        |
|
|
 The Geek Culture Forums
 Your News!
 .Mac will be all the RAGE!
|
 UBBFriend: Email This Page to Someone! |
next newest topic | next oldest topic |
| Author | Topic: .Mac will be all the RAGE! |
|
Snaggy Moderator 
Posts: 1687 |
posted July 17, 2002 07:23
   
from http://www.mac.com/1/mac_faq.html... The fee is US$99.95 per year, and as a thank you for being loyal customers, existing iTools members can reserve a first year special offer of $49.95. iTools members will have until September 30 to join .Mac. After this time, original iTools accounts will be deactivated. Yow! that hurts! Pay up or else... I've got 60 days to clear my iDesk and delete my most pristigious email address on the Internet. Yowsa! and you can't even pay monthly! Geeze, even a Superfan account is more flexible. IP: Logged |
|
Zwilnik Assimilated 
Posts: 405 |
posted July 17, 2002 08:02
The pricing has even annoyed me. Ok, so you get Virex with it, but I don't want to pay every year for Virex anyway (besides, I've already bought it) and 100 megs isn't exactly a huge online disk (big enough, but not $99 big enough). I wouldn't mind knowing if the bandwidth restrictions will be lifted when you're paying for the stuff. If not, my current ISP works out cheaper for that sort of storage and email. (and I get an actual ISP) I'll probably do the $49 upgrade for the first year, just to keep my mac.com email address, but I'll probably have to set up a strangeflavour.com email address to replace it with eventually. IP: Logged |
|
Erbo Super Geek  
Posts: 181 |
posted July 17, 2002 08:03
Some wags have already suggested that Apple's "Switch" campaign should be interpreted as in "bait-and-switch."  Apple can't be that desperate for revenue...can they? IP: Logged |
|
Zwilnik Assimilated
Posts: 405 |
posted July 17, 2002 08:27
I think it's a case of 'no-one else is doing it for free, so why should we?' but I think they've gone way to high in their pricing. Did anyone notice that the .Mac section was the only bit of the keynote that had a deathly silence from the audience. I suspect Apple will change their minds and make it a bit cheaper within the next month. I'd pay for .Mac, but not that much. IP: Logged |
|
alphacomp Maximum Newbie 
Posts: 17 |
posted July 17, 2002 09:01
In my opinion, .mac seems like an okay service, although I'm pretty miffed that it has such a high price, not to mention that they're completely deactivating their free service. As a result, I'll have to move the entire Genki Inc. site from iTools to GEOCITIES or some other service, which is annoying in itself.>_< There's a chance that many others will do the same with their own sites, which is pretty unfortunate for Apple, and might make what Apple may see as a treasure chest of gold into a large box of magnetite. Although I don't hate Apple or disown the Macintosh as a result of .mac(I'm actually more annoyed about that Jaguar-textured aqua style in the OS X section of their site), I have to admit that something's been very fishy and different lately about Apple- First the whole thing with the Rumor sites, and now this...Maybe Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field Generator is malfunctioning, or he was captured and replaced with a monster-ish person, a-la Chrono Trigger. The world may never know....=D -alphacomp IP: Logged |
|
Bregalad Alpha Geek Posts: 333 |
posted July 17, 2002 09:46
The free iTools features were a way to differentiate Mac owners from all the rest. It was one more thing that helped justify spending all that money to get a Mac instead of a PC. In the long run this .Mac thing will probably backfire. I expect it will cost them hardware sales as people decide that they can do almost everything just as well on a PC. I for one will definitely cancel my mac.com account and I believe that 95% of their users will too. There just isn't enough value there to justify US$100/year. IP: Logged |
|
perfectstormy Geek Apprentice
Posts: 46 |
posted July 17, 2002 11:04
...and I just started recommending it to some of our users who were using their POP mailbox to move files between home and work. And the mac.com address is a nice perk. But the question you ask yourself about any free service, including this one, lol, is "how do they pay for that?" snaggy: thinking about branching into web services? how about geekDisk, geekTunes and geekMovie? ------------------ IP: Logged |
|
macadddikt18 BlabberMouth, the Next Generation.     
Posts: 1776 |
posted July 17, 2002 11:21
i don't like the idea of paying, but there is nothing else close to it on the mac. So i have 60 days to decide. in that time i shall look for another program, like it. Nayt ------------------ IP: Logged |
|
Snaggy Moderator
Posts: 1687 |
posted July 17, 2002 11:52
snaggy: thinking about branching into web services? how about geekDisk, geekTunes and geekMovie? lol, that was what Nitrozac and I thought of almost immediately. IP: Logged |
|
ilovemydualg4 Assimilated
Posts: 446 |
posted July 18, 2002 10:18
and as a special intro, dot geek is available to forums posters and superfans for only 39.99 a month, and after that, it will be 98.99 a month, that's right, it will cost less than apple!  hahaha ------------------ IP: Logged |
|
AnyoneEB Newbie  
Posts: 9 |
posted July 18, 2002 10:37
"and as a special intro, dot geek is available to forums posters and superfans for only 39.99 a month, and after that, it will be 98.99 a month, that's right, it will cost less than apple!" >US$98.99 a month for e-mail and 100MB of webspace. Now I see why everyone is mad: I thought it per year. IP: Logged |
|
GMx Geek Larva
Posts: 24 |
posted July 18, 2002 14:25
Maybe I should post this in the stupidest thing I've ever done forum. I ponied up for a .mac account so that I could keep my homepage. More disc space is good, but I wish I knew thing were going to offer Virex sooner, because I already bought it. But then it's the one time only deal, so if I don't renew my .mac account after 1 year, I still have it. I also bit the bullet and put an advanced order in for 10.2 because Uncle Steve only let people who bought mac from July 17 and after the free upgrade. I just bought a new flat panel iMac in May!!! I guess this sounds like I'm some kind of mark, but please don't ask me for any money. ------------------ IP: Logged |
|
Rednivek Alpha Geek Posts: 280 |
posted July 18, 2002 16:44
.Mac is $100 per year, not per month! I think its worth it... Apple was having problems with people putting high bandwidth items (movies, etc) on high bandwidth sites.... like webmasters who would store movies or graphics on their itools space and point to it from their domain pages. They couldnt sustain that type of use for nothing. IP: Logged |
|
nekomatic Assimilated
Posts: 419 |
posted July 19, 2002 06:17
I'm just glad I decided to pay the $20 or whatever it was to Yahoo a few months ago in order to keep POP access to my yahoo mail, instead of telling everyone to switch to my mac.com address! No-one should feel they have a right to something that was offered for free, and it does cost Apple to run iTools so effectively it's been funded by a tax on the price of each Mac (or copy of Mac OS) up till now. But it does seem like Apple has handled this one pretty poorly in terms of generating bad feeling among the kind of 'rest of us' users that iTools was supposed to appeal to... IP: Logged |
|
DigitalBill Alpha Geek Posts: 338 |
posted July 19, 2002 06:59
OK... here's some info and my thoughts on .Mac. First, it appears that if you have a friend or family member with a full .mac account, you can have a free email only account.
