.Mac Needs to Be Radically Retooled
When Steve Jobs announced Time Machine at the recent WWDC keynote one could sense that he was excited about something. After all, at first blush Time Machine is nothing but a back-up piece of software, much like the aptly named current Apple backup offering, Backup. The first thought that flashed through my mind was, “holy crap, Apple is finally going to get it. Steve and Co. will get that Gmail is giving 1gb away for free, Yahoo too, and, oh yeah, there is AOL’s recent 5GB for free annoucement. Apple is going to offer virtual backup space the same size as the hardrive you ordered.”
I was wrong. Time Machine lets you go back to files in your past. A very cool and sexy feature (and the interface don’t hurt either). Until you start thinking about disk space. If you start saving multiple versions of that photoshop file you could get in trouble. Quick. But this piece isn’t about the pitfalls of having access to previous versions. No, this is about the pitfalls of .Mac.
.Mac is a dinosaur of an offering that has been completely overshadowed by the web 2.0 offering both in terms of technology and features. Want to manage your family’s photos? I suggest Flickr, not .Mac. Creating album web pages is a pain with .Mac compared to Flickr. Want to allow your relatives to order photos in .Mac? Can’t. Want a way to quickly tag photos and make albums? Use Flickr. And, as far as I know it doesn’t limit how many photos you store.
Another .Mac offering is email. I think enough has been written about this, but suffice it to say Gmail’s free email offering smokes .Mac. So what does that leave? Not a hell of a lot.
Which is why I got so excited about Time Machine. When Steve showed that only 3% of people actively backup, I thought Apple is going to solve this! It hasn’t. So Apple you want to be bold, and make .Mac something worthwhile? Here is what you need to do.
First of all make .Mac free. Forever. No iTools switcharoo five years down the line, please.
Second, fill it with outrageously good features. When I buy a Mac I want a virtual disk housed by Apple that matches my hardrive size. Free. I want to be able to use that to backup my machine using Time Machine. Free. Now that would be a feature.
Third, port stuff to the web. If the whole web 2.0 thing teaches us anything it is that the web is the primary operating system of choice. People watch videos in YouTube, not Quicktime. We use Gmail for email, and manage our photos with Flickr. Create tools that integrate with the OS, yes, but whose primary interaction is the web. The homepage builder in .Mac is a good start, except that it has an old paradigm of building web pages. We don’t build web sites anymore, we build spaces online using wikis and blogs. iWeb is an excellent example of something that should have been web-based from the start.
.Mac as a distinct product should disappear, replaced by a suite of innovative web-based applications. Be bold with .Mac Apple. Stop thinking about how to milk users for every $99. .Mac membership when customers buy a Mac and yes, think different. Otherwise .Mac will soon be left in the dust by the Flickrs, Gmails, Pandos, and Youtubes of the world.
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I would just be happy with .Mac mail to be free .. everything else I can take care of on my own on my university’s server (not that it’s exactly very trustful either) .. but paying 129$ per year (yes, in Canada it’s that expensive) is a little much.
Why not give everyone who buys a Mac a free .Mac email account?
It would just be great to have .mac free. It would be great to have everything free. Maybe Crest should give toothpaste for free. Do you give your time away for free? If so I would guess someone is supporting you.
.mac is like any product or service that is available. If you like it buy it. Otherwise forget it. It’s not a philosophical issue.
Personally I sometimes prefer to pay for something rather than be constantly besieged by advertising, but that’s just me.
Jim
.mac is like any product or service that is available. If you like it buy it.
Of the pointless defenses of .Mac, this is the pointless-iest. Since no one is asking that Crest give away free toothpaste, then one must exercise the thinking portion of one’s brain (no matter how much it might hurt) to imagine why so many users, and Mac fans at that, would advocate a free .Mac account (although I personally would settle for it being substantially cheaper) while NOT simultaneously requesting free toothpaste.
And one need not look too far for the answer. Mac fans want .Mac to be competitive. But the products that .Mac competes with are almost all free. Therefore, it’s not unreasonable to argue that for .Mac to be a viable service that attracts more users, it would have to offer either a heavy discount or way more value.
But right now, .Mac costs many times MORE than similar products while offering LESS. And if we kick the cobwebs off yet another thinking part of the brain, we realize that offering less and charging more is not a good model of success, and that the only people willing to pay for that service are your most loyal and diehard <strike>chumps</strike> customers.
And as others have pointed out, and now we’re really exercising the brain power here, .Mac could/should be included in the purchase of a Mac or OS X upgrade, which would drive the cost down while increasing the user base. And since Apple ties so much functionality of the Mac into .Mac anyway, that isn’t an unreasonable request either.
