Dropping .Mac
I’ve been a .Mac user since before it was .Mac (it used to be called iTools, for those new to the scene). I’ve anted up each Oct 2nd for the privilege of having a .mac email address, syncing across multiple Macs, easy iDisk access and the other .Mac features. However, this year I’m opting out. I had nearly decided to use my $100 early adopter iPhone rebate to renew .Mac this year, but decided against it (I opted for Aperture, which I really like).
Look, I’m not saying .Mac isn’t a valuable service. It is, so long as you want to do things the .Mac way. Let me explain this feature by feature.
Email: .Mac email is very nice. The IMAP implementation is speedy, has good uptime (but not great), and is super simple to setup in Mail.app. The cons are that the storage space isn’t great (it got better with the new update, but you have to share 10GB between email & web), the junk mail settings kind of suck, and it doesn’t “push” automatically to the iPhone like Yahoo! mail does. The last point was a sore spot for me. Why does Yahoo! offer push email to the iPhone for free, but Apple doesn’t?
iDisk: Or as I like to call it, slowDisk. WebDAV is super friendly, and being able to mount and work with the share via the Finder is nice. However, when the transfer speed is ridiculously slow, it really negates the benefit of ease of use. And I suspect the main reason the Finder still won’t write to FTP shares is that Apple doesn’t want to make the Finder too friendly to FTP, as it sees that as a way to drive people to .Mac. Whatever. Convenience is nice, but not at the cost of being a turtle on the information superhighway.
iWeb: I used to publish my family photos on my iDisk through Homepage. Homepage eventually was succeeded by iWeb. While iWeb is nice for those who don’t care about ridiculously huge unoptimized files, it is an abhor-ration for anyone who does web development. I can appreciate a tool that makes serving up pages/images super simple. I still think iPhoto’s export to HTML (while really ugly) does the job nicely. iWeb does a good job of making the average joe feel like they are creating a nice website, but at the end of the day, its a templated piece of crap. Web Gallery is nice, but I don’t want all of my photo/movie pages looking exactly like everyone else’s. Sorry, I’ll stick with iPhoto/Aperture web export, and Flickr.
Back to my Mac: When this was demoed for Leopard at WWDC, I was very impressed. It seems like it will make connecting to computers throughout your home super simple. The problem for me, is that I know how to enter an address in to the connect window, so I’m not really sure I’ll benefit from this. The ability to connect to your home computer via the internet seems slick, but you can do this currently with DynDNS (or other similar services) for free.
Syncing: This is the one feature of .Mac that had me justifying year after year to renew. .Mac syncing is wonderful. And it is getting better in Leopard. In addition to syncing Email Accounts, Rules, Keychains, Contacts, Calendars and Bookmarks, Leopard will also add Preferences, Widgets, and Dock items. This makes getting a new computer up to speed incredibly easy. .Mac syncing usually lobbed off a good 30 minutes of setup time for each new machine/new OS installation I had. It is the one feature I will truly miss.
So for the last couple of weeks, I’ve started to migrate away from .Mac. On Oct 2nd, my subscription will lapse and I’ll be .Mac-less. I’m sure I’ll feel a little sting the next time I need to setup a new Mac. But I’ll just keep reminding myself that I can put that $100 to better use elsewhere.
Posted: September 19, 2007 / Category: Opinion