Geek Swagger.
Archive for June, 2008
.Mac gets an update?
Jun 3rd
There has been a lot of news pointing towards the potential refresh of Apple's .Mac service over the past week. The obvious conclusion would be that the update would be announced at WWDC next week, but because this is simply a rumor and nothing concrete it's difficult to say. I have never been one to get too excited about .Mac since it seemed like a glorified online back-up solution allowing you to share a measly 10 gigabytes of files via iDisk. There are also some other nice features like Web Gallery which lets you share images from iPhoto, iWeb website hosting, and an IMAP email address to use with Mail - but for $99 a year? I'll stick with , and .
When Leopard was released another interesting feature was given to .Mac users, "" It seems sort of like a glorified remote desktop solution to me, but from what I've read about it the intent is to give users a no-fuss solution for returning to their Mac at home when they're out and about. I've also heard a lot of people complain about Back to my Mac not working as it should so it's not exactly a feature to drop $99 a year for. Not to mention the same can be done with and which I have written about in the past.
With Microsoft ramping up services like the previously mentioned SkyDrive, FolderShare and now Live Mesh I think that Apple needs to get in the game with .Mac. I'm already using SkyDrive, it's a solid and aesthetically-pleasing way to back up and share files on the internet. I only used briefly but it's a great way to synchronize files and folders across different computers much like Apple's iDisk, not to mention it's free and multi-platform. That means that I can share files between my Windows desktop and my Macbook without any problems. adds everything together in one package plus gives users the ability to remote desktop back to their home machine just like Back to my Mac. There's also the assumption that Live Mesh will integrate some cloud-computing components through their Live Desktop application. Basically to sum it all up - Microsoft is gaining on if not beating Apple in this area, and they're doing it for free. Microsoft's has been cranking out some amazing software on a consistent basis - big props to them.
So what kind of changes/improvements will the rumored .Mac update bring? Well, details are sketchy but it seems like Apple is trying to make the service popular with their mobile device users, iPhone in particular as you would expect but I would hope they'd add support for the iPod Touch as well. The updates are supposed to include over-the-air Exchange and .Mac syncing with Windows which is interesting, this includes contacts and calendar events as well as email. The other rumor is that .Mac will get a much-needed price cut of $50, but only for those purchasing new iPhones which is lame.
Along with those features it seems like Apple is going to try and completely re-brand the .Mac service. Someone using (a domain service Apple and others use) purchased the domain and some references to a service called MobileMe have been found in the iPhone's 2.0 firmware. One would assume that, if Apple bought me.com, Me would be the desktop service and MobileMe would be the iPhone service...pretty straight-forward stuff there.
Really there is so little go to on that it's kind of hard to put together a cohesive post about all of this, but the potential is pretty interesting. Especially with Apple stressing cloud-related products (Macbook Air, iPhone, iPod Touch) it's more important now than ever that they utilize .Mac properly. I've heard it referred to as one of the biggest areas of un-utilized potential that Apple has, and with Microsoft taking the forefront with their Live services the pressure is really on Apple to step it up. That being said if these rumors are accurate I'm not that impressed. There's nothing there for me to really get excited about because I'm not an iPhone user. To really knock it out of the park I think they should just include the cost of .Mac with the purchase of a new Apple computer at the very least. Buying a new mac? You get .Mac for free. Then they could make others pay the $99. This price point just doesn't seem feasible to me anymore with the Live services being for free. We'll see in a week.
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