I tend to believe that .Mac offers decent services for the money, although I think one year’s membership should come free with the purchase of a new Mac or a new version of OSX.
One point also: I think the refernce to YouTube in the following sentence “People watch videos in YouTube, not Quicktime.” is inaccurate. It is Flash Video that is taking the web by storm. Quicktime player (and other iLife tools) should export to Flash making it easy for users to share their media in the growing internet social network.
I’m a developer, was at WWDC, and sat in the Time Machine presentations. From what I learned, your concerns about mulitple copies of a photo being stored by Time Machine are not warranted. The backing up is a bit more sophisticated and bound to get only more so as Time Machine is refined.
I’ve used .Mac since its rollout and have no problems with it. Free would be nice, but I think I get what I pay for.
I’m excited about Time Machine and the future of .Mac. But then, my iPhoto library is only 35 Gig and my Music library is only 55 Gig, so I may not be the memory hog that others here may be.
Thanks for the great comments everyone.
jdhouse4: I was at wwdc as well and heard the keynote. From what I could understand while there will be some great work within Time Machine a file is still a file. If, as a designer, I work on hundreds of megs of files throughout the day I can’t see how Time Machine is going to work….please correct me if I’m wrong!
Beeble: Once again you hit the nail on the head with this, “But right now, .Mac costs many times MORE than similar products while offering LESS.” This really sums up my argument.
jbelkin: I’m not talking about going to one website, in fact, the use case for Flickr is arguable easier than iPhoto. Download images to computer (using Image Capture, no iPhoto needed). Upload images to Flickr and organize in an easier way, create webpages for friends and family (yes, Flickr has a private option) in an easier way, order prints, etc.
OK, lets look at the features Apple highlights on their .Mac page:
Publish in one click with iWeb: If you want to do a far more powerful photo album, use Flickr. If you want to do a blog use blogspot. About the only advantage I see in iWeb is easy podcasting. Oh yeah, and Rapid Weaver rocks and has a one-time fee of $39.95.
Photocast with iPhoto: cool idea in principal, but is based on closed systems, not the web. Only works well if all your friends and family have iPhoto. Want to download a highrez version of he image? Can’t. Want to order a print? Can’t. See Flickr.
Exchange Files from anywhere: I do use this feature (yes I’m a .Mac member!). It is a good, one, but I know there are tons of other free optoins, albeit not so seamlessly intergrated with the os.
Stay in Sync: Same as above
Communicate the way you want: See gmail
Back up your life: Well, not your whole life, only up to 1gig unless you want to pay through the you know what.
Bring groups together: Yawn….
Correct where I’m wrong, everyone
Okay so about Time Machine…it’s not so much a backup solution as it is a combined backup/transaction logging/versioning system. You don’t get multiple copies of your files backed up. You have a single backup and then a record of all changes made to the file(s). Think of the way non-destructive photo editing in Aperature works…you have a database that records each and every change you make to your photos so you can always roll back to a certain point. You will also be able to determine exactly what you want covered by time machine and for how long. Just clearing that up….carry on.
I now that I’ve already decided to switch this year to some free offerings—awardspace.com for hosting, box.net for file storage, flickr/picasa for photos, and my beloved gmail and google calendars for email and calendaring. As a student I just can’t afford to keep renewing. Sorry, Apple.
I agree .Mac needs the reinvention. I still think Apple could make an amazing change to people’s computer experience if they backed up everything to .Mac, but in a way which allowed me to log into any Mac, anywhere, and be given my standard desktop, files, and applications (probably only caching file lists etc, and then download files on demand)
However… I agree that the space required may be too high. And the upload speeds may be low.
So if I made a deal with a friend (or family) that we would back up each other, would that solve the issue. Could my friend’s Mac becomes my external hard disk (over the internet)? Could I then log in on some 3rd Mac and have it connect to .Mac for spotlight searches & file info, and then either my or my friend’s Mac to get my actual files?
Basically, could .Mac become an umbrella service that integrates backup, iChat remote desktop access, file access, group iCal, and iPod file movements?
Greg (n° 24),
“Basically, could .Mac become an umbrella service that integrates backup, iChat remote desktop access, file access, group iCal, and iPod file movements?”
Once again, is this not simply what OSX Server does ?
I don’t think anyone does what I’ve described. Have a local server does achieve many of those same goals (eg log into any machine and just work).
If Apple can use its resources to give you your Mac, anywhere, I think it’d be a killer app. As long as you can log in to any Mac, and see your own desktop, email and files - it doesn’t matter if
1) those files etc are all stored on .Mac, or
2) it uses a background file exchange (via iChat) and caching with your own Mac, or
3) uses your iPod, or
4) even if it just remote controls
Most likely - it’d need to use a combination. Anyway… enough of that