Customer Reviews

Apple .Mac 4.0 Online Service (Mac) [DISCONTINUED PRODUCT/SERVICE]

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

The .Mac services are a great intruduction to anyone in the Mac world. DotMac offers free online training and lessons to subscribers, this is especially useful to new users of the platform.
As far as the utilities, I'll say that they're great and could still be better. I use Apple's Mail as my main email and it works flawlessly both web based and through Mail. It synchronizes all my mail and I can see the same messages anywhere, unlike POP3.
iWeb hosting lets you publish your own websites to Apple's servers, and with 1GB of storage, you have plenty of space for all your family pictures, blogs, music and more.
iDisk is also a very useful tool; and I use it constantly as well. I can copy documents to my iDisk and view them from any computer, whether Mac or not.
My only complaint is address book synchronization. Sometimes I add, edit or delete a contact on my Mac, and it will take a while before I can see the changes online; even after manually synchronizing .Mac.
Backup is also a great tool offered with .Mac, and you can easily back up your stuff to Apple's servers. The Backup wizard is very easy to follow and self explanatory. If you're a regular user, Backup is a great tool because it does it all on its own; all you do is run the wizard to configure it.
Overall, the .Mac service is a great idea and it's easy to use. There are other alternatives to the services offered by .Mac, but the most important facts to consider are integration to the OS and its ease of use.

I wrote a review for the 3.5 version of .Mac here on Amazon discussing alternatives to the service. Many of my complaints are still valid: the service is unacceptably slow and the online feaures are rather weak. Rather than rehash those points, below is a revised chart for how to replace .Mac for free (in most cases):

Webmail/Email: Gmail. You'll gain address autocomplete, cell phone access, among other features. Plus, you can still have offline copies in Mac OS X Mail by using POP access (tip 1: set up a rule in Mac Mail to mark every message as read and use the Gmail online interface, or go POP-only if you prefer the desktop client; tip 2: try the Gmail Notifier program for handier integration of Gmail on your Mac.) Free.

Picture Sharing: Kodak EasyShare Gallery. The free Cocoa Kodak EasyShare program allows you to import photos from your digital camera, edit and organize them, and upload them to web for sharing with family and friends (no need to upgrade iPhoto as part of iLife every year for $70). Online albums can sync automatically with your Mac. Free (buying prints costs extra).

Calendar sharing: iCalX. This service is very easy to set up, and you don't need a special utility to use it with iCal. Also, you can have password-protected private calendars with iCalX unlike with .Mac. Free. (Google Calendar might also be an option for you.)

Sync: Plaxo works very well for address book synchronization (and it works with Thunderbird as well as the Mac OS X Address Book). You might also want to consider Del.icio.us for online bookmarks. Both Free.

Groups: There are many: Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, Writeboard, Blogger... All Free.

Photocasting/Blogging (iWeb): Both are available easy-to-use and pretty at Blogger. Or, try the new Google Pages service. Both Free. RapidWeaver is a simple program for making websites. Mac OS X has built-in web hosting capability, you could try DynDNS (free) for hosting web pages on your own computer.

Backup (to disk): Silverkeeper by LaCie. Free. (Also see iDisk alternatives below for online backup options.)

iDisk: If you still need online storage you may want to invest in a hosting company that offers sFTP access. I recommend Yummy FTP as a great FTP client for Mac. Or, you can use Transmit by Panic and Automator actions (for Mac OS 10.4) for online file operations (Yummy FTP can also do automated sync). Alternatively, your internet service provider might already inlcude webspace with your account. Finally, Google is rumored to soon offer a Gdrive online file storage service as part of Gmail.

How well the .mac account will work for you and whether it'll be worth the money really depends on how you work with your computer and how you want to work with it. You can definitely find other services out there that fill one or more of the same functions that you would get from .mac and you may also be able to add up all of the services you want and come up with a price tag lower than that of a .mac account.

What you really need to think about when you're deciding to buy this is how much the difference in cost means to you compared to the amount of effort that it will save you. In a service like this, I'll often see other computer users talk about how you can do the job with something much cheaper. What they sometimes forget is that some people just don't want to spend time (or don't HAVE time for) learning a number of different kinds of software and how to go about using them.

If you're in that group, having all of the services included in .mac as a set is a big help. It means that you'll have fewer different sets of settings to maintain, and the user interfaces will work in roughly the same way for all of them so that you can spend less time trying to figure it out. Also, some other software might require that you spend more time on things like figuring out what server names to tell it, what port numbers to use, and that kind of thing. With the .mac set, however, the software knows immediately that it will be contacting the .mac servers, so already handled for you.

If you're a power user, you'll probably find it easy to find other services to do what you want to do and you'll probably find figuring them out to be easy enough that this isn't worth the cost to you. If you use your computer more casually, and you just want to do what you want to do and then get back to the rest of your life there's a good chance this is worth it.

One warning that I should add, if you're considering buying this so that you can get the use of the excellent Backup program that comes in the set, it may actually not be worth it. The next version of OS X (10.5 aka Leopard) includes a feature known as Time Machine that adds similar function without the yearly subscription cost. Of course, the .mac Backup can put your files on their servers, which protects you from a total hard drive failure in a way that Time Machine (or any other backup system that keeps the files on the same hard drive) can't. On the other hand, you ought to be able to replicate that fairly easily by making sure that you copy anything vital to a CD, DVD, or external hard drive on a regular basis.

