The more I use Posterous and its companion app "PicPosterous", the less I feel I need a .Mac account.
The PicPosterous app lets you add photos to albums retrospectively (Apple's own Gallery app doesnt even do this), it automatically syncs photos to albums as you take it, it takes photo's quicker than apples own camera app and PicPosterous autoposts your new content to a whole range of web 2.0 services like Twitter, facebook, blogger etc which again apples gallery app doesnt do. Apple fail.
Granted, Posterous doesn't do all of the things .Mac does (hardly any of them in fact) but it got me thinking about alternatives to .Mac. Add to this that .mac is around £80 a year for the subscription and other, better services are available for free I just dont see what the point to .Mac is now?
BTW, I deliberately refer to it as .Mac rather than its newer name of Mobile Me because I really want to show how much I resent it.
Lets do a quick "comparison" of those .Mac features and some free alternatives:
iDisk. yep you get online storage. great however its REALLY slow. When i work on a broadband connection it takes forever to build the folder list. Compare iDisk performance to dropbox, sugarsync and evernote, which are all free and offer really zippy, responsive service. Consequently, iDisk doesnt get used in my house and dropbox is our goto CAS (Cloud Attached Storage - just invented the term) pretty much every day.
Email. Well look, there are THOUSANDS of email services out there, what does .mac do that the others dont? It doesnt sort your mail for you, it doesnt scan for spam or viruses, its possibly less prone to attack than Gmail or Hotmail but if .Mac has to use "email" to justify its price then it really is screwed!
iChat. So you need a .mac account to use iChat, iChat is great, its by far my favourite IM client and the 6 friends I have that also use it also think its better than the others. But thats just it, no-one uses it, everyone has MSN, skype or AIM which are all free and which also (in the case of AIM) allows you to use the iChat client. Another apple fail.
Webgallery. What a waste! your photo's exist in a digital coma if you place them here. You cant alert people that a gallery has been updated unless they subscribe, you can add text around the picture and you cant submit for printing like you can with EVERY other photo service out there. Apple fail.
Syncing. This is the only reason I continue to subscribe to .Mac, the ability to sync contacts, calendars and bookmarks over the air automatically to multiple computers is golden. And when I get a proper job and am forced to use a windows laptop and outlook, I'm going to miss this feature. Apple got me on this one, i've looked and I just cant any other service that comes close to providing this facility (not for all 3 services under 1 banner anyway) I could use google / yahoo calendar / contacts and foxmarks, but they're just crap in comparison. Apple win.
Hosting iWeb sites on an iDisk is nice of course but once you've done 1 you get more ambitious and you quickly buy your own domain names and hosting package, so that quickly obsoletes itself. I'll score this as a draw as not everyone wants ambitious websites, a lot are just used to allow families to stay in touch (which negates the web gallery but anyhow...)
Find my iPhone. Well your iphone has to be on and it has to be connected to a data network for this to work. I'm sure some people have benefitted from this feature but really, remote wipe / lock is the only thing I want as once the phones gone, I'm not getting it back (assuming it was stolen). this service obviously didn't work too well for Apple 2 weeks ago when they're 4g iPhone "was left in a bar". So if Apple won't use it, why should we? Apple fail.
And thats where I'm at, there are other features of course but these would be the main selling points. I'm genuinely keen to get your thoughts / feedback. I've been using .Mac for years now (5 at least) and with each passing year its value declines to me. And Apple have done such a bad job of investing in the service, 1 million iPads in a month has really killed the services servers and the web is awash with complaints from users not getting their data synced and email not coming through (apple's own support pages in particular).
So for me, its doubtful I'll be renewing, but what are your thoughts?
