Filed under: Rumors, Software, Internet Tools, .Mac
.Mac updates coming tomorrow morning?
Yes, the most recent rumor about Apple's announcement tomorrow has been debunked by commenters and other sites, but this one stems from a scheduled maintenance message Apple has posted on their oft-debated .Mac service page (tip of the hat to reader Jake Coventry). Quoth Apple's message at www.mac.com:Due to scheduled maintenance, .Mac members might be intermittently unable to access some .Mac services from 10 AM to 12 PM PDT on 08/07/2007. We apologize for any inconvenience.
While this doesn't necessarily guarantee .Mac will be getting any kind of upgrade or new features, it is a bit uncharacteristic for the service to tell its users about such a major downtime before it happens. On top of that, this outage is happening during the day of a big announcement that Apple clearly stated was going to be all about the Mac. Here's hoping for the best.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
theodorelee said 2:43PM on 8-06-2007
As a .Mac user, all I can say is... ABOUT DAMN TIME.
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Michael Rose said 2:42PM on 8-06-2007
Oooch! Think you... missed the... spleen there, David... move that knife over a smidge -- ah, better.
:-)
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Scott said 2:50PM on 8-06-2007
...and the top "tip" on the .mac home page is "Is your browser up to date?". Maybe they want to prep everyone for the refresh...
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Eli Hodapp said 3:03PM on 8-06-2007
I'm glad you were able to overcome your unbridled rage regarding the revealing of Fake Steve in order to continue posting here. You truly are a hero of the people, David.
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Joe said 3:05PM on 8-06-2007
Down for two hours? Does that mean the announcement might be two hours long?
Searching for clues is fun!
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Jason said 4:23PM on 8-06-2007
I think the best change for .Mac would be a $99 reduction in yearly fees. Other than that I think it's a swell service.
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shadownight said 3:11PM on 8-06-2007
It's "à la iPhoto", not "a là iPhoto". A nitpick, I know, but I need to defend the use of my mother tongue ;)
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Michael B. said 8:21PM on 8-06-2007
And yet everyone seems to forget that during The D in May, when Steve and Bill were on stage ntogether with Walt . Here the iTunes link:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=256972720
I can't remember where it is but this is what was said:
Walt "When you bought a Mac, you had this internet service back end called .Mac and I think a lot of people feel you haven't developed it much"
Steve "I couldn't agree w/ you more, and I think we'll make up for lost time in the near feature"
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David Chartier said 3:41PM on 8-06-2007
I highly doubt the announcement will span two hours. Even the major Macworld/WWDC keynotes rarely last quite that long. However, each time .Mac has gone down in recent memory to add new features, the .Mac outage announcement stated a two-hour downtime period.
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jaime said 4:12PM on 8-06-2007
i think .mac is the maybe the most shameful way that apple has of insulting its customers today. having said that, i'm also very frustrated at how darn convenient it is, and i use it at least weekly, if not daily.
if only - please please please - apple is going to announce changes to .mac that will make the $99 conscionable. fortunately, i don't ahve the sting of paying for it (i get it free from my company) but as a consumer advocate i shudder at the product.
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Christopher Shaw said 4:18PM on 8-06-2007
Down 2 hours tomorrow?!?!? How about the 2+ hrs (and counting) that I can't get my .mac mail today?
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Todd said 2:04AM on 8-08-2007
It's the .mac only dashboard widgets!
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David Chartier said 4:25PM on 8-06-2007
"It's the .Mac-only Dashboard widgets!" LOL! I nearly spit out my water. I harped about those things a while back but forgot about them since then.
Personally, I'm not that excited for new iMacs because I'm happy as a camper with the current models. For me, software announcements would be much more interesting - iLife '07/08 and .Mac FTW!
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j2d2 said 5:59PM on 8-06-2007
I haven't used .mac since they announced it wasn't free anymore. I miss it. But I'm not going back until it's free, or at least until they have "scaling" service levels, such as "free", "extended" and "pro".
Basically it's the sync stuff that I can't live without. Syncing iCal and Address Book across multiple computers (I have 3 plus iPhone) seems like, in this day and age, should be a standard and free service. I love iCal but I can't really use it unless the info is synced across all my machines.
Sync with Google Cal would be swell too!
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Blair said 6:02PM on 8-06-2007
Eli -
Jesus... give it a rest dude. Everyone makes mistakes. David's entitled to some as well. Do all of your comments have to be invectives against him?
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Victor Agreda Jr said 10:17PM on 8-06-2007
well it'd be hard for Apple to make .Mac any worse, but one can dream... (I should probably backup my old homepage.mac content tonight huh?)
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Kurt Vander Bogart said 7:35PM on 8-06-2007
.MAC should go the way of e-world. In fact, e-world was much better. .MAC is an under performing Apple service, unless, of course you want to sync, your Safari bookmarks. Yippee!
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roz said 8:23PM on 8-06-2007
I still use .mac and find it indispensable for a home-business I have created. I wish it would add filemaker database hosting, I think that is a no brainer and would greatly improve the utility of it as a solution. Really FMP and dot mac, together with ilife and desktop apps could create an incredible web publishing platform. I would really like to see that sort of evolution.
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Buckeye77 said 8:31PM on 8-06-2007
I can't figure out why i bought .Mac to begin with. email accounts ending in .Mac should be free with your computer and then you should be able to spend some cash if you want to upgrade your account.
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john russell said 9:31PM on 8-06-2007
If you look at this video from D5:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=OhDL48ulKyw
Steve mentions "backend internet services," possibly hinting at a .Mac refresh, or even a total overhaul.
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