to be able to backup my whole home directory to it.
The syncing of contacts and bookmarks works great (except the odd glitch) and it is good to have access to them via the .mac site even when i am not on one of my own macs.
I am not a novice user, I am actually IT Manager for a large international company, so I could easily go and hack together a load of services to work in the same way as .mac and give me more storage etc.....the point is I dont want to, i cant be bothered, i want something that works without constant tweaking and messing about, i dont have the spare time.
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bryan said 8:31AM on 10-23-2006
In addition to my last comment, maybe Apple should offer 3 version of .mac? A cheap .mac basic edition with a 100MB or so storage and just email functionality. A .mac standard which is the smae as the current version and a .mac pro with a LOT more storage and better price points for purchasing more storage space?
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Nik Fletcher said 8:34AM on 10-23-2006
I've managed to resist the urge to buy .Mac. I've always looked on it as not competitive enough, but given the amount of integration with OS X, I'm probably going to splurge the cash on it at some stage. I too have my own hosting, but .Mac is convenient enough to make it worthwhile.
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Stuart said 8:55AM on 10-23-2006
Never used .Mac since iTools went away. Perhaps it's diffent in the US, but in the UK you tend to get mail and web space with your ISP for no extra charge.
iDisk doesn't seem that worthwhile and it's not that hard to sync your bookmarks through del.ici.ous.
.Mac doesn't seem to add a great deal else for the extra money involved, though I can appreciate for some where money doesn't seem to be an issue it's a very handy service, if I had the cash to spare I'd probably get it too. I liked have a mac email address : )
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Dels said 9:23AM on 10-23-2006
Having just had a laptop HD crap out on me, I can't even begin to tell you how much .Mac's syncing helped. While I was able to back up all my data, the fact that with the click of a few buttons in the .Mac preference pance my Address Book, Mail.app, Safari, Keychain, and iCal looked and worked EXACTLY how they should is amazing, and worth the price as far as I'm concerned.
Also, I'm greatly looking forward to the next version of iCal which (as far as I can tell from feature discussions) will be a two way street, such that I can not only view but edit my Calendars via .Mac's webDAV interface. Has anyone had any experience with this in the Leopard builds out so far?
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shaninho said 9:16AM on 10-23-2006
I tend to think that the inherent simplicity in a one price plan is important to Apple. They know there are plenty of people out there, myself included, who really hate digging through menu after menu of options.
In fact, at restaurants (in the real world), if I order anything now I have to answer twenty questions to get any food. Damn, I'm just hungry!! That's why Thai restaurants are so sweet - P32 every time, baby.
Well anyway, I think .Mac should keep the services together, though I have expressed about once a year to Apple that I would go for it if I could find out or get a monthly payment option (yet another facet of complexity, however).
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Matthew said 9:51AM on 10-23-2006
>the inherent simplicity in a one price plan is important to Apple.
Bingo. The fact that .Mac includes all of the services someone new to the Mac, or the existing Mac user with average Internet-related needs, shouldn't be miscalculated. It's a huge reason why Apple sells this as a package.
When Apple first moved from free iTools to pay-for .Mac a lot of us cried out for the pay-for-service option. Some of us just wanted to keep our @mac email, while others wanted their @mac email address and the homepage feature. No go.
The bottom line, however, is that Apple knows that it's in line with their philosophy of "simple" to offer everything at one price. They also know it's a lot easier to sell it this way.
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Marcos said 5:11PM on 10-26-2006
I renewed last year... and every year it's a tough decision. The pricing is not competitive at all. They should lower the price to $49 AND give you a 1 year subscription with iLife and/or new purchases of Mac OS X and or new Macs. Because once you have it, it's so darn convenient that you just renew it despite the price.
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David Chartier said 10:07AM on 10-23-2006
"Bingo. The fact that .Mac includes all of the services someone new to the Mac, or the existing Mac user with average Internet-related needs, shouldn't be miscalculated. It's a huge reason why Apple sells this as a package."