quote: I read along the way somewhere that you can have 10 free email addresses attached to a full account. So those of us with 4 or 5 mac.com accounts can get 1 full dotMac account, and link up the others as email only. This seems fair. ---- Second, maybe some generous .Mac full users can donate some of their free email addresses to those less fortunate that want to keep their 'prestegiou$' mac.com address. I'd be willing to donate a couple slots after I get all mine straightened out. Third, my personal opinion is that Apple can do whatever they want. They have real costs in running mac.com and I don't think that $8 a month is going to break most .Mac users. Demographically, Mac users tend to be in upper income brackets anyway, at least according to Apple's figures (that's why they only open Apple Stores in high-rent areas). They're adding new features to dotMac and the increased the storage space significantly (figuring on all the mac.com people that would drop out?), so sign me up, again. =bd /me gets out his wallet IP: Logged |
|
MacStar Single Celled Newbie
Posts: 1 |
posted July 25, 2002 22:41
I love Apple. I loved Apple before there was a Macintosh to love. I just wish they didn't seem committed to shooting themselves in the foot every chance they get. Every time I start to think they are finally getting their "stuff" together, they go and pull a bonehead move like this. I LOVED having a mac.com email address. I hate that I have to give it up. But in the post 9/11 economy, there are a lot of people who no longer have disposable income to frivilously throw around and I am one of them. With all the corruption in the financial world, and the lingering threat of more terrorist attacks, this is not something that is likely to change significantly in the immediate future. I'm looking at the real possibility of having to dump my DSL service because I can barely pay my rent as a result of not being able to get a job I didn't need until this year and my husband being laid off and unable to get steady work since Jan. I certainly don't have an extra $50-100 to lay out over and above my ISP for email service! Besides that, the only feature of iTools I used was my mac.com email address, and I picked that up from my destop email client! Yeah... I played around with iDisk a couple of times, but just really didn't have any use for it. My ISP offers as much webspace as I'll need any time soon, and I back up my HD on CDs, and I can access and transfer stuff between my PB and my iMac from my network, so I, personally, never really saw much need for any of the other features of iTools. I suspect there are quite a few others who could probably say the same. I completely understand Apple charging for homepage storage and the geeky-stuff that the more tech-savvy-poweruser type might want. I think its awesome that they are offering Mac-specific features such as .Mac offers and will be offering. I recognize such advanced computing features require more expense, maintenance, R&D, etc, to keep running smoothly and stay cutting-edge. But what about the rest of us? Wasn't the Macintosh originally promoted as "the computer for the rest of us"? I'd love to have more time to invest in learning and setting up and using the other features of .Mac, but the fact is, going to school full-time, I barely have time for my email and Quicken and the wordprocessing I need to do. All *I* really want and need is my mac.com email address and 3-5 mgs of storage space to hold incoming email until I download it to my puter... in case I go on vacation or something. Why can't we have one free mac.com email address for each family member that wants one, or even for a yearly fee of $5-$10 per email address... and then opt in for other .Mac features we might have use for as we want to expand our computing experiences? Why couldn't there be an ala carte menu for other features/services and maybe one or two packaged sets of features to choose from? WHY does it have to be all or nothing??? What happened to the "more choices" mentality that has kept me in the Mac camp so long? Has Jobs been spending too much time with Gates??? Did Gates install an MS worm at Apple headquarters sometime during his five year partnership??? Was that just a ruse to install a Trojan Horse at Cupertino??? This is the kind of thing I've come to expect from the Windoze world... NOT from Apple. I know we fight for every % of marketshare we can get, but this ain't the way to keep or get customers! And it makes it all that much harder for me to sell my Windoze friends on a Mac! Even Microsoft offers HotMail... which ain't even all that hot! Geesh... even *I* find myself thinking... If there was any other viable alternative to Apple... *other* than Windozes... I might find myself investigating my options. I'm not impressed with Linux, either, so I'll stay true to Apple... but if they keep doing bonehead things like this, maybe I'll just have to banish computing from my life altogether. G-d knows I'd have a lot more disposable income if I did... Disappointed in Cupertino once again... IP: Logged |
All times are Pacific Time | next newest topic | next oldest topic |
  |
|
� 2002 Geek Culture� All Rights Reserved.
Powered by Infopop www.infopop.com © 2000
Ultimate Bulletin Board 5.47e
|
