MobileMe to Become a Free Service?

[Steven in VA]

Didn't somebody already point out the family account bargain?

$149 for 5 accounts; only 30 bucks per account per year seems like a good deal for us. Even though our kids are grown they still like having it. And the 10GB storage on the sub-accounts is still big enough to be useful.

But I just got the email notice that mine/ours is just about to renew, too. To have it become free for new users in a week, or a month, even, would be somewhat of a bite . . .

 

[Nuvi]

But I just got the email notice that mine/ours is just about to renew, too. To have it become free for new users in a week, or a month, even, would be somewhat of a bite . . .

I'm sure it won't be full MobileMe if its ever going to happen. I'm betting my money on Apple lowering the price but in that case the old subscribers get extra space.

 

[cjmillsnun]

This has never happened

Maybe it hasn't but I could see the logic.

Buy a Mac and receive MobileMe free during the limited warranty (and during AppleCare if you purchased that)

Afterwards charge for the use of it or supply a free ad supported model. I'm not saying it would happen, and you correctly pointed out it hasn't

We could find out that Apple have no intention of changing their current model.

 

[jjvdhoef]

While I agree, MobileMe is still in my eyes the best of the bunch. That's how they get away with charging $99/year. However, if it became free, they could really talk up how great owning a Mac is because of MobileMe.

I don't know what the service was like this past year, but while I subscribed to the service it was very very very unreliable. I now use google services to replicate most of the functionality for free.

 

[kesnut]

It's naive to assume that Apple won't use MobileMe data in the future to serve you ads.



Given the [lack of acceptable] performance of the current service, all of these things are just going to be painful to use. If they can devote some more bandwidth to them, I could see it being a hit.

i am hoping that the new datacentre will improve the current problems that we mobileme uses are experience.

and i yes those are a great idea
free mobileme with iads
paying users no ads
one can hope, i don't want ads in my mail, i have yahoo and gmail for that..

 

[PhoneyBoy]

There are changes coming to MobileMe, but I can't say anymore due to an NDA.

 

[PsyD4Me]

Maybe it hasn't but I could see the logic.

Buy a Mac and receive MobileMe free during the limited warranty (and during AppleCare if you purchased that)

Afterwards charge for the use of it or supply a free ad supported model. I'm not saying it would happen, and you correctly pointed out it hasn't

We could find out that Apple have no intention of changing their current model.

And what happens to the email address after people don't renew for a paid subscription.
I think for free they should just include a shell acct where you can manage your files (2gb), but you get no email

 

[tivoboy]

paid

I'd be so pissed/happy if it were to become free... 1 year of .Mac and 2 years of MobileMe.

Pissed, I spent $99 for 3 years

Happy, more people will have access to MobileMe's benefits.

If one paid for MM, and it went free, apple would most certainly push this money towards either itunes or whatever addtional premium services a FREE MM would offer, which of course they would

 

[tivoboy]

services

I for one, feel that what I pay per year (about 35$) for the MM services it TOTALLY worth it. for 20GB of online photo album storage, idisk offline syncing, syncing my calendar, addressbook etc. (which WORKS with iphone and macs MUCH better than the google solutions) being able to find my iphone and my nephews when he drops it, being able to send people files, data, pictures for them to download, creating iweb sites for photos, updating family via simple RSS, etc. It really does work well. I have never really used the email services since I have so many others, but the implementation is good nonetheless.

If it were free and I simply got more space and services, I think it would be even more positive, but I wonder WHY/HOW they would make it free. I don't see it being in any way a compelling reason for someone to BUY a mac. I don't want them to plunk advertising all over it. It MIGHT be part of their cloud services solutions that are coming to stream YOUR content to ANY device, so your payments for THOSE products could cover it. Not really sure what the operating model would be.

 

[ste1989]

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this so far, but to me it is very obvious the reason why some features will be free.

The iChat and a/v integration on the next iphone.

Obviously iChat needs either a mobile me email address, or an AIM username, or some other less common ones.
Needless to say, AIM is not very popular outside of USA. Everyone uses hotmail or gmail afaik.

If they really want to plug the new iChat, they need to get as many people using it as possible, so therefore the @me email addresses will probably become free, and maybe more features with it

 

[Little Endian]

I don't know about completely free and with all the same features available now. Free would probably bog mobile me down to a joke status and even now I would hardly call mobile me performance stellar. Perhaps tiered pricing and plans would be more suitable.

However I believe Apple could and should lower the price. I have been using Mobile Me since itools and have been paying the $100 a year Apple tax for the past 5+ years. Well sort of... The first year year hooked me in at $49 and I got another couple years on discounted terms. The progression of itools>.mac>mobile me has seem many improvements and added features, but really come on!! $100 a year for services that you could get for free or half off is pretty steep, sure the integration and seamlessness is nice but its far from perfect.

I have actually been planing to cancel my mobile me plan for the last two years but both times auto renew and laziness sucked me back in. All I know is that this year will most likely be my last unless Apple dramatically improves performance, adds more features, or drops the price. After all itools used to be Free and was an added benefit of using a mac.

 

[Sky Blue]

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this so far, but to me it is very obvious the reason why some features will be free.

The iChat and a/v integration on the next iphone.

