So-long .mac!
Published on 9 Nov 2007 at 2:31 am.
6 Comments.
Filed under apple, mac.
I’ve been a .mac member for as long as I’ve been using a Mac.
Yesterday when Apple replaced my MacBook I had the chance to renew my membership at the discounted price of $69.95. In fact, every time my membership has come up for renewal, I’ve had a purchase coming up and so each year (except the first) I paid $69.95. I chose not to this year, and let me tell you why.
Mostly, the only thing I use it for is email, and email is easy to find. Besides the countless websites offering free email, I also have servers co-located and I could easily host my own email (in fact, I do.) I guess I liked the @mac.com email address, but that’s hardly worth $70 a year.
.Mac also offers a few other features that may be useful to some people. There’s the iDisk, WebGallery and Mac syncing. I don’t have a need for online storage and ten gig isn’t much, honestly. I could get an 8GB thumb drive for the price of a year membership. Besides, I have virtually unlimited storage on my own servers (I realize this isn’t something that most people have.)
As an owner of several Macs the syncing could be very useful. Too bad it’s not. Syncing is hit or miss. Usually miss.
Each time I setup a new machine for .mac keychain syncing it asks me for a password to a computer I no longer own, a password I no longer use. There’s no way to change or remove that password, so I must remember that one password to do one thing — configure .mac keychain syncing.
Keychain syncing is broken. I use Apple’s Server Administration tools to manage my Mac servers. Syncing those passwords always causes corruption of the Server Admin passwords. That means I can’t actually use the keychain syncing, the one feature that might be the most useful to me. I’ve reported this bug to Apple, and it’s yet to be fixed. It’s still open after more than two years.
Preference syncing isn’t what I want. It’s one of those features that could be useful, but isn’t. I like some settings different on my MacBook from my iMac. Preference syncing doesn’t allow you to choose to sync preferences from only some applications or some system settings. It’s all or none.
Mail rules syncing is the backwards of what I’d want. It syncs the rules, but disables them! Only one copy of mail will have the rules active. I want whatever machine gets to the mail first to handle the rules.
With syncing so broken, it may as well not exist as a feature. The other major features, web hosting, groups (gotta be a .mac member to join groups — good luck finding any), iDisk, web gallery and Back to My Mac are all useless to me. The only thing to stick around for would be email, but I can do that myself, so I can’t justify $70 a year for an email address.
Can Apple fix this stuff? Maybe, but I doubt it. They could make syncing work, that’d be nice. I can’t exactly justify $70 for syncing and mail though. They could also increase storage, say to 10 TB, I still don’t need it. But one thing they could do is lower the price to something more reasonable for what is offered.
When I installed Leopard on my iMac I didn’t configure .mac. Same with the new MacBook. Oh, and my Mini. The only thing I did was add my email account to each machine. Guess what? It’s actually been easier without .mac! No constant “sync conflicts,” no keychain corruption. My contacts stay synced thanks to my iPhone and my bookmarks… I don’t use bookmarks.
So for the first time in four years I’ll be without .Mac. I’ll lose the email address in February. That means I have a little bit of work ahead changing my address at various sites, but then I’ll be free. Free of the $70-per-year email bill.
RoseMary Davis on 9 Nov 2007 at 4:34 pm: 1
I would like to have an update of this after a year to see how you fare—whether you miss any of the .Mac features.
Eytan on 9 Nov 2007 at 11:39 pm: 2
Wow - for me syncing is the best feature of all!
I sync between my MacBook Pro (running Leopard,) my home Leopard server, and until yesterday my work G5 Tiger, now Leopard. It has always worked well. It has always worked reliably (at least the last 2 years). I don’t need to transfer passwords or keychains - I have the same login on each machine, with of course different logins for the server at work on the work machine. I sync my mail. I sync my bookmarks. I sync my calendars. I sync my contacts, thank god for that…. This, for me, is the thing keeping me on .mac. Member since Jan 5th, 2000 - my guess is that is the day iTools was announced. I renew at discounters online, for the same $70.
Hack This Mac : My Mac’s security is being compromised by .Mac on 17 Nov 2007 at 9:20 pm: 3
[...] you may have already read here, I won’t be renewing my .Mac membership. To get a jump on not relying on it any longer I was sure not to add my .Mac account to the .Mac [...]
reinharden on 21 Nov 2007 at 11:23 am: 4
For me, syncing my Address Book and my Bookmarks are the primary reasons I keep a .mac account. Although I usually buy memberships from eBay and pick them up for around half-price when I’m lucky.
I wish that ala Firefox’s extensions, .mac had the ability to sync web history across machines. Although I can imagine that that’d be an interesting problem for some people with shared accounts and, um, interesting web browsing habits!
reinharden
igal on 29 Nov 2007 at 5:26 pm: 5
Some time ago I found a program that did the same sync of .mac but without the yearly $70, instead the license was $70, only once.
I tried to find it again without luck.
Does anyone knows about this program?
Hack This Mac : Can prior .Mac members get a MobileMe Trial? on 10 Jul 2008 at 1:01 am: 6
[...] December I gave up on .Mac. I stopped using most features at that time and began changing over to a new email address. [...]