.Mac - worth it?

Re: .Mac - worth it?

.Mac is a weird package full of odds-and-ends. You kind of have to judge whether you'll use enough of them to justify the price.

1) it makes publishing a website really, really easy. Sure, you can publish to a folder with iWeb and then upload that wherever you like -- certainly a few more steps than just clicking on publish. For me, this is enough by itself -- my updates to the family website used to take me an hour, and now they take minutes, literally. I had the pictures of the new baby online about fifteen minutes after he was born, and it took me around ninety seconds worth of work. http://web.mac.com/aaronreynolds is my .Mac family page.

2) easy data syncing on multiple computers -- you can use iSync and the iDisk part of .Mac to automate synchronizing calendars, address books, e-mail accounts (and rules and signatures and so on), bookmarks, passwords and the like. Change it on one computer and the change shows up on both.

3) easy portable data -- imagine having a folder on your desktop all the time that is easily accessible through a web browser from any other computer, even when your computer is offline.

4) simple automated backup. Tell backup "every day, backup all Microsoft Office documents to my iDisk". And it finds them, and it does.

5) Garage Band freebies -- about 400 additional loops and instruments in the Download section.

Yes, there are a lot of ways to accomplish all this stuff easily, possibly cheaper. But the .Mac package is really simple and integrated into the operating system.

Are you buying your machine from an Apple Store? Because .Mac is usually discounted when you're buying a machine, and discounted further if you're buying the machine and AppleCare.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

.Mac seems to be a rather controversial piece of software.
Reading the die-hard Mac forums, most members scream about the
fact that Apple charges $99 a year for the service. Most think it
should be free.

Me? The only reason I bought it was because the Apple store gave
me 10% off when I purchased my Mac Pro desktop. I knew nothing
about .Mac and decided to buy it blindly.

I don't use it to store large files. I don't do large backups with it,
nor did I even know (as Aaron points out) that it has extra Garage
Band freebies.

Where it absolutely comes in handy for me is doing a synch between
my notebook and my desktop. I can keep my address book, iMail,
iCal, passwords etc. all synched between two Mac computers. You
simply back up the necessities to their server and download with the
secondary computer.

As with everyone else my complaint is you have to pay $99 a year
for this service. However, for me, it has proved to be useful enough
that I will pay for it again next year.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

Mike, I forgot to address a couple of your specifics --

Domain registration: your site is at web.mac.com/yourusername, and if you want yourname.com you'll have to pay someone else for that and either redirect to your .Mac page or forgo .Mac and re-upload to your host when you make changes.

Bandwidth: I don't remember how much you get, but it's a reasonably substantial amount.

Ron -- have you seen the .Mac Learning Center? Go to Mac.com and check it out for video tutorials on iLife software.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

My wife has it and it's worthwhile for her. The email address for her personal business justifies the cost. Online email access away from home is good. And the iWeb / .Mac synergy made it quite easy to create and maintain her new business website.

I don't have .Mac. I have my own personal email address, domain name, and web hosting for less than $99 / yr. And all the other stuff I don't care about or .Mac costs too much for too little ability.

A major problem with .Mac websites is that they aren't indexed well by Google. And re-directed domain names that point to a .Mac website are also not indexed by Google, generally. Thus, getting a personal page to show up in a Google search is difficult and long-coming at best.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

Hilariously, my old .Mac page used to show up as the number one Google search result for "honeymoon in Prague" (one of the pages was a series of photographs from my honeymoon in Prague) -- I got a lot of weird e-mails thanks to that. That was my first go-round with .Mac, back when it launched as iTools. I used it until 2003, then I went with an alternate set of services that ultimately were a lot more hassle, and .Mac had a series of small but useful improvements and I resubscribed last year. Pleasantly, they kept my old username available for me.

