[JoshuaZ]

So I was looking at my .Mac account today and realized that Apple was skimping on space. For a basic account you get 250 MB of storage, half of that automatically goes for e-mail, and the other half you can do whatever you want with. This isn't too bad, but honestly, when you think about it, 250 MBs of online space is nothing these days. Especially when you look at how Google and Yahoo are offering a full Gig of FREE e-mail storage.

I just find it kind of odd that Apple hasn't upped the storage space for its users. You know, with all the hoop-la about online photos, movies, and webpages you'd think they'd be offering a while bunch of storage space to its subscribers.

[Randman]

Well, you can resize the 250 any which way you want but I agree that the space could be more robust. And the free kit has slowed down as well.

[mitchell_pgh]

IMHO .mac isn't priced very well. Sure it has a few cool tie-ins, but I'm not a big fan.

[JoshuaZ]

Oh, plus, before Tiger came out and right after Tiger came out the .Mac page said stuff about exclusive .mac only widgets. I've yet to see any released.

[ManOfSteal]

Originally Posted by JoshuaZ

Oh, plus, before Tiger came out and right after Tiger came out the .Mac page said stuff about exclusive .mac only widgets. I've yet to see any released.

Yeah, that is really weak on Apple's part.

[JoshuaZ]

Has it always been 250 MBs worth of space? If not, when was the last the Apple upped the size?

[TheMosco]

Originally Posted by JoshuaZ

Has it always been 250 MBs worth of space? If not, when was the last the Apple upped the size?

yeah, I noticed in the account setting that you only get 3GB/month transfer. I just signed up for a service, 5GB storage, POP/IMAP, 10GB/Day, SQL, etc for 94 bucks a year plus you get a free domain and I got 2 months free. The only hard thing now is transferring all my email stuff to my new email.

I think Apple really missed the ball on the whole blog thing too.

[OwlBoy]

Originally Posted by JoshuaZ

Has it always been 250 MBs worth of space? If not, when was the last the Apple upped the size?

Use to be 100mb of iDisk, and 5mb of email.

-Owl

[willed]

In fact with Gmail you now get 2GB. However, they work on the assumption that only a tiny percentage will ever actually use anything near the full capacity of that.

[CreepingDeth]

Can I use my gmail account to host images and ****? I've gone through so many .Mac accounts because I didn't want to pay for server space.

[TheMosco]

Originally Posted by CreepingDeth

Can I use my gmail account to host images and ****? I've gone through so many .Mac accounts because I didn't want to pay for server space.

You can get some pretty cheap hosting if all you want to do is host images and stuff. under 50 bucks a year from a reputable place.

hostpc.com is one of them. You don't get a domain name, but you could probably get a free dyndns.org link but you would probably have to make sure of that.

[Randman]

Originally Posted by TheMosco

yeah, I noticed in the account setting that you only get 3GB/month transfer.

My account shows 10GB/month in bandwidth. That's enough for me and then some.

[TheMosco]

Originally Posted by Randman

My account shows 10GB/month in bandwidth. That's enough for me and then some.

really?

Storage
Email Storage: 15 MB
iDisk Storage: 235 MB
Total Storage: 250 MB
Data Transfer (bandwidth)/month: 3 GB

thats what mine says.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

.Mac storage is a joke. I mean for backups it is useless. You can get an external 160 gig drive for half of what .Mac costs you a year. Not to mention it is more reliable and transfers 100x faster.

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by JoshuaZ

Has it always been 250 MBs worth of space? If not, when was the last the Apple upped the size?

Not too long ago, six to nine months, I believe. It was after the free services beefed up their offerings. Before that, it was something like 25MBs.

[budster101]

Just to clear things up about backup with .mac and misinformation read this...

[Stogieman]

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

.Mac storage is a joke. I mean for backups it is useless. You can get an external 160 gig drive for half of what .Mac costs you a year. Not to mention it is more reliable and transfers 100x faster.

