Wednesday, July 16, 2008, 11:00 am
Apple apologizes to MobileMe subscribers with free 30-day extension
Apple on Wednesday admitted to botching the launch of its new MobileMe Internet service and said all current customers will be awarded with a free 30-day extension to their subscription as a result."The transition from .Mac to MobileMe was a lot rockier than we had hoped," the company said on its website. "We will be extending subscriptions by 30 days to customers free of charge to express our appreciation for their patience during the transition period."
In an email to subscribers, Apple noted that although the launch of core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications "had lots of problems."
"Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running," the company said.
In the same email, the iPhone maker also acknowledge that its use of the word "push" in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella proved to be misleading.
"While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe 'cloud,' changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices," the company said. "So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word 'push' until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too."
MobileMe subscribers should look for their automatic 30-day extension to be reflected in their account settings within the next few weeks.
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The MobileMe rocky transition is still an ongoing battle for us. We have not been able to successfully synchronize our iCal calendars nor our Address Book to the MobileMe website for 3 days now. The MobileMe website contains OUTDATED information from our Address Book and iCal calendars. We are running Mac OS X 10.5.4 on a MacBook Pro, with the MobileMe 1.1 updater applied. We have tried all the troubleshooting steps on Apple's website, including unregistering & re-registering our computer from the MobileMe system preference, completely resetting our sync data from the MobileMe System Preference, resetting our SyncServices folder using the Terminal command in this tech info article <http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1627>, repairing permissions, and running Keychain First Aid. All to no avail. Our MacBook Pro has all the current & up-to-date information, but the MobileMe website does NOT have the current & up-to-date information. The MobileMe website has a hybrid combination of old information along with SOME (but not all) of our current information. It is EXTREMELY frustrating! AND WE ARE NOT GETTING ANY ERROR MESSAGES WHEN WE SYNC! The MobileMe system preference says that our last successful sync was just a few minutes ago! But yet, the MobileMe website is NOT up-to-date. We have tried clearing our Safari cache and quitting/relaunching Safari as well. Apple, please fix this problem!