Don’t mind Apple—they’re just calling to say they’re sorry. Sorry for everything: for the hurtful words they said, for the way they abandoned you, but most of all, for the way they botched the whole MobileMe upgrade thing.
Apple spokesperson Bill Evans (not, not the Bill Evans) talked to our colleagues at Macworld, and offered the following words of consolation.
“The .Mac to MobileMe transition was a lot rockier than we had hoped but everything is now up and running…We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge.”
Woo hoo! Free…30 days…of Mobile…great. It doesn’t appear to have kicked in on my account yet; how about you, readers? (You can check by logging into the web interface and going to the Account pane). Evans also said that Apple would stop referring to all of MobileMe’s services as “push,” due to 15-minute limit we discussed on Monday.
Evans made no mention of a potential return for the late, beloved iCards. I know. It’s tough. Stifle your tears, hold your anger deep inside of you, and then one day…vengeance.
What say you, readers? Are your angers assuaged by the 30 days of free MobileMe?
Update: Apple spells out account eligibility and other details in a support doc: you need to have been an existing .Mac subscriber with an active account prior to July 9th 2008, or a new MobileMe user who created their account before 7PM PDT on July 15th. Extensions will be reflected in the accounts over the next few weeks.
I wasn't upset about the rocky start at all. The extension is a great gesture and much appreciated. People have to understand that these things sometimes happen. Not everything in the software world goes off without a hitch. I think the people that are "upset" about the rocky start need to stop taking themselves so seriously and take just it easy.
MobileMe looks great. I think apple did an incredible job of breathing new life into .Mac. Was it worth not having my email synced for a day and a half? Totally.
Hasn't shown up in my account yet either. I guess they will send you an email, too. The only hardship I had was a couple of days of mobile me's site not working, but I was still getting mail on my mac. I'd say a free month is a pretty cool gesture for that.
It's nice that they acknowledged the problems and made some kind of symbolic reimbursement, but what is a 30-day extension of the subscription really worth? It seems to me that the extra 30 days will only matter if you're planning to let the subscription expire. Otherwise, it's just a 30 day postponement of the renewal date. So what they're giving us is one month's interest on $100, or something like 30-50 cents. If you want to get my attention, discount my next renewal by several dollars.
I'm glad they got it straightened out and I'm shocked they were willing to extend the subscription. What I don't get about those who complain about the service outages is why they though Apple was some magnanimous entity with our interest at heart in the first place. I mean they won't take responsibility for anything a user deems critical. Just like with a lot of web services out there, if you have to have it working no matter what then you need to do it yourself.
@bilmor
Or you could look at it as a free 30 days, which works out to about $8.
I got the email. It linked to this support article: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2408
i could care less about 30 days free. what apple NEEDS to fix is iCal and the major problem with not syncing/pushing subscribed calendars. this is a MAJOR oversight and with all the complaining going on by current users, apple has yet to provide any sort of explanation as to why.
think of it. you've got loyal apple customers who have macs and iPhones and are also .Mac/MobileMe subscribers and these people absolutely rely on their iCal calendar. a big part of it is viewing subscribed calendars (even just birthdays!!), and yet with MobileMe they absolutely DO NOT work. this is a BIG BIG problem that apple seriously needs to address.
I could not care less about an extension when I have every intention of canceling my account shortly. Days in, and Tiger users are still left out in the cold -- the .Mac preference pane is nonfunctional, meaning we can't set up syncing, AND iWeb pages with slideshows no longer function.
I spent an hour on the phone with Apple the other day and learned that there is NO telephone support for MobileMe. So instead I am now in a loop of clueless e-mails from some support robot.
Check out Apple's own discussion boards -- Tiger users got screwed on this one.
Yeah I just noticed that ical wasn't syncing. WTF? That's just not gonna cut it Apple. Why isn't this fixed yet?
I'm happy with the extension, but I hope they get iWeb working right soon. My pages are publishing but I get an error message, comments don't work, and some things look wrong on the pages. It's a little frustrating. So while I'm grateful for the extra month, I hope they're working hard at fixing what remains to be fixed and not sitting back self-satisfied at their magnanimity.
For me mobileme syncs my home network - SOMETIMES - and then sometimes not. I have to go back and reregister my iMac each time it quits.
As for the web apps, Mail works fine for me, but contacts is all screwed up. I get the alphabetical divider bars but there are NO contacts under them.......Wait, there are, but they're invisible. When I hover the cursor under the divider bar a contact pops up in the right pane. Not very handy!
And then there's calender. It loads forever and ever. But sometimes it will actually load and then it defaults to Jan 31, 1969 and has no entries.
As well as losing the services already mentioned, there are no more five aliases to your email account, you get just one account, with two suffixes, one .mac and one .me. So we're paying the same coin for less services.
Personally, I use .mac for syncing my home network and the one email address. Mark/Space has a utility that will sync my network for $49 one time. And there's plenty of services for free email accounts.
It's apparent that .me was created for the iPhone. Well I won't buy one, not because of the price but because of the monthly fees. I see no need to pay near $100 a month to surf as a pedestrian. I'm no longer able to deduct that fee from taxes as a retiree.
So will I renew my me.com account? The answer should be clear by now. Actually, my account doesn't renew until february, so I guess I'll wait and see how it goes. If they put back some of the services they removed I probably will, if not I won't.
Happy to report that ical synching is working now. yay.