Dave -- you can use her .Mac account to sync your machines to each other if you'd ever do address book or calendar syncing.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

Those are the same people that used the old iTools service years ago that are still embittered that Apple had the audacity to change it to a paid service (with a lot of new features thrown in, of course)

I just can't justify the $99 because a lot of what .Mac offers would be redundant for me. Comcast is already scalping me $55/month for Internet access and I get multiple e-mail accounts and online storage through them. I do local backups on my computers. Third party network backups aren't really an option for me as I have a lot of confidential work data on my machines. I've never been sold on .Mac's sync features...I know a few colleagues that would up with duplicate entries on one machine or the other or wound up have data overwritten on one machine or the other. Plus Apple is not immune to network downtime. In fact, the .Mac support page has a status window that shows when mail, backup or other services are affected. Usually it's only 1 or 2% which doesn't seem bad unless you are part of the 1 or 2% that can't get or send mail for several hours.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

There's a notice on .Mac that it will be down tomorrow from 10 AM to Noon, fueling speculation that there will be a .Mac-related announcement during tomorrow's Apple press event. During Walt Mossberg's D event several weeks back Jobs admitted .Mac had been neglected and promised changes "soon". Could be interesting.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

Should be interesting to see if they reduce price to keep the service alive. As more apps come along to make web hosting easy, the .Mac ease of use is less compelling. 20-40 a month will get you way more space than Apple offers, but then it's just space - not a connect the dots type of place like .Mac.

I've been on a Pair account for years at 6.00 per month with plenty of space for a site.

Tomorrow's big deal is the new iMac

Re: .Mac - worth it?

The one thing I like about the .mac service is the photocasting through iphoto.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

The thing that .Mac does well is tie in with the various Mac desktop apps. The sync capability works well for me also. Where they've fallen behind is perceived value for the service.

I think the new .Mac (assuming there is one and it's coming tomorrow) will leverage Apple's partnership with Google. I would expect Google to provide the basic infrastructure (after all, anyone can get a free GMail account with 3 Gb of space; why wouldn't Apple take advantage of that??), and Apple will layer value-add services on top - perhaps with a tiered-pricing system. Maybe something like every Mac purchaser gets a free .Mac mail account (based on GMail but with IMAP like .Mac mail has now to give it a little boost over standard GMail) with basic calendar/to-do sync between Macs. For a little more (say $30-$40 / yr) , you get more advanced sync, basic web & photo hosting, and a bit more space/bandwidth. The current $99/year gets you the full package, with complete sync (including third-party apps) & backup, advanced hosting (with major improvements over what's there now), and even more space/bandwidth.

I would also expect that there wil be new features announced that will require Leopard (or the Leopard versions of iLife/iWork apps) to take advantage of. I'd bet a fair amount of money that one of these will be an online Time Machine respository, to replace the current .Mac Backup app.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

Well with the new iPhoto/photo album features (like third party e-mail based contribution, full rez downloads) and 10GB storage, I'd give it a resounding yes.

Now if I can only upgrade the pathetic 128Kbps up-speed on my DSL -- where is the !#@$%*&^^ is FIOS in Manhattan?!?

Re: .Mac - worth it?

Yeah, it's not quite the redesign I hoped for, but increasing the amount of storage 10x makes the yearly fee a lot more palatable. And the new online photo features look fantastic.

Also, .Mac now supports using your own domain name, which a lot of folks have been asking for.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

TUAW is reporting that all .Mac users will have their storage automatically upped no later than the 14th (although some users are already seeing the increase). Also, the monthly bandwidth limit has been increased from 25GB to 100GB.

Here a sample of a new .Mac photo/video gallery (which require iLife 08 on the client):

http://gallery.mac.com/emily_parker#gallery

Pretty cool.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

The new online gallery looks cool, but there's a problem with the way they're doing the pictures. Here's an example of when you're view a picture - http://gallery.mac.com/emily_parker#...&bgcolor=black - notice all the jagged edges? They're resizing instead of resampling the pic. If you click the button for photo information, you can see the original resolution and filesize. Then, if you right-click (yes, I'm using a PC) the image itself and look at properties, you'll notice a smaller resolution but the same file size. In firefox, if you right-click and choose to view image, it will show in full resolution without the jaggies.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

One more upgrade to .Mac happened yesterday that I just now read about - they added server-side spam filtering to .Mac mail. Previously you had to check for spam on the client. This combined with IMAP makes .Mac mail a very attractive option.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

Can you post a screenshot of what you're seeing? I'm seeing a nice, smooth image over here in both Camino and Safari.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

this is what I'm seeing on windows.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

and now on OSX....that's at 1280x800.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

wow you're right, look at all the jaggies under the girl's arm.

