.Mac is .Annoying
So you know the warm and fuzzy feeling you get all over when you’re in the Apple Store to actually make that Mac purchase? It’s as if nothing could bring you down from that geek-high. Then you get the Best Buy style protection plan sales pitch. But I’m not talking about AppleCare - I actually want that. Rather, I’m referring to the supremely annoying practice of the Apple Store Employees pushing .Mac as if it’s the Second Coming of Steve.
Hold the hate email for just a moment. I realize this is something the Apple Store Employees are required to do as part of their jobs. I mean, who doesn’t want to sell an ongoing revenue stream to their customers? But wow, I swear that nothing can kill that new Mac purchase buzz like being hammered into the ground with all the reasons .Mac will improve the quality of my life. Either you want it or you don’t.
I don’t. Being in the IT world, and having a hearty appetite for all things nerdy, I feel I’ve got a solid grasp on many of the more technical concepts that .Mac targets and simplifies. So I’ve already got my favorite ways to backup, my own hosting, and so on, and so forth. .Mac for me just isn’t something I see value in. Yet “No” is not the answer the Apple Employees are supposed to accept.
Apple provides many worthwhile and valuable services to its customers. OnetoOne, AppleCare, and .Mac being among the more prominent. I’m certain every consumer out there can find some benefit in at least one of these services. But if they understand the service and say no, let it go…No means No!
Excuse my annoyance. As much as I love Apple and all the great things they do, I despise the way they can instantly turn a great experience into one that feels like being at Best Buy.
#1 Ryan says:I’ve never had .Mac pushed at me in an Apple Store. I actually asked, once, if anyone ever buys it, and the Genius told me, “Yeah… but most folks get what they need online to do the same stuff for free.” He didn’t seem any more impressed with it than actual .Mac users!
#2 Teeter says:.Mac is rather excellent for the “right” customer. Sure, sure it’s not a deep geek tool, but trust me there are “billions” of people that just need .Mac, not some complex series of steps to get a nice page up and running. .Mac is pretty cool and lets “most” users work well and easily.
The price should be $25 a year, not $70! (never ever pay $99, shop on google for the part number)
So .Mac is NOT Annoying, it’s only annoying for people that don’t understand you should have to pay $100’s to some “expert” just to put up a nice page.
#3 Former Sales Rep says:You think saying ‘NO’ is annoying to you. Try selling this over priced, underperforming piece of sh!t.
#4 Lyle says:I’m a geek, and can do all the .Mac-type stuff myself, but still have a .Mac account because it makes some things so blasted simple, easy, seamless, and pleasant. It is a pleasure to see in action.
Which brings me to my suggestion: if you find yourself the victim of a sales pitch like the one described above, just tell the person you already have a .Mac account.
#5 Neutral says:I do not necessarily have a feeling either way. My wife has .Mac as it is good for her and family members’ sharing. I do not have it as I do not need it. However, I can see why the Former Sales Rep is a Former Sales Rep, as he provides evidence of his inability to provide reasons and documentation, instead using terms that only prove his lack of education to intelligently provide information. Thank goodness he does not represent Apple anymore. That said, yes, if .Mac could only be gotten for $99 then my wife would not even have it, but for the discounts that are generally always available, it is nice with many of the accoutrements it offers as part of the package.
#6 Maffew says:It may be over priced and under performing but it’s still good enough. I iSync my 3 macs, I video chat, use the mail aliases, host 2 web sites, publish work from my idisk, and use Backup. I’ve even got a 4-char .mac addy so it looks like I’m never leaving. It could do with improvements though and I’m not talking about more space.
#7 vanni says:I have a .mac accoun which i love/hate. Apple needs to update this clunky/easy app. and it needs to make it a 39.00 app. 99 is S T U P I D and overpriced. iDisk is over priced. ABckup is clunky .. i could go on. But some of it’s other features are great. PS. where in the hell can one edit the iWeb pages on our iDisks?
#8 Mark Issacs says:I’ve used .Mac since the day it became available. I recommend it to all Mac users, especially those who have come from the “dark side” using Windows. Many of them do not know or cannot verbalize why - but the find the Mac just feels right. To those users in particular, .Mac enhances the Mac experience. Integrated email, automated back-up of critical files to your iDisk, off site but available where ever there’s a computer copies of your most valuable info. What the hell are you complaining about? The product and service are, in my opinion, worth far more than the annual cost. The $99/year for a permanent email address - especially if you have a decent one - the ability to sync and protect your bookmarks, settings, addressbook, etc., makes it all worthwhile.
$99? I’d glady pay $149 or $199 for it. This product/service package completes the Mac user experience and can save your ass on occasion. Like when I dropped my cellphone into the Grand Canyon while taking a helicopter tour. I could buy another RAZR by pulling out a credit card. But my address and phone numbers were somewhere near the shores of the Colorado as it winds through the bottom of the canyon. One five minute stop at an Apple Store in Phoenix after I’d bought a new phone and I had my numbers back into the phone with no problems, NONE. Of course if I’d not had .Mac my restore of the Razrs Address and Phones would have to have waited until I flew home to New York City several days later.
#9 Zar says:.Mac is great, overpriced, but great. I love it, but can’t afford it at the moment. Fortunately, there are many free options available that can be used to emulate .Mac. I use GMail for storage of photographs and files. Plaxo permits me to sync my emails for free - imperfect and a bit klunky, sure. Still it is free and what I can afford at the moment. I was never able to use iSync for my cellphones, so I use Onsync for my phone syncing. It cost me about $19.00 and that’s about what I spent with some additional time, which cost me very little.
