Customer Reviews

Apple .Mac 5.0 [DISCONTINUED PRODUCT/SERVICE]

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Rather than reiterate all the features of .Mac, I'll just highlight some useful points.
I have been a .Mac member since Apple first introduced it. Apple has been improving and adding features to .Mac all the time. You now get 10 GB of storage (for an individual account) to split between email and data storage, as you see fit.
The version number of the retail .Mac package is almost meaningless. I suspect it is a way for Apple to have an idea of when the package is purchased, as Apple is aware of the first release date of each version and the end-of-life date of each version, as well.
The retail .Mac registration code can be used to either create a new .Mac account or RENEW an existing account. You can save money by buying the retail kit from Amazon or another vendor, rather than purchasing directly from the .Mac website.
According to Apple, the registration number provided with a retail .Mac kit can be used up to nine months from the date of purchase.
The .Mac kit contains a booklet describing the service and how to register. The registration code, to be used at the web site, is located on a sticker attached to the booklet. The kit also contains a couple of Apple logo stickers. That is all. There is no CD or DVD included.
If you are using the .Mac kit to renew an existing account, the renewal takes effect on the expiration date of the account (providing you use the registration code prior to the expiration date.) This way, if you enter the registration code early, you do not lose time on the life of your account.

Buying either new or renewal from Amazon usually saves a few bucks over what the Apple Store charges and is really easy to use.

I have had a .Mac account since it was free and, to be honest, have come close every year to letting it lapse, but the newest versions of iLife apps are so spectacular that I am finding .Mac more useful than ever. The integration between iLife and .Mac make such an easy to use, and professional looking presentation, that it is worth $100 a year for the .Mac account.

Yes, you can find free or less expensive alternatives for photo sharing, video sharing, web site hosting, but none of those will be as easy to use or look so good as using .Mac.

I'm totally new to the mac as of October 2007, and I'm so glad I switched. I think .mac is so cool and easy that I can't imagine why every mac owner doesn't get it. I manage 5 websites now for myself and friends (e.g. when one has a new baby), AND I HAVE NO WEBSITE DESIGN EXPERIENCE. iWeb '08 + .mac = EASY. And the .mac web galleries are great too.

Yes, I'm aware that most of the services included in .mac are free other places. I have flickr and picasa and youtube, I do all that too. But I think $100/year is worth the simplicity and easy of use for this kind of hosting.

I don't use .mac mail (why be tied to Apple when you can have gmail). I sync my contacts, etc, but since I only have one mac, that isn't really helpful.

Basically, I think that the easy-website creation + .mac web galleries are worth $100 a year. Amazon's price is even better.

Also, I've bought several domain names from godaddy.com, so that I don't have the (somewhat) ugly .mac domain names. Steps:
1. Buy domain from godaddy.com (e.g. www.sallylovesapples.com)
2. Go into godaddy settings (i.e. "My Domains")
3. Click "Fowarding" so that you can forward people to the ugly .mac domain (so that when people type www.sallylovesapples.com they will be forwarded to www.mac.uglydomain.com)
4. Making forwarding "enabled" and copy paste the ugly .mac url
5. Check "Moved Temporarily" (not sure what will happen if you choose "permanently")
6. Click the "masking" tab, and enable it (put check in check box), and write something pretty like "Sally Loves Apples"
7. Click "ok" or whatever
8. About 1-2 hours later, when you go to www.sallylovesapples.com (in your internet browser), users will be redirected to your .mac website, but they will never see the ugly .mac domain!!

Hope that helps. It's super easy. And you can get a domain from godaddy.com for about $7.99 for the first year ($9.99/year thereafter). Just google "godaddy coupon" and you'll find coupon codes.

There is no difference between version 4.0 and 5.0 since it is just a box and a set of Apple stickers. You actually buying the code inside the box. It would awesome if Amazon or Apple could email you that code (saves shipping and the packaging costs).

I'm hooked on .Mac. Like many others, I think that one can cobble together the features, free, from other sources. But I've used it for years and there's enough value to justify the annual cost. When I buy it from Amazon, I save about 20 bucks over getting it direct from Apple. What I Don't like is that Amazon sends a big box. Inside the box is another box. Inside that box is a lot of paper. One of the papers has a code. All I need is that code to type in to renew. So I save 20 bucks but then feel bad about my negative environmental impact. But we tree huggers are like this. Thanks for the savings.

Amazon is a great way to save a few bucks on yearly subscriptions to .Mac, Apple's online storage, special features and web hosting service. Purchase from Amazon at a discount, enter the serial number, and Apple automatically recognizes you've already originally or re-subscribed, avoiding Apple's full-priced automatic resubscriptions .Mac (dot Mac) seemlessly syncs with Apple software for backup, web hosting and other purposes. Easily accessible from Macs and PCs (Windows), among its many features are the ability to store and transfer files, lock (password protect) areas or make them fully public. If you own a Mac and iLife, it's a great addition. Apple often posts free software (such as huge amounts of extra sound loops for such apps as GarageBand, backup and other needs.