At any rate, the Time Machine feature is not available yet, but will be on the new version of OS X due to be released in the Spring of 2007. If you intend to upgrade to it immediately, that means just a couple of months before software is built into the operating system to do backups for you. Since you can only buy .mac subscriptions in 1 year chunks, if backups is your goal you may want to just save yourself a bit of money and wait out the couple of months. I'd strongly suggest looking around on the Internet for descriptions of Time Machine so that you can decide whether it will suit your needs better (or as well as) .mac Backup.

If you don't mind spending $7 a month for very simple solution to certain problems, .Mac is the way to go. Yes there are free options that do the same, there are cheaper options that do the same, but you know what, if you are like me and don't have the time to search and decide and weigh features to save yourself a crummy $2-$7 an month, many easy to use (and therefore quick to use and learn) features are there. I can post pictures on the internet in 3 clicks from attaching the camera! This service simplifies several areas of my life, keeps me from having to carry a PDA, learning how to make websites, and lets me make good enough ones in a minute or two for various functions. I would complain that if you need to store and move large files back and forth from .Mac that it's not very fast, but it works just fine. I have never had a problem with my mail going down or other service interuptions.

THE BIG SPEED ADVANTAGE IS THAT SO MUCH CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED WITH SO FEW CLICKS OF A MOUSE.

This software package gives you an account with .Mac for one year at a lower price than you can get through Apple. You'll get an @mac.com email address, 1GB of storage space on Apple's servers (upgradeable to 4GB with an extra fee) and a few other services. Those services are:

Webmail - Access to your mail from any computer with internet access.

Homepage - An insanely easy to use program for posting your own webpages. You can even password protect them if you so choose.

iWeb Integration - Easy one click publishing of the web pages you create with Apples new iWeb application. (web address will be web.mac.com/user name, where user name is name you choose for your .Mac account)

iDisk - Your personal storage disk on the internet. Perfect for sharing files and archiving.

Groups - Communicate, coordinate and stay in touch with your group of friends, team or organization with a customized website, calendar and message board.

Backup 3 - A very easy to use program for backig up your important files to iDisk, CD, DVD and/or external drives.

Support - Online support in the form of Quick Time movies that demonstrate how to use your .Mac account and other Apple products.

Photocasting - Like podcasting but with pictures. Allows subscribers to stay up-to-date with any changes you make to your album.

Info Sharing - Access your Address Book and Bookmarks from any computer connected to the internet. You can even post your iCal calendars to the web to share with others.

This is the perfect solution for people (like me) who don't want to be bothered with finding (and learning how to use) multiple other companies software to preform these same tasks. It's also good to know that someone's watching your back. Apple does this by continually updating the support pages as well as offering many free programs, demos and discounts through iDisk. For me though, the best feature (besides email) is the iWeb integration. It allows me to easily keep family and friends up to date with my life. I post a blog and movies as well as photos from special occations. And speaking of email it's terrific. It's best feaute is the ability to create aliases (up to five of them) so you can have a different email address for shopping, groups and message boards. If ever an alias is getting too much spam, just temporarliy turn it off.

For keeping family up to date, sharing files, backing up important files and enjoying a feature rich email account you could hardly do better than a .Mac account.

Although there is much discussion in the Mac community whether or not .Mac is overpriced, I find the services useful, and the Amazon discounted price much easier to swallow. Of course there are free services that provide excellent email and photo sharing, I find the sync features indispensable. Having my calendars, address book and bookmarks both at home and work both add to my productivity (and my fun).

Other services such as photo publishing, iWeb publishing, iDisk and file sharing are very easy to use and essentially provide one click interfaces. I just hope Apple decides to add more storage and therefore more value as they did when they upgraded the service to "4.0."

I originally purchased this just for the backup software. However, I do use the mail service, and I use the hosting service just to push family photographs to the web. And, I'm completely dependent on the iSync service to match my settings, calendar, and address book between my personal desktop computer and my work computer. All services work very solidly with little need to configure or babysit them.

Being cautious but lazy, when I learned of the automatic backup feature with .Mac I signed-up. Never seemed to find the time to use the many other aspects of .Mac but automatic backup is so smooth that I renewed for a second year when offered the price-break through Amazon.

I like this product yet it certainly isn't for industrial use. It takes a bit too much time to sync files to a public folder and on all of my Macintosh computers it logs out too slow and prevents my Mac's from shutting down because it won't log out of the .Mac site in a reasonable amount of time. It's good for basic personal uses but I'd avoid it as a solution for a business use.

Never understood why as a Mac user, we were and are forced to pay a premium price (well - retail, undiscounted) when purchased at an Apple Store. Shouldn't the factory store offer some slight discount cutting out the middle man of the distribution network?

we already pay a premium for all things Mac, simply because, well - they're Mac, right?

Anyway, I find it odd that I can get this from J&R for 20% less than anywhere else. ANBD, no shipping price. NAmazon has to get off the charging Tax kick they're on tho, when you can order from anywhere else on line and not pay tax.