Is the £59 price for MobileMe worth it?

[tjhilder]

I was thinking of signing up for MobileMe, but then I saw the £59 price tag after the free trial.

is it worth paying £59 for a year?


EDIT: if a mod comes around here, please change the title to : is the £59 price tag worth it?

 

[jsw]

There are many of these threads already.

Brief summary:

(1) You can usually get it (much) cheaper online, depending on where you live. Apple's prices are never the best for it, except possibly when buying a new Mac.

(2) It's usually worth it, or close, when you have an iPhone, a Touch, or multiple Macs. With a single Mac, it's not all that worthwhile for many people.

(3) The email and offline storage aren't really worth it; the sync capabilities pretty much are.

So... it's all up to you and your situation.

 

[Pooshka]

With an iPhone, Find My iPhone feature and a Mac, it's an absolute MUST!

 

[MacDawg]

You pay for the seamless features with your Apple products

Many of the "products" can be found cheaper or for free online in other places, but not with the integration that Mobile Me gives the Apple/Mac user

Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

[tjhilder]

Ok so I decided to give it a chance, but I'm trying to find an alternative to using outlook as my calendar, any suggestions?

 

[Let's Sekuhara!]

is it worth paying £59 for a year?

I was just discussing this in another thread. Here is a brief overview of some alternatives to MobileMe services:

Free me.com email alternative: Gmail
Free calendar and contact sync alternative: Google Sync
Photo sync alternative: manual sync via USB cable.
Free photo publishing alternative: Flickr
Free iDisk alternative: Dropbox
Free Back To My Mac: LifeHacker workaround
Web hosting alternative: too many to list (free solutions usually place ads on your site)
Find My iPhone: no known alternative
Remote Wipe: only known alternative is Microsoft Exchange Server, which would probably be more expensive.

So while many of MobileMe's services have free alternatives, not all of them do. People who pay for MobileMe usually do so for the sake of having all of their internet services conveniently bundled together. Of course if you ever decide to cancel your membership it can make things more complicated for you. But it does bring a lot of cool services to people who would otherwise have no idea how to sync all of their data, publish websites, etc. The price tag does make sense if you take full advantage of all the features, it's just that many people don't need all of that stuff. And there are probably also people who will pay that price for the Remote Wipe option alone. People each have different reasons for finding value in MobileMe. Considering the alternatives, is the £59/year worth it to you?

 

[steve knight]

I got a kerio email account that used ms exchange. it worked well though you could only sync calanders and contacts with outlook or your iphone. but the imap worked great syncing email on my two computers using thunderbird. then for some reason it stopped pushing email to my iphone and I gave it up as I needed to move to a different host. now I use gmail to fetch my mail and forward it to yahoo to do the push till gmail gets there, I like googles calendar better then anything else nice drag and drop interface and choice of notification methods.

 

[macgrl]

I suppose it depends on what you want to use it for and whether you will make use of the facilities it gives. I for one love it and it makes things a lot easier for me.