.Mac storage is sufficient for syncing and backing up my contacts, emails & bookmarks. I use the wonderful application Backup for storing everything else on my external firewire drives or DVDs.

[Randman]

Maybe it's because I have the extra storage. But I haven't paid full price for .Mac in more than 2 years now. There's a Mac Users Group in town and often people get .Mac then don't want it so I buy it from them at a pretty good discount. Works well for all.

[goMac]

Apple will probably be redefining .Mac within the next few weeks. The demos were very impressive.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally Posted by goMac

Apple will probably be redefining .Mac within the next few weeks. The demos were very impressive.

What demos?

[Mac Write]

I want to be able to keep my Documents folder synced and exclude X folders (for size reasons). and sync more stuff. Would make life easier. I tried keeping my Documents folder on iDisk, but some stuff wouldn't copy or save.

[Randman]

Create a Smart Folder and try syncing that.

[legacyb4]

Yeah, a full gig of .Mac goodness would be sweet. I would definitely drop either my gmail or yahoo account in a heartbeat for all the extra bells and whistles.

[goMac]

Originally Posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker

What demos?

They gave demos at WWDC that are not under NDA of .Mac 2.0. They are changing it to be more like a networking protocol that allows you to bypass normal ip addresses. It's like a combination of dyndns and.... well networking. Basically abstractly all .Mac computers will be on their own sort of network.

The example they had was they had two programs running over .Mac. One was a computer running a simple server application that had a well you could drop images into. The other computer had a special build of a TextEdit client with a document open. One image in the document was linked to .Mac. When a new image was dragged into the well on the server application, the special client TextEdit changed out the image in the document to match. This was all done over .Mac. The server app was notifying the other computer via .Mac an image had changed and supplied the more up to date image.

Another thing is that you can connect to other people's computers with their .Mac user name. For example, you could connect to my machine in a .Mac enabled program by simply entering "gomac" as the address (as far as I was led to believe).

You could also create accounts under your name for people who don't have .Mac accounts but want to access things. Say, for example, I had a newsletter being hosted via .Mac 2.0. You need a .Mac login and pass to subscribe to it. I have a friend named John, he has a PC and he's not buying .Mac. I can create an account under my account. It would look something like John@gomac for the account name. That login is only valid for services I am hosting, and he can use that id to log in via .Mac to my services. He can't start sharing any new services on .Mac with that name, it's access only.

The big picture was basically Apple showing a diagram of the internet, and then telling us instead of worrying about ip's and stuff we can route all our traffic through .Mac instead. So I guess the general idea is that under .Mac 2.0 we can start treating .Mac like a network instead of just a service for email and serving web pages. However, I think they said it will really only handle 10 requests a second, which means I wouldn't expect to see intensive things like games or other things to run over .Mac, although .Mac could still be used as a means for discovery.

[Big Mac]

Very interesting information, gomac.

[Superchicken]

When .mac first came out I thought Apple was seriously going to bring some awesome tools for basic web development. That said, that never happened. It just turned into something Mac users have to be ashamed of when PC users switching asking if they need it when they buy their Mac? "I don't see what the point is, it's a bit of online storage and an e-mail address... am I missing something?"

If Apple would have released "The .mac suite of applications". Has anyone tried out N|vu? It's from the crack pot that came up with Lindows. That said it's not THAT bad of an app. I might even use it in the future since I haven't upgraded Dreamweaver in forever. If Apple would have come out with some basic Pages like app, even now if they bundled it with iWork it could actually be useful.