I'm not seeing those at all on Mac OS X on either Safari or Firefox.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

I'm seeing much smoother images than you! That's quite odd. On my older G4 desktop, I'm seeing an unresized 800x600 image, and on my wife's MacBook it's sized down because of the smaller screen size it's sized down, but still looks smooth. I'll see if I can make a screenshot tonight.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

Freakin .Mac backup system! Almost makes a guy want to go back to Windows! At least then I knew what I was in for.

I've spent 36 hours trying to get the .Mac backup system to work on my wife's computer, to no avail. She's selected 5GB of files to backup; she's got 9+ GB free on her .Mac account, and her hard-drive has 35+ GB free. The Backup app issues failure errors every couple hours, with no explanation or indication what the errors were. We hit "retry" only to see it fail again the next day. This morning, after letting run overnight, found that it had wholly failed and deleted all data it had previously uploaded. The console log had a cryptic error about POSIX system out of hard-drive space. How can I be out of space when her .Mac account has 2x the space we need?

We'll try again this weekend. When Apple does something right, they get superb quality. But when they bumble it, they produce software too simplified to properly troubleshoot. And because their software is so "good", they don't bother to document it adequately!

Anyone use .Mac backup successfully? Any tricks?

Re: .Mac - worth it?

With the increased capacity, I tried to similarly ramp up the amount I back up. It seemed to complete, but then immediately restarted the backup procedure, at which point I canceled it. I intend to try again, but I'm in the midst of migrating my .Mac website to being hosted directly by my domain registrar.

With the new personal domain feature, it is possible to host a site on .Mac, without simply redirecting to it or masking it. It's a big step forward. But given the nominal increase in cost, I decided to opt for true hosting, which also got me 50 email addresses.

I lost the ability to easily have password protected sites, but I think I can do the same using .htaccess, once I figure it out.

At the moment, I plan to still use iWeb to develop the site, and then use Cyberduck to keep the folder on my hard drive in sync with the one on the hosting site. (In theory - I haven't tried this yet.) Not quite as easy as simply pressing "publish" but not too difficult either. I may someday step up to something like Freeway, but after playing with it a bit I was still lost.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

Your .Mac space is partitioned - some is allocated to mail, and the rest to general use (including backup). You might want to go check this split - I'm not sure but it may default to 50/50. You can change the split to meet your needs better.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

In addition to Craig's note (which you can change by logging into Mac.com and clicking on your little silhouette to get your account info), I heard something the other day about issues with backing up a very large amount at one time. I will get some clarification on what exactly the issue is and let you know, but in the meantime you may want to break up the backup into individual items on slightly different schedules and see if that solves the problem. For instance, back up the photos separately from the documents, and so on -- create lots of small plans instead of one big plan.

Also, if you haven't tried it, I love the quick picks like "find every Word document in my Home folder and back it up".

I made the transition to a personal domain with .Mac with only a couple of small hiccups, which I'll detail in the iLife thread (which I think was where I was talking about it before) when I get a chance. Short version: if you're starting from scratch with a new domain, it's easy as pie. If you've already got the domain and are actively using it, talk to your current host about side-effects.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

Oren, what you're doing for your website should work fine: publish from iWeb and upload with Cyberduck (or other FTP client). I tried to talk my wife into this, but nothing doin'

Craig, thanks for the tip. I'll double check.

Re: .Mac - worth it?

The side effect I encountered was that I could change the cname for www.domain.com, but not domain.com, because changing it for domain.com would mess up the email hosted by the domain registrar.

So, either way, the displayed content would be exactly the same (since they would both point to .Mac), but going to domain.com would cause only domain.com to be displayed in the URL (due to forwarding with masking).

Re: .Mac - worth it?

OK, so I tried again. First, i read somewhere that someone fixed the problem by deleting everything in ~/Llibrary/Application Support/Backup/. But after doing that and starting another big backup, I had the same experience - it would keep restarting.

Yeah, well, that's because it wasn't actually restarting. I opened up my iDisk in the Finder, and discovered that Backup was breaking up large backups into parts, roughly 90MB each. Each part was displayed in Backup as if the backup process was restarting. D'oh.

Once again, user error. Damn you, Macintosh! One day I WILL find your flaw!