Should I get the bucks ahead I’ll definitely re-up my .Mac subscription - will do it faster if Apple lowers the price…
#10 sjmills says:I don’t find it to be overpriced. A hundred bucks for a year? Big deal. It’s totally worth it to have Address Book and iCal seamlessly and automatically kept in sync on every computer in the house (plus the computers at work when I used to work in an office). I also find it much easier - when needing to make a file available to other people - to simply copy it to the iDisk rather than using some other xfer method, e.g. launch Terminal, navigate to the source folder, type in an ftp address, put, quit, etc. It’s also easier for the newbie recipient.
And since Apple writes the server side and the client side software, it will always work with all the apps that currently support it (and probably more in the future).
#11 Kurt says:It does certain things very well. Syncing data between machines, seamless website publishing, backup of files. Sure, they are separate programs out there that do all this for less, but combined, they don’t do the things .Mac does as easily - with one click ease. I think it’s worth the money.
#12 eberlin says:.Mac is in desperate need of updating. I did purchase it when I was new to Macs and found it useful but I will seriously consider ditching it at my next renewal unless it can:
1) Introduce more integration by including more tools onto one personalised homepage. I now use Google personalised homepage and I would love a more stylish Apple version.
2) Increase the storage. Compared to offerings from gmail, yahoo and hotmail, .Mac is lagging behind its competitors.
It really is time that some focus is given to .Mac. Hopefully we will see a significant improvement at the same time as the launch of Leopard.
#13 Viswakarma says:We use .Mac for e-mail and iDisk which allow us to access our mails and important files from anywhere in the World without advertisements, since we travel a lot. Moreover we get 2 to 3 free songs from iTunes every week as a part of the package. The free songs themselves pay for the $99.00/yr (less than $10.00/month or $2.50/week). There is a lot more that .Mac offers for the price that we still have to experience.
#14 Armen says:Overpriced, but as others pointed out, unbeatable for ease of sync and publishing, especially with the way apps like iPhoto, Yojimbo, &c. integrate with it. Also overlooked is its WebDAV access — so easy to share music and other files with Win/Linux/Mac friends. Pet peeve is inability to publish to the calendar from anything other than a Mac. Hey Steve, some of us would kill to use Macs at work, but can’t (yet)! We’re still loyal Mac users, throw us a bone and let us publish from work!
#15 ThunkDifferent.com says:.Mac needs updating. The syncing could be much better coordinated, and of course the iweb & back-up features are really the best features of the product. It is a pity they don’t moderinze it. It is true many of the services offered with can be offered for much less.
http://ThunkDifferent.com
#16 Niclet says:That’s funny, I was in a Apple Authorized reseller last week to buy a flash drive and in the same time, I asked info about .Mac with the positive intention to buy it. The vendor was categorically discouraging me to do so. The main reasons was the (over)price and the “gadgetized” features.
I was looking for a solution to help my wife and I to live-sync our calendars and also to have a server to share big documents with others.
Mmm, I continue to meditate on this…
#17 David Bailie says:I agree with the main gripe of the article, that pushy salesmen ought to be taken out and shot, but I personally think that .Mac is brilliant. I use PC’s at work and Macs everywhere else and can get at all my documents on my iDisk from everywhere. I sync my phone to my Mac and then to my iDisk so everything is always the same. My calendars are always in sync too. My family are spread all over the country and are not computer literate at all, so dropping all of our pictures of our last trip or of the kids playing ball is easy. My wife creates photo books and slideshows and drops them on line. I like the mac.com email address too.
I gladly pay the $140 (I’m in Canada) every year. As someone else said, it completes the Mac experience for me. But as someone else said, it’s time for an overhaul.
#18 EV says:I buy .Mac purely for the offsite Backup feature, but I’m ceaselessly stumped by its shoddiness. I repeatedly have to click “Try Again” because “Backup is in use” when it’s doing two things at once. Worse, the “incremental backup” feature clogs my drives, both idisk and external hard drive, with useless, repetitive saves. What is the purpose of this??? Iomega’s backup program on my PC replaces recently changed files with the new version, that’s it, and that’s all it should do. Why does Backup copy everything every single time, without erasing the previous versions and without notifying me when the disks are full? That’s considered “incremental”? Maybe I’m missing out on the Mac elegance here — if so, I’d appreciate any insight into what’s going on.
#19 Thunk Different. says:.mac isn’t that bad, well… ok it is. It is useful tho - just not $99.00 useful. Much more like $19.99 useful.
iHope their is an update, last year it was all about the igoogle and apple integration, this year NO ONE is saying it, even tho Google updated the iPhone search, gcal, and other features.
Tomorrow will be interesting…
#20 Karl Blessing says:Odd, when I purchased my MacBook about a month ago (first mac I owned since the G4/733 I purchased back in 2002 and went back to PCs around that time). I was actually bugged to get applecare (which I would get but could not afford at the time). Not a word about a .Mac account at all.
However course I noticed on OSX if you click anything .Mac related, like the iDisk you will of course get all the sales pitch plus the 60 day free trial offer. I don’t know if this was the case in the past revisions of OS X, but I think they stopped pushing it (at least in the apple store near me) because the OS already pushes it in your face upon first boot, and upon clicking any of those features.