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gse1woody · Mar 29, 2007, 09:41 AM

I have recently returned to the Mac scene and was wondering how many people use Apple's ".Mac" and if it is worth the $99 a year ?

I have a Gmail, Hotmail, and SBC account but I would like to consolidate all my stuff into one source that I can access at home, at work, and when travelling.

Big Mac · Mar 29, 2007, 10:50 AM

It depends what you want out of it. If you like the idea of having an @mac.com email address, then it may be worth the money. However, the service isn't always great (some downtime and weird behavior from IMAP), and if you're comfortable with what you have right now it may not be worth it to switch. When you say you want a mobile solution, what exactly are you looking for?

mac128k-1984 · Mar 29, 2007, 11:02 AM

I'd say a definite maybe.

It all depends on what you find important. There are advantages to .mac, for instance you have the .mac email address. Some people fin that important. The features of .mac are tightly integrated with osx and you have a one stop area for a number of tools and features.

You'll find though the majority of users here feel its not a good deal and you can find less inexpensive solutions on the net. I myself was a .mac user since the itools days (when apple offered .mac for free) but opted to cancel now as I feel I can get a better bang for my buck.

I hope this helps.

VanillaEps · Mar 29, 2007, 11:09 AM

I love the IMAP mail account and the iDisk. Two very nice features of .Mac. Downloading Backup, I am able to integrate iDisk and Backup pretty well and the iLife suite does as well.

Gee4orce · Mar 29, 2007, 11:37 AM

Lots of people think so.

Lots of people think not.

I personally find the IMAP email (and the excellent webmail interface) very good, the .Mac syncing is a great feature if you have 2 or more Macs, and being able to easily backup your most important files somewhere off-site is a big benefit. Add the that the iDisk feature (which I hardly use, but it's very useful for some folk), and your own webspace, and I think it's worth the money.

I think .Mac does need a big shot in the arm to make it truly competitive, and Apple is really missing a trick by not offering more and getting 100% of Mac user's signed up on .Mac. But I have a sneaking suspicion that Leopard might have some killer .Mac features.

VanillaEps · Mar 29, 2007, 11:57 AM

Originally Posted by Gee4orce

Lots of people think so.

Lots of people think not.

I personally find the IMAP email (and the excellent webmail interface) very good, the .Mac syncing is a great feature if you have 2 or more Macs, and being able to easily backup your most important files somewhere off-site is a big benefit. Add the that the iDisk feature (which I hardly use, but it's very useful for some folk), and your own webspace, and I think it's worth the money.

I think .Mac does need a big shot in the arm to make it truly competitive, and Apple is really missing a trick by not offering more and getting 100% of Mac user's signed up on .Mac. But I have a sneaking suspicion that Leopard might have some killer .Mac features.

The space is the only thing that I find a bit lacking. 1GB is not enough, especially if you have it configured to have half of that space to be used for your mail. I don't keep much in my mailbox, so that's not a problem, but 1GB get filled up pretty quickly.

chris v · Mar 29, 2007, 12:08 PM

If you've got more than one computer, the syncing is the best part. It's nice to be able to bookmark something at work, then retrieve that bookmark at home hours later. The iDisk is handy for tossing up jpegs if you want to post images in threads, since it sits there in the Finder. Overall, it's probably a tad pricey, but I keep address book, bookmark & calendars synced between three machines.

Thorzdad · Mar 29, 2007, 01:38 PM

I had .Mac for a couple of years and decided to dump it when renewal came around again. Just couldn't justify the expense. None of the features really suited the way I work. The idea of remote storage was nice, but I can do the same thing through my ISP account. Syncing was a great idea, I suppose. But, if I needed the same files on two different Macs (at home and office), I just found it easier to pop the files on my flash drive and carry the files with me. That's just me, of course.
Now, if Apple were to drop the price to something in the $50/year range, I might take a second look. But, at $100 (with a paltry 1G of storage), it's a no-sale for me.

besson3c · Mar 29, 2007, 01:43 PM

Originally Posted by chris v

If you've got more than one computer, the syncing is the best part. It's nice to be able to bookmark something at work, then retrieve that bookmark at home hours later. The iDisk is handy for tossing up jpegs if you want to post images in threads, since it sits there in the Finder. Overall, it's probably a tad pricey, but I keep address book, bookmark & calendars synced between three machines.

