Sometime yesterday afternoon, I lost my status as a dot-Mac member.
That sounds far more melodramatic than it is, but still — it’s an event that’s tinged with a certain sadness. I was one of the early iTools subscribers. In fact, I signed up within minutes of Steve Jobs’ announcement at Macworld San Francisco a couple years ago. It was one of the few times I hadn’t made it to a keynote and wound up being glad. You see, those in the audience had to wait until they could find their way to a computer connected to the Internet to sign up. Watching the streaming video from my office in New Jersey, I was able to sign up while the keynote was still being delivered, scoring a great username in the process.
When iTools gave way to dot-Mac, I hesitated, but ultimately decided that the $69 intro offer made the service worth checking out. A year later, with the price tag now at $99, dot-Mac may be worth the price to some, but not me. Here’s why:
Services
Email – Like everyone with an Internet account, I get this from my ISP, and while the mac.com address might be nice and simple, my ISP address isn’t bad, either. In addition, my mac.com address has turned into a spam magnet — about 90% of the mail I get there is junk.
Homepage – I admit, I had high hopes for what I might do with Homepage, iPhoto and iMovie, but in reality, I barely use them. And again, I get web space through my ISP. It’s not nearly as simple to upload photo and movie pages, but free third party utilities exist to help.
iDisk – Other than using it to store movies and photos for Homepage, I never touch it.
Public iSync calendars, filesharing, iCards, Backup – Nope.
iSync – I use it to sync my desktop machine to my laptop. If I didn’t have issues getting through my firewall at work, I’d use it there, too. I’ll miss it, but I’ll still be able to sync my devices.
Apple touts the retail value of its freebies and discounts as more than worth the price of dot-Mac itself. But that’s only true if you agree with Apple’s estimated values, and more importantly — if you use them.
Backup – I’ve been a Retrospect user for years, but there are other freeware alternatives, too. And Backup, although improving, isn’t nearly robust enough to compare it to commercial products.
Virex – Of course, this could change at any time, but as of now, there are no viruses that affect Mac OS X. When there are, I’ll consider buying an anti-virus program. For now, this has no real retail value to me.
100 Free Kodak prints – This is the offer that convinced me to sign up for the introductory account last year. I wound up not using it, and suspect that even if they offered again, I wouldn’t take advantage of it. Of course, we’re talking about why dot-Mac isn’t worth it for me, here — your mileage may vary.
Free Software – I’ve downloaded all of the free programs offered, but have only used them a handful of times and certainly wouldn’t have bought any of them on my own. If you would have, by all means count their retail value against the cost of dot-Mac.
Discounts – Similarly, if dot-Mac has saved you money when buying something you truly needed, deduct that savings from the cost of dot-Mac to see what its net cost is. But consider that you might have done just as well or better looking through your Sunday circulars or dealsontheweb.com or dealmac.com. And if the dot-Mac discount influenced you to buy something you wouldn’t otherwise have, then dot-Mac actually cost you more money.
Free Online Training – This is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine. These “training” videos are little more than promotional tools that Apple has always posted for its products. Putting $40 price tags on them in order to count them as “dot-Mac values” seems insincere. If you want a good training video, shell out an extra $10 and get TackyShirt’s excellent Mac OS X: The Basics (reviewed here). It’s four hours of lively training on all sorts of topics.
The bottom line is if you use a lot of Homepage-related services, or the free offers and discounts are saving you lots of money on things you’d have bought anyway, then dot-Mac may offer you a good value. But it you’re primarily using it for email, good value awaits you somewhere else.
If you decide, as I did, to let you dot-Mac subscription lapse, I have some good news. You’ll have access to your mac.com mail account for an additional 15 days (to let people know your new email address). You also get to keep your mac.com address for your Apple Store and iTunes accounts, and as your screen name for iChat and AOL Instant Messenger.
I’m still a proponent of some form of tiered dot-Mac services: email-only; email and iSync; all services, for instance. And if enough dot-Mac subscribers become formerdot-Mac subscribers, I wouldn’t be surprised to see that start happening.
What I fear, though, is that Apple will try to force the hand of its users and start tying more of its programs’ features — or worse yet, services like iTunes — into dot-Mac, basically crippling them unless you pony up the 99 bucks a year. Let’s leave that tactic to Microsoft.