Obviously iChat needs either a mobile me email address, or an AIM username, or some other less common ones.
Needless to say, AIM is not very popular outside of USA. Everyone uses hotmail or gmail afaik.

If they really want to plug the new iChat, they need to get as many people using it as possible, so therefore the @me email addresses will probably become free, and maybe more features with it

Couldn't they have people use their iTunes account?

 

[Sky Blue]

There are changes coming to MobileMe, but I can't say anymore due to an NDA.

yeah, i know all about it too..i just can't say either.

 

[ste1989]

Couldn't they have people use their iTunes account?

remember not everybodys itunes account is an email address, for use with ichat etc
when setting up a mac, I got an Apple ID(which is my itunes account) and its just a username not an email address

 

[Sky Blue]

remember not everybodys itunes account is an email address

yes it is.

Anyway, you don't need an email address, just an account (username/password).

 

[flottenheimer]

Have Apple ever posted any MobileMe numbers?
Number of users? Revenue? Gigabytes stored? Growth?
Anything...

 

[ct2k7]

There are changes coming to MobileMe, but I can't say anymore due to an NDA.

See page 5, paragraph 5, note 6.2.8 of your NDA. You cannot even state that you are under NDA - not even acknowledge that there are any changes coming.

 

[Liam8]

That would be great! Think of how useful it is!

 

[bkonings]

yes it is.

Anyway, you don't need an email address, just an account (username/password).

No its not, go here:

https://myinfo.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MyInfo.woa

Login with your current appleid, click apple id and change it to whatever you like. If you, like me, had a separate itunes and mobileme account you can change you emailadres here aswell to the mobilme-email account. Now you get your itunes mail on your mobileme

 

[LucidPsychosis]

Oh dear god I hope this turns out to be true. I really want an @me e-mail address, but I'm not willing to pay for it

 

[kdarling]

The best thing about using the free Google Sync, has been that my family has been able to move between different phone models so easily.

We've swapped between iPhone, WinMo, WebOS, Blackberry and Android... and each new phone gets all our contacts and calendar entries within a few minutes after taking them out of the box and putting in our Google account info.

It's great that the calendar info is shared between every computer we have as well.

Our kitchen Touchsmart computer, running a custom iGoogle homepage with Google calendar, is the nexus point for checking our family schedule each morning.

Does MobileMe support all devices as well? And what's worth $100 a year about it?

 

[markfc]

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this so far, but to me it is very obvious the reason why some features will be free.

The iChat and a/v integration on the next iphone.

Obviously iChat needs either a mobile me email address, or an AIM username, or some other less common ones.
Needless to say, AIM is not very popular outside of USA. Everyone uses hotmail or gmail afaik.

If they really want to plug the new iChat, they need to get as many people using it as possible, so therefore the @me email addresses will probably become free, and maybe more features with it

Yep I mentioned this already! ;-)

makes sense to me, why send people to aim just to get iChat working on iPhoneHD!

 

[nuckinfutz]

The best thing about using the free Google Sync, has been that my family has been able to move between different phone models so easily.

We've swapped between iPhone, WinMo, WebOS, Blackberry and Android... and each new phone gets all our contacts and calendar entries within a few minutes after taking them out of the box and putting in our Google account info.

It's great that the calendar info is shared between every computer we have as well.

Our kitchen Touchsmart computer, running a custom iGoogle homepage with Google calendar, is the nexus point for checking our family schedule each morning.

Does MobileMe support all devices as well? And what's worth $100 a year about it?

And that's also the worst thing about Google or any web based tool. There's a layer of abstraction with a web based
tools versus native. In address book or iCal that data is part of a systemwide API that any 3rd party developers can access. This means I can install and app and it automatically knows who's in my contacts and often will start to autocomplete email address based on who's in my contacts list. Doing mail merge is easy when your contacts are local. Addressing letters in Pages is as easy as dragging the contact vcard over to the proper field.

Ditto for iCal. If you don't like Apple's option no worries get something more networking robust like Busycal and voila all your data is there with a little secret sauce on top. Install a CRM tool and bam there are you calendar events and contacts.

Everyone talking about how great web based tools are for sync always fail to mention what they "give up" by going to web based tools and from my experience they are giving up a lot of potential productivity.

MobileMe has no desire to support WinMo, or RIM or Palm WebOS. They are free to develop their own systems and I'm glad Apple is not trying to be all things to all platforms. MobileMe has ironed out a lot of the initial growing pains and wrinkles and for me it just hums along.

My question to Google fans ....if your password got compromised and your emails and contacts got deleted. How would you recover?

 

[Ibjr]

I'd be so pissed/happy if it were to become free... 1 year of .Mac and 2 years of MobileMe.

Pissed, I spent $99 for 3 years

Happy, more people will have access to MobileMe's benefits.

I do not understand this flawed logic. Making it free does not impact the service's values for the last three years. If you did not think it was worth the price you paid, you should not have renewed it.

I say this has someone who has paid for dotmac/mobileme since it stopped being iTools. Unlike you, my average yearly cost was 30 dollars because I bought them off of eBay.

 

[Ibjr]

Does MobileMe support all devices as well? And what's worth $100 a year about it?

It is worth spending money to decentralize where all my information is stored.
Yes.