.Mac is one of Apple’s most controversial products, right alongside the love-it-or-hate-it Apple TV (me: love it). Technophiles can see past much of its gold and glimmer and locate other services online that do the same stuff (sometimes more) cheaper, or even for free. Of course, the downside to all that is inconvenience — but weighing the $100/year subscription and the one-time inconvenience of locating and setting-up a .Mac-like psuedo-service, it’s not hard to believe that many would choose the latter and instead spend the money on something totally more worth it…like, say, a $100 supply of Jelly Bellys.
“Many,” though, apparently isn’t all that much: Analysts at NPD Group now say that the .Mac service package is the second best-selling product at Apple retail stores. I always figured .Mac’s mind-penetration was limited to those of the Mac Elite — but now I’m noticing even my non-techie friends jumping on the web service bandwagon, buying a subscription to .Mac when they buy a new computer. (Of course, they do often later admit they “have no idea why” and “aren’t really sure what it actually does.” A testament to the persuasive powers of Apple retail staff.)
The real upside to this is aptly noted by David Chartier at Infinite Loop: more people buying .Mac means more attention from Apple — more features, better support, etc. .Mac won my heart with Back to My Mac and its simple syncing — but really: it could be so much more.
Come on people, it's a no-brainer. If anyone out there wants to host a banner-free web site, you're going to have to pay at least $12.95 a month (give or take) to match the 10GB that .mac offers.
.mac is only $8.33 a month and getting 10 Gigs of online storage is only 1 thing out of a list of at least a dozen that you get with .mac.
.mac is totally worth $100.
This Christmas, tell your friends and family you want gift certificates to the Apple store and maybe you'll end up getting it for free.
krye is right. The hosting space is cheap. I use most of the other features too. If you look at it monthly, it isn't that much money. You can get .mac on Amazon now for less than $99, btw. Or I seem to find a way to get a discount almost every year (referrals, buying a new mac).
I've had .mac since it started and I can understand why technophiles don't like it, the only problem is, IT'S NOT FOR THEM!
.mac is for people like me that don't want to worry about signing up for some free / low cost service and waking up some day to find out --
a. The service has closed down , over night, 'poof', gone.
b. The service sells your personal information to all and sundry.
c. You get stupid ads with the 'free' service.
d. You find that their tech support is useless if you have an interface issue between your mac and their service.
So what if I can duplicate all the .mac services with free/low cost services and save $. I don't think I would save that much, and I don't know about you, but the hassle factor of trying to piece together something, dealing w/ different companies, etc is worth avoiding. How much am I willing to pay for avoiding a hassle with my computer? Why, about $100 a year, strangely enough.