Just FYI, you can do Bookmark syncing via the Firefox Foxmarks extension, and you'll be able to do calendar syncing with non .Mac servers using iCal in 10.5. I'm using Apple's Calendar Server with Mozilla Sunbird right now.

iDisk can be easily replaced with any other ISP that provides WebDAV, afp, or SSH connections.

There may be utilities that will handle Address Book syncing, I haven't looked in that yet.

Just passing this on for those that are looking to wean themselves of .Mac.

mickeymac · 10:04 PM

I have been a .Mac user for two years, and I really like it for keeping my desktop and my macbook bookmarks, passwords, files, etc. syncronized. However, I don't use it for much else. The webmail is nice, but I have no use for it. If you're just after a mail service, there are better and cheaper services available.

As mentioned previously, there are alternatives for keeping everything in synch, but call me lazy, I like Apple's unified solution over having to piece together alternatives. For my budget, a little over $8 a month is a small price to pay for the service.

On a related note, I'm looking forward to the new sync services (preferences, etc.) that I have seen in the Leopard betas.

mac128k-1984 · Mar 29, 2007, 08:53 PM

One huge reason that I dropped .mac was it's spam filters. I get more crap through my .mac account then any other email account, save for my hotmail account. This may be caused by its longevity, that is, I've had the .mac email address the longest but I don't get half of the crap on my other email systems.

besson3c · Mar 29, 2007, 09:04 PM

Originally Posted by mac128k-1984

One huge reason that I dropped .mac was it's spam filters. I get more crap through my .mac account then any other email account, save for my hotmail account. This may be caused by its longevity, that is, I've had the .mac email address the longest but I don't get half of the crap on my other email systems.

My sense was that Apple has always been stingy with their mail service, devoting the bare minimal of resources in getting it running. I say this because they were very slow to offer SSL support (they do now, right?), and disk quotas remain modest. I would be surprised if they were only using a DNS service such as Spamhaus to do server-side mail filtering, and that they weren't doing any content-filtering at the server level.

mickeymac · Mar 29, 2007, 10:10 PM

I can't help but wonder about the future of .Mac with new ties to Google and Yahoo brought on in the development of the iPhone. Personally, I'd like to see Apple hand over the backend operation of .Mac to either of these two, with Apple continuing to focus on the tight integration of the service with the OS.

parsec_kadets · Mar 30, 2007, 05:50 PM

.Mac is one of the areas where Apple's past history of proprietary implementations rears its ugly head in my opinion. Sure they implemented .Mac using all open standards, but it doesn't do anyone any good since OS X locks down the settings so tightly that you have to be a hacker to change which server it uses. I use the service every day, but I don't feel like I'm getting my money's worth. Also, .Mac feels like the red-headed step-child of Apple products. It gets updated so seldom that I have absolutely zero faith in Apple being able to provide us with any meaningful value in the next year. Even when they updated the capacity to 1GB they were just playing catchup. Unless Apple introduces stunning features by July I won't be renewing, and I'll actually begin transitioning away from my @mac.com address next week.

lpkmckenna · Mar 30, 2007, 09:17 PM

I let dotMac expire. It wasn't worth it. Backup was crap. Free services like YouTube and Flicker and Hotmail are more than good enough.

The selling point for me was Photo-casting. I thought it was gonna rock. It does, but my Windows-using relatives weren't interested in that new-fangled "rss" thing. They'd keep asking "why don't you just email the pictures to me?"

Ok, it wasn't a complete waste of money: I got all the Apple Loops sets.

gse1woody · Apr 2, 2007, 03:10 PM

Thanks to all for your opinions. I went ahead a signed up for the 60 day free trial. I think I will just let it run out though.

Parvez · Apr 2, 2007, 04:05 PM

What's wrong with Gmail? You get a lot of storage.

samsontan · Apr 5, 2007, 04:47 AM

sleek/fast blogging and database easy accessibility plus exceptionally unique using iLife