Making the case for a .Mac subscription


Hello, my name is Mike and I'm a .Mac subscriber -- at least this year.

Millions of Apple iTools accounts will go dark next week as Apple completes the transition of its free online services to a fee service. That means software once hosted by iTools will no longer be available, email to acquaintances will bounce and informative and curious Web pages will be blank. Apple is pulling the plug on what was touted as the companies first big splash into the Internet, encouraging its customers to "come on in, the water is fine."

Apple's iTools was a sizable success, attracting 2.4 million users since it was announced in January 2000. Last week, Apple announced 100,000 of those users decided to pay up either $50 or $100 to use .Mac. That's not too bad considering many people have more than one iTools account, and the $50 promotion period is yet to be over. Certainly a rush of last minute procrastinators will sign up, as after September 30, current iTools customers will be deactivated and presumably need to pay $100 instead of $50 for the first year of service.

Much has been said around these parts about the .Mac initiative, and frankly, not much has been positive. Apple apologists cry "nothing is free" while the trolls shout "bait and switch." The nucleus to the problem, I believe, is email. Apple is selling .Mac as a one-size-fits-all solution, bundling the kitchen sink when most of its customers appear to only want or need email. Apple is trying to add as much value as it can, but it seems determined to use old iTools email addresses as a hook for the whole package. Oddly, once you subscribe to .Mac, you have the option to add additional email-only accounts. These accounts function just like a regular account, but only has 5 MB of space. Apple charges $10/year for this account, something it certainly could do as a standalone service. The problem is that likely Apple suspects the same thing I suspect -- given a choice, a vast majority of iTools customers would opt for the just-email option rather than paying for the whole thing. Interestingly, I'm surprised no one has offered to host .Mac email address for a discounted price. Each full .Mac subscriber can have up to 10 additional email addresses. Perhaps if people would rather pay $20/ year for just .Mac email rather than $100 for everything, we'll see this happen. Where there is a will there is a way.

But I digress. Lets put this behind us, and take a look at exactly what .Mac has to offer.

.Mac is a suite of online applications designed to integrate with Apple's operating system and applications. Ideally, they will make using your Mac easier, and therefore your life easier. The services aren't for everyone, but everyone should find a couple things of interest. Before we get going, one key thing is that broadband is almost required. While you can get by on dial up, a lot of the additional services will be painfully slow and pretty much negate the effort. Also, .Mac is most useful for Mac OS X. OS X and supported OS X applications are integrated with .Mac, making things very easy to use.

.Mac Services

Email

Email is by far the most practical of all the services. Apple's new Webmail access allows you to check email from any Web browser, handy for keeping tabs on things while away from your computer. .Mac email works with both POP and IMAP mail protocols, and includes SMTP services. IMAP should be the wave of the future for email. POP allows you to log into an email account and download all email to a mail client, making it ideal if you only use one computer for reading email. IMAP instead saves information to the server, which then can be viewed from multiple computers. So say for example you want to handle email at work and home, IMAP will let you always view email sent to you, email you sent, unsent email, in addition to letting you store email in folders. .Mac gives you 15 MB of space, which should be ample for moderate to heavy POP and light to moderate iMAP (over time) use. Additional email space can always be purchased.

Worth noting, I'm finding Apple's Mail application to be very good at handling IMAP accounts. I used to use Entourage, but I'm slowly moving over to Mail due to its features and stability.

As noted above, additional email addresses can be purchased for $10 a year. These can be new address or existing iTools addresses. They can be accessed via POP or IMAP and have 5 MB of storage. No additional storage can be purchased for the add-on accounts. Considering what you get, this is a pretty good deal if you're looking for an extra email address or one for someone like a family member. The key with .Mac email, is there's no advertising and Apple promises to keep your email address private. Apple will send the occasional marketing ploy or notice your way, but things seem to have quieted down since I upgraded.

iDisk

iDisk was Apple's answer to the floppy. No longer would you need "sneaker net" or a means to shuttle small bits of data using disks. .Mac can be mounted directly on the desktop and used as a hard drive. Broadband here is quite helpful. I found you need to get used to thinking about having the iDisk available. I'd often burn a quick CD if I needed to transport something between locations, or I'd just email it to myself. Now I'm finding iDisk to be pretty handy for getting files from one computer to another. Even if you can fileshare or FTP between computers, iDisk is much easier, espeically for those who don't regularly do these types of things. Note that Apple offers a utility to mount other people's public iDisks on your desktop.

With .Mac, you get 100 MB of space. For what I described, this is pretty ample, as sending more than 100 MB over the Internet is tedious. If you're looking for on-line storage, this should also be enough, however, more space can be purchased.