Right now we have the basics of what one needs to use the web, Safari, Mail, iChat. .Mac really should be filling in the mid level end between your own hosting, and nothing. And it's price should reflect that. For 50 bucks American I could maybe recommend it. If they dropped the price to like 35 I actually might even buy it myself. That is of course if they bundled it with USEFUL Apps.

iDreamweaver is a BASIC thing that should be in this. iBlog, a tool for people who wanna use prebuilt layouts and make minor changes to the graphics etc. iFTP of course a basic requirement. On that note .Mac should really be a software suite. I say sell the hosting and e-mail addy as part of the suite for the first year, and charge a renewal fee. Essentially you wanna upgrade to .Mac '07 great we give you updated apps and continue your hosting. You don't want to, you still at least have something to show for it.

That said, a basic drawing/graphics app IMO is something that Apple really needs to have in place for this. Yes there's photoshop, and yes there is PS Elements. But... last version of Elements I used it felt like a bad Windows port.

[besson3c]

I know that most people don't have the time/interest to learn another operating system, but you can do just about everything a .Mac account can do and more with a machine running an OS like FreeBSD.

If you plan to keep .Mac for the long haul, it might be more sensible (and thrifty) to build/acquire a PC, install FreeBSD/Linux, and add it to your LAN.

Examples of tasks my FreeBSD machine handles:

- running Windows via VMWare (near native speeds)
- Microsoft Remote Desktop, VNC
- network USB printing
- automatic nightly backups (folder syncs)
- hosting an iTunes share
- file storage (AFP, Samba, NFS, FTP, etc.)
- web server
- hosting of photo galleries via PHP Gallery and the iPhoto Gallery plugin (works quite well)
- hosting extra IMAP email accounts

If anybody is interested in any of this, let me know and perhaps I'll start another thread or something....

[Superchicken]

I think the whole point of .mac is that it's easy for more light weight users. My frustration is that it could actually be super useful it just isn't.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Superchicken

I think the whole point of .mac is that it's easy for more light weight users. My frustration is that it could actually be super useful it just isn't.

I think that is their intended target audience... my target audience for my post are relatively savvy, thrifty, and interested in learning something new.

How did Jesus manage to fit inside you, did you eat him?

[Superchicken]

Originally Posted by besson3c

I think that is their intended target audience... my target audience for my post are relatively savvy, thrifty, and interested in learning something new.

How did Jesus manage to fit inside you, did you eat him?

When you have a God that is not limited by time or space, it's not surprising that He can come into one's heart . If you'd really like to talk to me about it you can IM me at ClayShaker Salty on iChat (not at @mac obviously )

[Superchicken]

I should also say, yes I did eat Him.
From the book of John
"6:51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats from this bread he will live forever. The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”"

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Superchicken

I should also say, yes I did eat Him.
From the book of John
"6:51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats from this bread he will live forever. The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”"

You horrible cannibal... eating the son of God. How could you?


Is it just me, or does the idea of somebody giving their flesh seem a little creepy? You know, a la the Science of the Lambs or Seven or something... I know that Christians don't take this literally, I'm not trying to tease you... they don't, right?

P.S. Why did you eat Jesus? That wasn't cool...

[Superchicken]

Well see Jesus came to earth to offer His body for consumption. By caring more for me and those who would accept forgiveness for their sins, He came and died allowing us to have life because He forfeited His. Beyond this He proved He was worthy of us by not simply staying dead but coming back to life.
It's actually a really beautiful concept.

[budster101]

mmmmmm. derail. I just asked God and he said to start another thread or he'll be sending a lightning bolt your way if you derail this thread.

In case you forgot it's about .mac

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Superchicken

Well see Jesus came to earth to offer His body for consumption. By caring more for me and those who would accept forgiveness for their sins, He came and died allowing us to have life because He forfeited His. Beyond this He proved He was worthy of us by not simply staying dead but coming back to life.
It's actually a really beautiful concept.

Yeah, I've heard all of this before... I still don't know how much of this to take literally, and how much really matters whether I take literally or not. However, I'd suggest to you that the most effective way to convert people to Christianity would be to actually explain what all of this means rather than repeat it ad nauseam and insist "you just have to believe". I wish people would understand that they can't just package their faith in a little box and "give it" to people.

