Apple once again had to accept defeat and has announced that it will extend all subscriptions to its bug-ridden MobileMe service for yet another 60 days. This move comes after the company already gave every subscriber an extra 30 days after the botched launch of the product in July. MobileMe is quickly becoming Apple's most public failure in recent years - when the service first opened, it was basically rendered non-functional for the first couple of days, after that, a good number of users stopped receiving email, calendars disappeared or didn't sync, and the service often simply didn't work.
Even users who are still in the free trial will see their accounts extended. Apple has also posted an FAQ that should answer the most common questions.
MobileMe was supposed to be Apple's answer to Web 2.0 mail clients like Gmail or Yahoo Mail, but instead, it has turned out to be a relatively clunky and slow paid alternative to a lot of free services. While the MobileMe email client has some neat features like QuickReply, it often doesn't stack up against its free competitors.
Besides handling mail, MobileMe also manages contacts and calendars, as well as online storage and photo-management (both of which are pretty much useless for Windows users, by the way). MobileMe users have complained about problems with pretty much every single aspect of the service, so giving everybody a total of three free months of subscription (which is pretty much three times the lifetime of the service so far) is a small consolation for the agony a lot of paying users have had with MobileMe. Thanks to the constant service interruptions, MobileMe even became the target for phishers.
Given that nobody is paying for MobileMe right now anyway, maybe Apple should just have had an open, three-month beta period.
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You've made two comments here- one being that no one is paying for the service, and the other saying that the service is less than three months old- which don't show the entire scope of the issue.
When Apple launched their 'MobileMe' service, they also converted all of their '.Mac' users over to this service. This means there are, in fact, thousands of paying users. I am one of them, and let me tell you it hasn't been pretty.
The primary reason I paid for the .mac service was not for the email or calendar benefits (although I have used the email address in emergency situations), but rather for the "back to my mac" feature (which lets me run remote desktop to my home office) and the iDisk (remote storage with native support, so I can have one 'disk' that is synced between my multiple machines). Since launching this 'MobileMe' service, and forcibly moving all of the .mac clients over to it, there have been numerous disruptions and errors amongst legitimate paying clients who did not sign up for any sort of 'beta' test.
Worst yet, not all people seemed to have received both extensions- I received the latest 60 day extension, but back in July I did not receive any sort of extension to speak of. It seems Apple was more concerned with people purchasing their new iPhones than the were for the people who spent hundreds (if not thousands) on their computers and then went on to buy their .mac service.
Posted by: tedivm | August 19, 2008 10:40 AM
I pay $99 for a snotty email address period - ohleo5
Posted by: terry jackson | August 19, 2008 11:07 AM
At least they admit they messed up - wish they did the same about the 3G network issues me and a few thousand other people are having... having to turn off 3G to use the new iPhone.
I'm an Apple fanboy, well... used to should I say? I converted I don't know how many people to the Mac but I gotta say, I don't trust Apple anymore to produce reliable products anymore. I'm still not using Windows and it ain't gonna happen but I can't recommend Apple to anyone like I used to.
Posted by: wack | August 19, 2008 7:46 PM
Well... if gmail can be used as a "beta" for the past 5 years, I dont see a reason why mobileme cannot be :-)
Posted by: Ghost Rider | August 20, 2008 5:12 AM