What happened to .Mac?

The keynote was quite short... I reckon that there were things that were pulled at the last minute, and a .mac update could have been one of them, it could have been iWork/iLife too

Matteo

You have to ask yourself who 'expected' more. It was the rumour sites and us. We built up the expectations and then felt cheated. Our fault. Developers just want to know about what affects them.

AS for the web site, well taht makes sense from a branding point of view - new OS, new site (the old one was looking out of date) and if you take a look there you'll see a lot of things discussed that the keynote didn't.
The iPhone section makes sense because developers wanted to know if they could write apps for it, and now they can.

I'm not saying I wasn't disappointed - when he got to feature 4(?) and it was Spaces I knew I could go and make a cup of tea.
But I watched the keynote today and you know what? The new Finder and desktop features are pretty neat - that preview feature is going to be *very* useful to me, as is 'back to my Mac'. Sure, an iLife announcement would have been good, as would a new version of Keynote, but speaking with my 'marketing expert' hat on, it wouldn't have made a lot of sense to tell developers about Garageband and iWeb.

Incidentally, the Safari announcement made the BBC News headlines... ;-)

@Jonathan Baldwin
I would agree with your view in principle. But the WWDC 2007 was expected to deliever more. Particularly on the iLife side. You said the one in San Francisco is a developer conference. Well... Apple just redesigned their entire web site! They announced the iPhone release date. These are things that have an impact on the "wider audience" you are talking about... Whereas a complete set of features for the new iLife or iWork would be much more of interest to developers, as they would be able to write plug-ins for these softwares. I think developers don't care that much if Apple redesigns it's own website, or if they announce the release date of the iPhone...

My opinion is that this conference was a mix (not a good one) between "developers' stuff" and "consumer stuff". At least as far as the Keynote is concerned.

DotMac should be priced lower and offer more useful stuff. (Edit documents on the fly from NON MAC computers, access a Mac from a NON MAC (sort of "reverse bootcamp"). That would be appealing, not things that (my humble opinion) one can get free from Google or similar...

.Mac was featured pretty heavily considering. I mean, the whole networking thing was a great feature and I can see it being useful to me - my .Mac sub seems better value for money.
On the whole keynote thing, I think people are confusing a developers' conference with one aimed at a wider audience. The features presented here were ones that affect developers - the shiny stuff, the consumer stuff (like iLife) can wait until October.

@ #16

You can still get to the iCards page with this (at least from the UK anyway)
http://www.mac.com/WebObjects/iCards
hope this helps

Have to agree with most of the above sentiments. .Mac is the proverbial elephant in the room. Overpriced compared to other email / hosting options, and suffers from a fair bit of downtime. Publishing from iWeb is not without its problems either (just check out the iWeb forums).

I'm one of the lucky ones - I have 6 months left on .Mac, so I can slowly phase out my .mac email address, but if something groundbreaking happens in October with iLife + .Mac then I can hang onto it if needed.

They dropped iCard from .Mac.

I don't subscribe to iMac, but even before being a Mac user I was always visiting .Mac for sending webcards.

I will really miss iCards...

:-(

I was finally able to dump my .mac...paid half for webhosting and email, and bought a backup program. It's not worth it.

Also:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/dashboard.html

Widgets wherever.

Get yourself a .Mac account and your Dashboard widgets can follow you from Mac to Mac. With Dashboard syncing in Leopard, every widget you add on one Mac automatically updates on all your Macs.

My guess is we'll see a new .mac, iLife and iWork 2008 with the release of Leopard.