Product Description

.MAC 4.0 RETAIL IN

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4218 in Software
• Brand: Apple
• Model: MA361Z/A
• Released on: 2006-01-27
• Platform: Mac OS X
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .18 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Deeply integrated with iLife '06, Mac OS X, and other applications, .Mac helps you easily share their lives on the Internet. With one click in iWeb (part of the iLife suite of applications), customers can upload their websites, blogs, and podcasts to .Mac. Photocasting makes it easy for family and friends to subscribe to shared photo albums, automatically receiving full-resolution photos in iPhoto. With the dynamic combination of .Mac and iLife '06, sharing photos, movies, podcasts, and blogs with family, friends, and the world has never been easier.

Customer Reviews

Absolutely brilliant, except the price.
This is an excelent product, simply because of it's slick integration with Mac. iDisk is great and mounts on your desktop just like your hard drive, with a cool globe logo above a hard drive, looks great. It's got easy access from any other Mac using the Go menu of the finder, and from Windows PCs using a dowliadable Utility. iDisk may lack storage in comparison to Gmail, but admittedly, 1GB is more than I need. I would reccomend turning iDisk syncing on, so that it appears as iDisk instead of your username, and so that you can access it if your computer were to go offline. iDisk syncing is another great feature that works seamlessly.

Email is included, which is ALRIGHT, but I would reccomend getting all your messeges forwarded to Gmail in the background as well as arriving on your .Mac account so that when it expires you can still search all your messeges. .Mac Mail is good because it will sync between computers and then work in a browser, and it's the BEST browser based email service i've ever used, drag and drop ease. I use Gmail to back up my emails so that it's all online. You can forward your email automatically as well as recieving them to your .Mac inbox using the Mail settings on the web based service, not in Mail the software.

Sync looks like it works well, but I woulden't know because I only have one mac, it DOES give me handy access to my bookmarks and addresses from a browser, which is nice. The way it's all built into the Mac is great, it's all synced in the background so you don't even know it's happening.

The way .Mac integrates with iLife is spectacular, you can publish from iWeb with one-click ease (once you've disabled the usual copyright alerts), you can share photos using a photocast from iPhoto, which lets your family who use iPhoto or an RSS reader view an album of photos, and it will live update from your computer's version. Actually I think that's it, still they both work well.

You get Backup, an alright piece of backup software, but for backups i'd reccomend waiting for time machine in the upcoming leopard version of Mac OS X.

There is also a groups system, which I briefly tried out, and it would be brilliant if anybody who uses a PC was willing to sign up for a .Mac trial, but they're not, so it fails.

On top of that you get some free software, like Jam Pack Samplers, which I don't use, and you get access to the Learning Center, which is an excelent place to go if you need help with your Mac's software, it's full of video tutorials, it was a great help to me migrating from windows.

And now the most important aspect, the price. Apple charges 70 pounds a year for .Mac (cheaper on amazon), which is a hefty sum, I picked it up in a one day online apple store sale, and I think it was going for about 45 pounds, which is a great saving. It's still a bit of a rip off considering Google's free services, but much like Mac Vs. Windows, once you've tried it you won't want to stop using it. I'm gonna see if I can pick it up for cheap in a sale this year (if they do it again), if not I might get it here, but I think I will be renewing, I wish they'd lower the price a bit, but apart from that it's all good. Now that I bit the bullet and tried it, i'm glad I did, it's brilliant. The missing star is for the price.

A spectacular disappointment
When I signed up for .mac, 2 years ago, it was a good service. Apart from some very short outages, it worked fine and proved to be a good and useful service.
The migration of the .mac service to MobileMe was quite exciting. The extra functionalities sounded very good, and I was looking forward to try them out. Unfortunately, and further to a bit of a rocky start - perhaps not surprising, given the complexity of the update - unspecified problems occured to one of their servers causing 1% of their users (20,000+ people?) to lose access to their email.
This situation has been going on for over 7 days now. Those affected (me included) have not heard a word from Apple, apart from a paltry two sentence acknowledgement of the problem in their support pages. We have no updates, no help from their support staff, no idea when the service might get back up, and no reassurance that our email on the server is safe.
All in all this situation has been managed in an appalling manner, and Apple should be ashamed.
Until they can guarantee that this will not happen to you, stay away from MobileMe.