It's not that I believe or disbelieve, I just such a hard time placing the Bible and knowing how to treat it. I (tentatively) tend to view it as an important reference and something that is meaningful to many people, but not the be-all-end-all universal guide to living/morality for dummies book or something.

It's late, I don't know if this makes sense...

So much for geeking it up with FreeBSD or discussing .Mac further... oh well

[Randman]

What kind of bandwidth does the big G offer? Any exclusive widgets?

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by Randman

What kind of bandwidth does the big G offer? Any exclusive widgets?

I doubt he'll offer us any exclusive widgets now that Chicken ate his son... way to go Chicken.

[Randman]

I wonder if JC tastes likes chicken. If so, would that be demi-cannabalism, because everyone's fave carpenter since Tim Allen is a demi-God.

[Randman]

Originally Posted by Superchicken

Well see Jesus came to earth to offer His body for consumption. By caring more for me and those who would accept forgiveness for their sins, He came and died allowing us to have life because He forfeited His. Beyond this He proved He was worthy of us by not simply staying dead but coming back to life.
It's actually a really beautiful concept.

BTW, Jesus doesn't love you, but he does think of you as a good friend.

[Chuckit]

Originally Posted by besson3c

I doubt he'll offer us any exclusive widgets now that Chicken ate his son... way to go Chicken.

I bet Chicken ate Steve Jobs' son too. Now we'll never get new widgets.

[Cipher13]

.Mac has been a joke since the day it changed from iTools. Anyone that ever paid for it is a sucker, and anyone that still pays for it are even bigger suckers.

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by besson3c

You horrible cannibal... eating the son of God. How could you?

Because Christianity wass based off existing religions and borrows heavily from them.

[budster101]

Originally Posted by Cipher13

.Mac has been a joke since the day it changed from iTools. Anyone that ever paid for it is a sucker, and anyone that still pays for it are even bigger suckers.

Not really, many people find that it works well and does exactly what they need to get the most from their online and backup experience. Not everyone is a "power" user like yourself.

Many on MacNN have .mac accounts and like them very much. Are you saying they are suckers? Because then you are insulting some prominent people...

[version]

Mine runs out next month and I'm thinking of not renewing it. It's nice how it all ties into the OS, but I hardly use most of the features.

If they offered a basic service for half the price, I'd go for it.

[Randman]

Originally Posted by Cipher13

.Mac has been a joke since the day it changed from iTools. Anyone that ever paid for it is a sucker, and anyone that still pays for it are even bigger suckers.

.Mac envy.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally Posted by Superchicken

Well see Jesus came to earth to offer His body for consumption. By caring more for me and those who would accept forgiveness for their sins, He came and died allowing us to have life because He forfeited His. Beyond this He proved He was worthy of us by not simply staying dead but coming back to life.
It's actually a really beautiful concept.

Can you save this retarded preaching and converting for your religious boards? I mean one post off topic was enough but to carry on like this is stupid.

[budster101]

Originally Posted by besson3c

I think that is their intended target audience... my target audience for my post are relatively savvy, thrifty, and interested in learning something new.

How did Jesus manage to fit inside you, did you eat him?

He started the religious discussion... Not Superchicken. That said, why did you respond Chicken? Not appropriate.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally Posted by budster101

He started the religious discussion... Not Superchicken. That said, why did you respond Chicken? Not appropriate.

Cuz it was a joke and he went on and on in a serious manner hoping to bad another one.

[wdlove]

I certainly hope that with .Mac 2.0 Apple will increase the amount of storage. That and other perks would allow for an increase in subscriptions.

[JustAnOl'Broad]

Originally Posted by Cipher13

.Mac has been a joke since the day it changed from iTools. Anyone that ever paid for it is a sucker, and anyone that still pays for it are even bigger suckers.

Uh...gues I should've asked you first, huh?
Sincerely,
Mrs. Sucker