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January 7, 2007

speculation

If Gmail has 3GB for free, why can’t .Mac have 30GB for $99?

Posted Jan. 7, ’07, 6:14 AM PT by Aaron Freedman
Category | Apple » Speculation

With the pre-Macworld rumor excitement, this video of a 30GB iDisk running on Windows has been circulating a lot around the web. While I don’t believe that this is necessarily accurate, it would make some sense. I mean, take a look at Gmail. I get an email address with great spam filtering, POP access, a little online office suite, and almost 3GB of storage (2802 MB and growing, to be exact) for the great price of…nothing. So why should I pay $99/year for a measly 1GB of storage (though I can get 4GB, but only if I cash up). But if Apple did upgrade .Mac’s storage space to 30GB, then it may be worth the cash. I use my 10GB Bluehost FTP server for storage space, but if I didn’t have that Google would look like the best online storage alternative unless .Mac got a major storage boost. Plus, 30GB would make it very appealing for podcast providers, and if Apple could find some way to improve upon that platform, it could be a major selling point.

So, come Tuesday, maybe instead of the iPhone, the iTV, widescreen video iPod or Leopard, we’ll see a major improvement to .Mac.


11 Comments

Matt Hoult said:

You may want to check this link out; it's quite insightful:

http://ungeni.us/section/opinion/idiots_jumping_on_digg_bandwagons

January 7, 2007 6:34 AM
MacGeek Pro Author Profile Page said:

Yeah, it would be nice, wouldn't it? Some reason though, I'm not going to hold my breath.

January 7, 2007 8:07 AM
Rob said:

Even if true, it makes .Mac marginally interesting, but only in the U.S. and a few other countries.
Thanks to Apple's Byzantine pricing policy those of us residing outside the U.S. are punished for our poor choice of domicile, if we choose to buy a .Mac basic membership.
Relative to the U.S. price (using current exchange rates), the discount/premiums are:
Canada - 19% premium
Europe - 29% premium
UK - 33% premium
Non-EU &
Africa - 57% premium
Japan - 17% discount
Australia - 9% premium
New Zealand - 1% discount
Hong Kong - 1% premium
Singapore - 24% premium

So, it apparently costs 19% more to push data north from Cupertino to Vancouver (distance 825 miles) than to push it to New York (distance 2555 miles) and 1% less to push it to Auckland, New Zealand (6519 miles).

January 7, 2007 10:12 AM
Ian said:

Yeah, I'd seriously consider paying the fee for 30Gig.

January 7, 2007 1:34 PM
Greg said:

Why can't we have basic functionality back for free like we used to have?????

January 7, 2007 1:41 PM
dead cow said:

i just want a free .mac email address.

January 7, 2007 2:38 PM
DanH said:

If they were to offer way more storage (at least 10GB), I would certainly pay for it. Otherwise, I'll go with a premium Flickr account and some cheap webhosting. It would still be more expensive to pay for .Mac, but the integration with OS X would make it worth while. As things stand, however, the lack of storage space available makes it a complete joke.

January 7, 2007 2:55 PM
Luke W said:

If your just looking to backup files than try MediaMax. I have it and it works great. And the best thing about it is that you get a whopping 25 GB for free. There's also tons of other features too such as email, photo, audio and video hosting. And the best thing about it is that its absolutely FREE. I took me along time to find a solution for my backups and other files that i wanted to share and keep private for no cost.

January 7, 2007 6:02 PM
pwrbkusr said:

30GB is not true...unfortunately, its a bug in the Windows XP iDisk Software. Your iDisk size is as big as your Windows (C:) Partition. Try it. Information for both your main hard-drive, and your iDisk are the same. Sorry folks.

January 7, 2007 7:49 PM
TranceMist Author Profile Page said:

Very few people really use 3GB of email space. However, 30GB of file storage is easy to consume. So the % utilization on .Mac would be much higher than on Gmail.

That said, 1GB is paltry for $99.

January 8, 2007 6:05 AM
matthew said:

Just a friendly reminder to those of you that balk at the $99/year .Mac fee: you don't have to pay full boat. There are a lot of ways to find .Mac for $50-70.

January 8, 2007 6:33 AM

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