They don't do this with most of their other products. They offer product families, and inside those they usually offer at least 1 or 2 choices. Look at the iPod, the Mac mini, the iMac, etc. 'Simplicity' is good, but so is rational choice, and a $100 price point for this all-in-one package throws up a massive wall that deters a *lot* of customers who don't want half of of the services Apple is charging for.
My argument also isn't that .Mac should be split into three separate services from here on out - I think it should have that *option.* I think they should still sell it as one big bundle for many of those new customers for whom a bundle like that works out for. I'm arguing for a layer of choice for all those customers who have a little more experience under their belts.
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Kevin said 10:17AM on 10-23-2006
I agree. I live in Korea, where connection speed to .mac server is excrutiatingly slow. I can live with using slow server for less often used services such as web hosting, or for services requiring little bandwidth such as address book syncing. However, I can't use that for mail, and certainly not as iDisk. Sometimes I wonder why I pay such a high amount of money for such a slow service.
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Uncle Jerry said 10:30AM on 10-23-2006
They should raise the price of iLife $25 bucks and include .Mac with it. I wouldn't have a problem with that. But $99 or $75 on Amazon is to much for .Mac (even though I pay for it every year...)
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ToeKnee said 10:39AM on 10-23-2006
I was an original free iTools user, and I paid for .Mac every year until just two weeks ago when I let it expire. There are a few things that are USEFUL, but nothing I find necessary, and I decided to let it drop if nothing else as a statement of my dissatisfaction with Apple's .Mac upgrades relative to the market, particularly the market of "free" services available.
As for iDisk backup, there's a 1GB USB drive for $4.99 after rebate on the web today. 1GB is nothing, and even via USB 1.1 on my old Powerbook, the backup is much faster than SLOW SLOW iDisk.
Since I am now mainly a Firefox user, using free Foxmarks to sync is more useful than .Mac syncing only Safari.
I own several domains and have a few virtually hosted servers, so the e-mail address is close to worthless to me. Gmail is a more useful and free service with unlimited storage (I have two accounts now with over 5 GB combined e-mail capacity, can add more accounts if ever necessary).
The remaining services, while potentially useful, are not worth the price of admission to many people, but they're stuck paying it because they've been using the mac.com address for two long. If you're in that situation, I advise you to spend $10-15 to register your own domain name and start using that e-mail address-- once you own it, you can break the addiction to .Mac and the outrageous renewal fee (if indeed, the mail is all you use, which is probably a large chunk of subscribers).
I am enjoying my .Mac break. I am going to use that $99 saved to buy a 250 GB portable hard drive this week for fast and *complete* backups.
ToeKnee (formerly ToeKnee@Mac.com)
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Leonard Nimrod said 10:44AM on 10-23-2006
I'm with Dels.... THe one time you have a HDD crap out on you is when you really see the value of having .mac. As (s)he said, it's not just just the contacts and bookmarks that sync seemlessly, but also all your application settings. By itself, that sort of security and peace of mind is worth the $99/year.
With Time Machine in Leopard, .mac is looking less benefical to me.
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David Chartier said 10:54AM on 10-23-2006
#13: If you're a domain-slinging, flash drive-packing Mac user, .Mac and its services might not exactly be aimed at you. It's primarily designed for people who get the shakes when they hear 'oh yea, just go reg your own domain. It's simple.' People who don't *want* to deal with registering their own domain and dealing with their own hosting. People who *want the specific services .Mac has to offer.* You might not want them, but believe it or not - a healthy chunk of customers out there do.
The rest of us look at the service and complain and get upset that it isn't designed to cater to our 1337 h4x0r needs, and that isn't right. It's a product designed for a specific demographic of user - if you aren't in that demo, then life can just keep going on, right?
