Sam Oliver"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.
Oliver Haslam
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69 Comments
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 The MobileMe website contains OUTDATED information from our Address Book and iCal calendars.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!
I mentioned in another article comment that the "right thing" (tm) to do was to extend customer's contracts a few days to cover the few days of outages. 30 days is quite generous IMHO for about 5 days of trouble.
The push thing was a bit oversold, not so much in what they said, but what they carefully omitted in the demo. The thing I am finding is that push is killing my battery life on my iPhone. I work in a building which gets minimal reception and after enabling push, my battery is about half done after an 8 hour work day of the phone just sitting. Contrast that to maybe 10% down with manual checking set.
Sheldon
..... "right thing" (tm)
What does that mean?
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.
I guess it is a nice gesture but I'd just like it all to work. And to say it is working now is plain not true. It's like George Bush saying we are winning the war on terror, or that the economy is strong. Say what you will, everybody knows it ain't true. My email is a mess and today it just didn't load at all. My iWeb pages are screwed up and my calendar is not really living up to its promise. I will use this service when it works. More importantly, when it has been proven to work for more than a week or two. These services are too important to be half arsed. They look great in theory but for me Google Apps will not be ditched yet.
Wow, nice gesture indeed. For those who signed up for the free 60-day trial, it does not appear you'll get an extra 30 days (least it doesn't show that on my account). I would have been really surprised if they had given the free trial users another 30 days.