Thursday, March 22, 2007

So long dot Mac!

Well, I'm outta here! It was a $99 payment one year ago to Apple that established me as a .Mac member; it had lots of promise: it was going to sync everything perfectly--no more clutter. It was to be my online portal to the world, hosting websites, pictures, movies. etc. It didn't live up to the hype, however. I had a bunch of problems initially.

And for less than the same price, I just bought a web hosting plan that gives me 400 GB of storage, 8 domains, 3 domain names, 2500 GB of monthly transfer, mega-email accounts, etc., etc., which so far is very fast at web hosting compared to .Mac:

ixwebhosting!

That same $100 bought me a whopping, underwhelming, and pathetic 1 GB of annual storage with .Mac with a max transfer of 10 GB/month, and that includes your email account! Google's Gmail gives you 2 GB for free, and many other online outfits are just as generous!

With Apple, you're paying for the brand; it's a lot like buying a Rolls-Royce over a pick-up truck. And I'm the first to tout Apple's products, because I love almost everything they've dreamed up. However, .Mac is sick and needs to die; I can't believe it's still alive. They're going to need to overhaul it if they want it to hang around, but I suppose there are some users out there not willing to dig deeper to save money.

One redeeming .Mac feature (that wouldn't work for me initially) is the syncing of all your data between two or more Macs. There are ways around this if you're careful; Apple even gives some clues here on how you can do it.

And a $50 commercial app called SyncTogether does most of what .Mac syncing can do, except for keychains (you'll have to be careful and do these manually).

It's been real, and it's been fun...but it has sucked!


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