You don’t often hear people raving about .Mac.
People rave about Apple hardware and software, and people rave about iPods, but few people post excitable blog rants about how indispensible their .Mac account is.
Apple has just updated the .Mac offering, announcing a 250MB storage limit (up from 100MB), better email, and lower prices for upgrades and bolt-ons (such as extra email accounts).
It’s a nice package, but you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s not quite up to defeating the online storage juggernaut bearing down on Apple (and everyone else) in the form of Google. After all, you get a gigabyte to play with when you get your Gmail account, and someone’s already turned it into a virtual filesystem, and Google doesn’t even seem to mind.
Of course, .Mac offers unique features for publishing content, and synchronising data between different computers (as long as they’re Apple computers, of course). The fact that much of the .Mac offering requires a Mac is one of the things that might drive people to use alternatives; a lot of people use more than one computer, but many of them use a variety of computers. Mac at home, Windows at work. Symbian-based smartphone while out and about. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a service that works on everything?
If speculation that Google plans to turn itself into a web-based operating system turns out to be true, .Mac will have do offer something seriously special to even keep up. This might well be the first of many changes to Apple’s online service.
Want to rave (or rant) about .Mac? Does Apple need to worry about the GooOS, or are they different concepts, for different people?
Synching to a symbian phone
If you've got a symbian phone that also has bluetooth, then it can be synched quite easily via iSync. Just pair it with your mac, add the device to iSync, and you're done.
As for getting the data to a Windows box... well, can you really blame Apple?
DotMac still king
Yes 100Mb was limiting, and 250Mb is still not much compared to what you can get elsewhere, but DotMac is still very important to me and I have no plans to ditch it. The seamless integration of iDisk, bookmarks, calendar etc is what I am addicted to. I've been looking for alternatives but so far I haven't seen anything that can compete with DotMac when it comes to that integration.
//Magnus
Tiger?
It seems to me that syncing will be a feature in Tiger, and thus .Mac won't be necessary for that feature. I did just renew, but there isn't much left to compel me past this year (unless of course everyone wants to put me down as the referrer! :)). I do love the auto-publish through iPhoto... but they will need to revamp it more than this to make it a must-have item (or offer it as a tiered service). I will say that it is excellent for computer novices; since Mail auto-configures the e-mail accounts it's a whole lot easier to get up and running. But I think most people don't ever use even 50% of its capabilities.
Synching needs to be a separate service
I agree with much of what's been said. .Mac's web tools are excellent for beginners and insufficient for others. I can register a domain name and get webmail and 2.5 Gb of storage for less than .Mac and have PHP and Perl to boot.
For me syncing is the only useful feature of .Mac. Syncing bookmarks and the address book are heavanly. Unfortunately, it isn't worth $100 though, so I will be dropping my membership this year.
I hope Apple remedies this in the future.
Dotmac
Hello, this is only an information.
The dotmac scandinavia group has opend the Dotmac club and it is now possible to enter....
At least is it possible to enter
http://dotmac.no
and
http://dotmac.dk
soon will it also be
http://dotmac.se
and .. yes.. everything is possible...???
http://dotmac.co.uk.
br
Dotmac
Ps.. the dotmac forum is also open for use for those who speak read and write english.
Have an happy dotmac