My editorial is an attempt at offering an alternative to the way .Mac is bundled so more users who are interested in one component or another can hop on board without paying full price. There are plenty of reasons even the most 1337 amongst us might be interested in one component of .Mac or another (but this isn't the post to debate those), so I'm simply trying to add to the discussion of how .Mac could cater to those users while not alienating its primary customer.
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dunk said 11:14AM on 10-23-2006
i think .mac is going to play a big, big part in the iphone and a lot of people who don't have it are going to be signing up pretty fast. i suspect the new web mail will be fully xhtml/css compliant which means for a small screen device apple need only create an alternate style-sheet. web mail will only be the beginning as well, there will be a flckr like component and a music sharing component.
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Luke James said 11:33AM on 10-23-2006
i was one of the first itools people. i was so angry at apple when i was forced to pony up to keep my "free email for life." every year i'm reminded of that betrayal above all. this year i left... all i ever wanted was an option to keep my email address. but now no more feeling like the cliché of the abused girl who won't leave her selfish guy.
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ToeKnee said 11:46AM on 10-23-2006
#15 David-
Oh, sorry I forgot to mention that in the end, I like with your idea, though I don't think it will appeal to Apple.
I don't really agree with your reply to me, though. As I've seen in much of the discussion on this topic, .Mac is popular with a lot of IT folks who have the disposable income to not worry about $99/year, have a lot of computers to sync, and think it's worth it. I am in that camp up to the point of it being worth $99 for no major upgrades in the past year or two. The economist in me is seeing Apple get too comfortable and not competitive on the web services front.
In my family and circle of friends, I am the computer geek that everyone goes to, and I have successfully migrated most of these folks to Mac (and I begrudgingly support Windows because I have to). I recommend everyone take the 60-day trial of .Mac, and only one person of all those people has stuck with .Mac - they are not technical people, and they find the range of services .Mac offers far too complicated. My sister has stuck with .Mac mainly for syncing her two Macs' address books and bookmarks, and iDisk to keep financial documents which both she and her husband want to be able to work on. But iSync has been nothing but a thorn in her side the past few years. She can rarely keep it working for long.
She also used iPhoto with the Homepage button to make simple photo galleries of her grandkids' photos, but Apple actually REMOVED that functionality in iLife '06-- extremely arrogant of them to force everyone to use iWeb. It has taken her most of the year to adapt to the new program.
No one else I have moved to Mac has kept up with the .Mac. It's not for regular folks in most cases, other than e-mail, it's for geeks. And since .Mac doesn't offer ISP services, everyone already has an e-mail address with their ISP. I have resisted speaking out against Apple and its ever lamer .Mac services, but they all figure it out on their own-- either too expensive or not anything they need (with one computer).
And 1GB backup? My point with the USB flash drive comment was only to point out how inadequate 1 GB is. When they ask, and they do, if they can backup their whole hard drive to .Mac, of course I have to say 'no,' not unless they pony up MORE money for more space, and the speed is ridiculously slow.
(#17 - sad but true)
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Mark said 12:23PM on 10-23-2006
I too worry about the price, but I cannot live without .Mac sync. Simply the best way to sync two macs. iDisk is useful but not indspensible. I could easiliy live without the web hosting services and email.
I would add a Web version of iWork to compete with Apples new found friend Google!
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Ruby on Rails LiveCD said 12:53PM on 10-23-2006
I just let my .Mac account expire this past week. It was painful but I have no way to justify the $100 for syncing and some pretty templates. I found the google browser synchronizer for Firefox and installed it at home & at the office. It forces me out of beautiful Safari into less elegant Firefox, but now I have my bookmarks, cookies, history, tab preferences, etc all available cross platform. I never really used the iDisk for anything useful that I couldn't replace by sending myself emails to my GMail account. So while I'll miss the iPhoto publishing I suspect I'll survive the loss of that too. They just didn't have the value proposition that they used to. Apple needs to catch up to the Web 2.0 times.
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