Maybe I should renew after all....

Wait till Tuesday!

well, i hope something is in the works. i let my account auto-renew, but honestly, i can't exactly explain WHY except sheer laziness and hopes that apple will improve matters somewhat.

- virex is now dead-ware (and will actually hurt your computer if you still use it... though they still offer the virex DAT updates. wtf?!?) so we really have no reliable virus scanning solutions out there. admittedly, mac os x doesn't have as many gaping, wide-open doors as windows, but still...

- backup3 has been cited as being not only useless, but quite harmful with even the most innocent of mistakes (i direct your attention to john gruber's archive at daringfireball, where he links to several expert opinions that backup3 should be a hell of a lot better than it currently is).

- idisk is still god awful slow. i mean, yes, it's nice to have idisk almost behave like a normal mac os x folder, but i'd rather have the speed of a normal ftp client. heck, panic's transmit does a pretty bangup job. and please don't tell me to use the "local idisk and then syncing" thing. if that isn't the textbook definition of "workaround," i don't know what is.

- homepage used to be nice... for 1999/2000..., but now it just looks like terrible template-driven designs. and of course, apple can never kill off those designs, since many users used the "springtime" theme for their wedding or something and would be upset to find it gone... i guess.

at least my email is mostly spam-free (except when they got nailed by the worm late last year... but hey, so did everybody, and apple had it killed in about 24-48 hours... by comparison, bellsouth still can't figure out how to prevent email with subject lines like "COME ON LITTLE-D1CK, SPEND 60 BUCKS TO INCREASE 3" disappoint" from reaching my in-box. my wife happens to LIKE that 3", thankyouverymuch.

what happened to the freebie software? i actually LIKED seeing what new piece of free shareware i would get, and felt good knowing some smaller developers were getting some fat check from apple to provide them. yes, we get the garageband sample jam packs, but if you don't ever use garageband, well, you get, um, tiger quicktime tutorials??? gee, thanks.

apple, just announce on tuesday that you are providing the latest versions of transmit, virusbarrier and superduper! (or carboncopycloner, or retrospect... though the interface is permanently stuck in 1998 ) to all .mac members, and i'd be happy as all get out.

absolutely true. Itīs about time to renew, and I really hope itīs worth the decision. I just wonder what iWeb will do, and if I could trash iBlog :3

I switched to Gmail recently and didn't renew my .Mac subscription. iDisk is too little capacity, the e-mail is too slow - Gmail is so much faster. Virex was stopped - Apple should at least sell a virus protection for mac. Backup was useless.

However, I don't see myself renewing my subscription - for Ģ70 it would need to be more than some video download thing which, let's be quite honest, probably wont work in this country anyway!

While I agree overall that .mac is a just a ploy of not so great services for Apple to take a litle more cash, I just want to mention virus protection. From what you say you we have NO scanning solutions out there for virus protection. This is just untrue. Norton is an obvious example of one and there are others if you just search versiontracker.com

It is disappointing that there is no virex. I know that even the Apple store employees are angry that they took it out. According to friends most Apple employees view .MAC as a joke as well. Its probably one of the worst products Apple has ever produced. It just seems that nobody has told Steve this.

The only two reasons why I continue to renew my .Mac subscription are:

1. E-mail -> I don't want to have to tell the hundreds of people that have gotten accustomed to my e-mail address (which I've been using since the very beginning of mac.com (i.e., when iTools first kicked off). Especially since I don't know exactly who they all are!!

2. Syncing -> I can't live without automatic Bookmark and data syncing. That's the only reason why I won't commit to Firefox, cuz there just isn't a way to seamlessly sync its bookmarks like I can with Safari and .Mac. Same goes with iDisk. I don't see anything out there that would make it as easy as iDisk.

With that said... $100 for this service is too expensive. I don't give a crap about any of the software, including Virus protection, because by golly we don't need virus protection on OSX. At least, not yet. Since I can't see them lowering the price, I hope they'll improve it by adding some useful functionalities.

I also wish they'd do something about spams. I get a good 50 spams a day to my .Mac account and Mail's spam filter just doesn't cut it. No matter how much I 'train' it, it doesn't get any smarter. I feel like forwarding all my .Mac mail to one of my Gmail accounts, just to get rid of the spam. I do that with my university E-mail account (which receives about as much spam as my .Mac e-mail) and Gmail does a wonder of a job... cutting out a good 99% of spam, with VERY few false identifications (it's happened maybe twice in the past... that is, out of thousands of e-mail I've received).

I know that your writing style, and probably life, involves not making any commitmets or definate statements. Would you like to elaborate on which "gaping, wide-open doors" Mac OS X has? Or are you really just writing stuff down that sounds good?

The reason I have kept .mac is simply because of the host of people I would have to notify of an email change, business web site change, which wouldn't be that big a deal, but contacts would have to get used to it.

I like the email service fastmail.fm, which I also started using, the free version.

It will be good if Apple adds to the value of this subscription this week.

And I agree with Rawhead about the various spams that get in, too. I don't get nearly so many, but the various African ruses are there, and others.

Where is the information about Virex hurting a Mac merely by having it installed? I thought the only Mac virus program with security holes was Norton AV. FWIW, when I get a new Mac, I'm moving to the open source virus checker ClamAV:
http://www.clamxav.com/

I totally agree in regard to the dearth of free programs - it has really died out. Even a new game now and then wouldn't be bad. How about a Quicktime-streaming version of CNN Pipeline, just for .Mac users? That'd be a neat bonus.

I find iDisk speed passable - not as fast as FTP but it gets the job done. I don't keep large files on my iDisk anyway - it's just a convenient backup for small files so I don't have to carry a USB thumbdrive.