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On Aug 5, Steve Jobs admitted that MobileMe was not up to Apple's standards and gave subscribers a 30-day extension.

Although Apple has by most accounts ironed the issues that afflicted its successor to .Mac, the company is back again with yet another olive branch:

To recognize our users' patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received.

There's an Knowledge Base article that lists terms and conditions, but here are the salient points:

• Am I eligible for the 60-day extension?
—You are eligible if you are a MobileMe member whose account was active as of August 19, 2008 at 0:00 Pacific Daylight Time.

• What if I am currently in a free trial period?
—If you were in your free trial period on August 19 at 0:00 Pacific Daylight Time, your free trial will be extended an additional 60 days.

• I already received an extension recently. Am I still eligible for the 60-day extension?
—Yes. As long as you meet the conditions stated above, you will receive an additional 60-day extension.

So, for those who have suffered MobileMe's various trials and tribulations since July 11, your account will be extended by a total of 90 days.

Editor's note: All I can say is that Apple must be bleeding subscribers badly for it to again extend subscriber accounts by an additional 60 days.

The net effect of the various outages must be far worse than anyone's hinted so far. An obvious attempt to staunch the bleeding...

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Reader Comments

Some time ago, I let two trials of .Mac expire without signing up because .Mac was both unreliable and very slow from Eastern Canada. MobileMe compounds those difficulties at the same price. I suspect that a large number of potential subscribers who could use the synchronization feature will never even try now -- why do I want MobMe to screw up my iCal, AddBk, and Mail?? Why do I even want to take a chance? MobileMe Posted by Adam Bell on 08/19/08 11:26 AM When is Apple going to just give and make it free? They've already given 2-4 free months to people who are only a month into their first year. Or maybe they aught to offer it as a one time fee. Like Mac OS X/iLife/iWork, they could let people pay $100 and use it forever... but every 1-2 years they would release a new version with a lot of new features making it tempting to pay another $100 for the new version even though you don't have to. Posted by Guest Poster #2 on 08/19/08 11:50 AM After the first week or so of problems my MobileMe account's been fine - apart from the missing file-sharing feature which is still 'coming soon'. So why are Apple giving me another 60 days? It's Apple marketing. With all due respect to those few people who had ongoing problems, the general experience of MM has been OK (after the first 10 days or so) but the press it's been getting has not been so great. Blogs and news-sites alike have whined endlessly about the MM service even tho' half of these people don't seem to be subscribers. Where were you when .mac had downtime and outages? That didn't seem to be newsworthy but suddenly MM is headline stuff? Apple are filling blogs and rumor sites with positive spin, it gets them a ton of free (reasonably) good publicity and it costs them (virtually) nothing. Meet Apple marketing... Posted by Guest Poster #3 on 08/19/08 12:38 PM Aside from last week, I haven't had any noticeable problems and even last week's outages were short. I think you're right in that the tail seems to be wagging the dog. M Posted by M Sharp on 08/19/08 12:46 PM My calendars still do not sync properly. Calendars! Posted by Synthmeister on 08/19/08 1:22 PM After the 60 day expires, and I have a month/2month break in service, can I continue to use the same sign-on name and password if I decide to pay for the service later down the road (2-3 months later)? After 60 day trial Posted by Tony Z on 07/02/09 12:39 PM

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