.Mac was originally a free add-on perk that came with the purchase of an Apple computer. I'm not convinced it's worth a hundred, even though I keep succumbing to the easy temptation to renew when Apple reminds me each year. I no longer keep three Apple computers going, one at an office away from home. Consequently, the iDisk feature, the most useful part of the service, has lost its practicality. (Moreover, during prime business hours the company's webmail program was so busy that using iDisk was impossibly slow; I gave up on it and went to a one GB thumb-drive to transfer work between work and home.) The iSync feature is nice, but not worth a hundred with only two computers. It's not that laborious to go into the next room to read a calendar memo or to do e-mail, though keeping bookmarks synchronized is definitely useful. As for the other features, most of them are available free of charge on Yahoo or Google. Back-up would be nice, but 10GB is minuscule if you have 50GB of music files and write for 6 hours a day on the machine. I confess that I don't take and share pictures with family members (they're all PC users) or maintain a website (there are far too many out there), so I'm not exactly sure what the advantages of .mac are compared to, say, similar free services on Yahoo and Google. But it's easy to get pulled into the "Apple life" without carefully assessing and reassessing your needs. In my case, I know I'm not getting a return on my investment. Next year, no renewal.

I have just spent several hours trying to remove 10 GBs worth of files from my iDisc. Problems observed: the creation at one point of 2 iDisks on my desktop (one is bogus--be sure to go for the one with your name on it); laboriously, exasperatingly slow performance (I'm still in the letter C's). I've wasted more hours if not days on this worm-eaten Apple program than any other peripheral product. Get yourself a 60 GB Western Digital drive for sixty bucks, a Toshiba 120 GB or (at the present moment) a 500 GB Seagate--both of the latter for the same price as .Mac. It will reduce stress, not test your patience each time you use it, and above all save you the precious commodity of "time." .Mac on the other hand is space travel at a mule's pace. I may give up soon and just leave the clutter in some cyberspace orbit. At least, I've become more appreciative of the problems NASA is facing with its own spatial junkyard.

While you can back up to an external hard drive, that won't help you if you have a fire or flood. To be completely secure, you need to have an offsite backup. I've had .Mac for years. I researched the options available now and decided to stay with it (it's especially a good deal if you'll be backing up frequently and/or backing up more than one computer). With .Mac, my computers are backed up offsite as often as I want, automatically, without any effort on my part.

.Mac is worth the money so far. Though you could get some of the facilities for free elsewhere, it is so well integrated into the apps., it is worth it e.g. the Web Gallery is A1. Buy it here at Amazon - cheaper than on Apple. One silly thing is sending you a big bloody box with a number in it! Should be done electronically.

I am an apple developer and me and many of my friends have .mac.

None of us have been able to get idisk syncing to work, after a few uses, it glitches up and you need to delete the local idisk and start again. After upgrading to 10.5, this problem is even worse and the local idisk image takes up tons of space on your harddrive because of a glitch. If you were actually using it, you just lost all the local files that didn't upload yet.

None of us can transfer a file larger than 4GB to or from an idisk.

Transferring many small files is glacially slow. I have a 20mbit connection to the internet and it goes at about 56K speed. Each file that is created takes at least a few seconds to finish creating and syncing, so if you try to put thousands of small files... good luck, I have left it syncing sometimes for days and it never finished.

Syncing calendars and contacts works, but if you also sync to another device like an iphone or treo using isync, then it will get glitched up over time and then hope you made backups or you will spend hours deleting duplicate contacts from your address book (this happened to me twice so far since the iphone came out just a few months ago).

Perhaps the other users who reviewed this only use it about 5 minutes a year so they don't run into these problems, but apple knows about them and has not fixed them. This is the reason .mac is not supported by applecare. The only way to get support for .mac is to submit a web form, where they just email you back generic responses with a huge list of things to try to get your stuff to unglitch. I tried them all and none of them worked for me. They amount to resetting everything, so by the time you put everything back you will end up back where you started.

I am a huge apple fan and own 4 macs just in my home, and an iphone. I have to say .mac is the worst product apple has ever made - EVER. The iTV was a bad idea but at least it does what it is supposed to do.

.MAC is a great idea, and, if i worked, I would recommend it highly, except I have had it for about 3 years, and with this latest version, its not any less glitchy. They just added more space to your idisk and started advertising how you can send up large files - but neglect to mention that you will never use up all that space because it will become glitchy long before that.

Buddies of mine all use macs, and I have yet to meet a person that was able to fill the 10GB idisk. Not only is the connection so slow it would take forever to do it, but files get corrupted and you can't delete them, sot hey are stuck on there permanently, and apple refuses to reset your idisk if the permissions on it get corrupted (I have asked them to reset mine, and they don't seem to have a way to do it).

There is something called jungledisk which is cheaper and works far better than idisk, and calendar and contacts syncing can also be done by third party sites cheaper and better (meaning much faster).

idisk is based off of a webdav technology, and I am astounded how apple managed to implement it so badly. Clearly, they have zero experience in web development. Their own web site looks nice but they didn't even have the sense to detect if someone has quicktime on their machine. And this is their homepage. I have never seen any other large companies main page have a huge X in the middle where a component failed to load on 90% of computers out there (PCs). I wonder if they bothered to test the site from a normal windows PC without their stuff pre-installed on it. Many users I know don't know how to install quicktime anyway and the ones that do know wouldn't want to junk up their PC, they already have windows media player so whats the point?