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Backup

Similar to iDisk, Backup lets you store important files on your iDisk but also CD/DVD. Ideally, you'd store things like your Address Book, bookmarks, and security Keychain. Backup is cleaver in that it will restore your files to the appropriate location. So lets say you lost your Address Book data, when you restore, it will place the data where it belong. Backup lets you choose the files to be added and will save them to your iDisk or a CD-R/DVD-R. Keep in mind you have 100 MB of iDisk space, which is shared with everything else on .Mac and also you're sending this data over the Internet. it'll both be slow and unsecured.

Apple requires you do be a .Mac subscriber to use the CD-R or DVD-R backup option. Once the free period is over, I suppose this will become a moot point, but I don't understand this at all. Granted Backup is a .Mac utility, but frankly Apple should really include such a program with Mac OS X. Once you're a subscriber you can then backup your files offline, if that any makes sense. Note that you must be online in order to backup to a CD/DVD.

The new 1.2 version of Backup allows you to save large numbers of files to multiple CDs/DVDs. This is very useful for making archives of data. When one disk is full, it asks for another. Also, Backup does not use any compression, which I actually like. If you need to pull a file or folder from a backup, you just need to stick the CD in the drive and copy it over, rather than going through the Backup application, which can be inconvenient at times. The one problem I find is that in order backup to a DVD/CD, you need at least that much free space available on your startup disk. This is a problem with Apple's desktop burning system. If Toast and every other CD/DVD program can write files without making a duplicate image, why can't Apple? At the very least Apple should let us choose a scratch drive for the data.

Home Page

Home Page is Apple's Web site hosting and authoring service. Home Page is the center of .Mac and can be used for quite a few things. One of my favorite functions is the photo album. Using iPhoto, you can very easily create an online photo album. If you've ever done this the hard way, you'll appreciate how fantastic this is. In iPhoto all you have to do is create a collection of images and export them to .Mac. iPhoto and .Mac formats the page and makes it viewable for anyone. Similarly you can post movies using iMovie.

Apple also includes a resume maker for an online resume, a newsletter maker, which is essentially a template for portfolio Web site. Also included is similar to newsletter is a Baby page maker with different templates for a baby album and a similar education option with education templates. Also available is file sharing, to host files to be downloaded by others. File sharing can be ideal for getting files to those on Windows machines who can't mount your iDisk.

Anti-Virus

.Mac includes Virex anti-virus program. While viruses are essentially nonexistent on the Mac, an anti-virus program is a good thing to have around. Apple offers free updates which must be downloaded from Apple. The updates come as a package, and installs into the correct location for you. If you don't have any anti-virus software, this should be attractive, but if you're like me and already own Norton Anti-Virus, it won't make your day. Virex can be configured to automatically scan locations, or manually scan for viruses.

iCal

Apple's newest i-App is iCal. iCal allows you to publish your calendar to your .Mac account, although .Mac is not required for this. This allows others to download your calendar so that for example family members can keep tabs on what's going on in your day. This is a pretty cool feature of iCal using .Mac. I couldn't get iCal to publish to my Web server, but publishing to .Mac worked perfectly. .Mac allows you to view the calendar in a Web browser, in addition to subscribing to it for other iCal users.

iSync

iSync is yet to be released and I'm not 100% clear on the advantages of using iSync and .Mac. From what I understand, iSync will let you move files between computers over .Mac. As of yet I don't see any advantage in using iSync over Backup. We'll see what it can do when it's released.

Speaking of synchronization, one thing I really wish Apple offered is a true synchronization solution. I guess basically a way to mirror specific files and data between multiple computers that would allow the computers to transparently have the same data. That would be decidedly neat.

Does .Mac make sense?

So there you have it. At $50 for a year, .Mac isn't too bad of a deal. Apple really sweetened things when it announced 100 free (not including shipping) Kodak prints through iPhoto. That would normally cost $50, so if you think you'll use the free pictures, .Mac is a deal. For me, the real question is what happens next year? At $100 the equation change considerably. I'm reluctant to tie myself down further to .Mac when I may well dump it in a year. For now, I figure I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I expect Apple to considerably evolve .Mac in the next year, and after that time, I may find it much more useful.

For now, I'll mainly use it as an IMAP email account and the occasional iDisk shuttle. I have no use for more POP accounts, Web hosting or anti-virus and I'm not going to even talk about iCards. If you don't currently pay for Web hosting or could use an extra email account, .Mac has some pluses. I think the real value comes in how Apple integrates its products like iPhoto, iCal and iMovie into .Mac. My only concern is that Apple's strategy will go from using iTools/.Mac to improve its software to using it's software to improve .Mac.

If you're looking for alternatives, they're out there. Charles Moore has a great article looking at the various free and pay email services. While free or cheap is good, that saying says you get what you pay for. Since I upgraded to .Mac I've been watching closely how well it performs. There have been a few flaky moments but no outages or failures. The worst seems to be the occasional unreachable mail and the occasional iDisk weirdness that for all I know could be OS X.

So what's my advice? If you're an iTools user, fork over the $50 and give it a trial year. If you're facing a $100 subscription, I'd cool my jets until Apple offers you something that's worth your money.