Why buy .Mac these days?

I’ve been a user of .Mac for several years now. I originally was onboard because Apple gives it to it’s employees free. Now that I’m no longer employed by Apple I need to justify spending $99/year or $0.27/day on this service. Surely there must be something this product has to offer that I can’t get elsewhere for less money. I mean $0.27 a day isn’t all that much.

Email:
.Mac gives you an email account ending in @mac.com. There is a web portal for viewing your email on the road, and native integration with Leopard Mail app. That search giant google gives you web access to email and now offers IMAP and step by step instructions to integrate it with the Mail app or Thunderbird if you’re a Mozilla fan. Gmail is FREE.

Webhosting:
iWeb easily allows you to create basic web sites that look great. Upload your photos easily to share with others, or start a basic blog if you have something to talk about. You can even now use your own custom domain name with this service (modification to your CNAME entries necessary).

As far as web hosting is concerned, $99/year isn’t a great deal. Godaddy hosting is anywhere from $4-$12 a month or $48-$144 a year. Now, the simple WISIWIG (what you see is what you get) editor that godaddy offers isn’t as fancy, but it does do the trick for a simple page.

If you don’t care about a custom domain name you can get a free website with google pages. This is a WISIWIG platform and it hosts your page for free. Picasa or Flicker will allow you to share your photos and this is also free. Blogger is free (also a google property) for your blogging needs.

Online Storage:
Ah iDisk, this must be the saving grace of the .Mac service. With 10GB of shared storage across all of your apps (mail, iweb, and iDisk) you can sure store a good amount of stuff, plus you can access it from anywhere . . . cool. If you do the math this is $9.90 per gig of storage!!! YIKES!!

How does that match up in the industry? Not well as it turns out. There are many offerings out there with a range of storage capacity as well as features (sharing, Web 2.0, etc.) and pricing. If we’re completely interested in pricing then I suggest Xdrive by AOL. I think this is the first time I’ve ever endorsed an AOL product, but with only a screen name you can have 5GB of online storage for free. That’s a pretty generous amount of storage and it costs nothing. Xdrive is a web based application so you can access your files anywhere you have internet access AND you have the ability to share files on your Xdrvie with others that you grant permission to. Xdrive has a desktop, running on the Adobe Air platform, that you can install making transferring files as easy as drag and drop. Did I mention this is FREE as well.

Back to my Mac (remote desktop):
This might be a difficult one to recreate with a budget of $99 /year. WRONG! Completely free solution called LogMeIn. Works great. Only the machine you want to take control of needs the software installed. Taking control of the machine remotely is done through your favorite web browser. This service is Mac and PC compatible so you can take control of your Mac from a PC or the other way around. The service was a bit choppy over cable broadband, but it’s FREE and it works.

Sync & Backup:
These two features almost don’t deserve any attention. Backup has been replaced by Time Machine or just an external HD. Sync is not worth any part of the $99 price tag and thus deserves none of our attention or yours.

There you have it. You can replicate .Mac for FREE. I see no compelling reason to shell out $99 a year for this service.

Free NBC shows on the iPhone.. What is NBC Thinking?

In a somewhat under-reported development (we're doing our part) Gizmodo announced that full episodes of "30 Rock" and "The Office" are now available for streaming on the iPhone (and iPod touch) for free. Without ads. If you want to give it a try, just head to nbc.com on the iPhone, and you'll be re-directed to the iPhone site, then click on the videos tab.

Bear in mind this is the same NBC that pulled its catalog from the iTunes Music Store, and also just signed an agreement to bring the content to the Zune for a price. The video, by the way, looks bad. As in worse than Youtube bad, and there seem to be severe issues with audio sync. You get what you pay for, I suppose. The question is, why would you pull your catalog of content that people were happy to give you money for, then offer it up in free, bad resolution? You're not hurting Apple, as people now have a new (albeit ridiculously small) reason to buy an iPhone, and not pay for your content.

The melding of old-school media companies and new technology continues to be a topsy-turvy affair...

Readers: What's the Weak Spot for Apple Now?

With the iPhone rumors and news on overdrive, and Mac sales and record highs, Where's the weak spot for Apple? We want your thoughts in the comments. Is it AppleTV adoption? QuickTime? .mac? What do you think is the thing most in need of some attention from Apple asap to bring it up to par?

TDL Live: This week's Apple news and rumors (5/5/08)

In case you missed it, things got a little wacky during the Cinco De Mayo Live show. Enjoy our look at all the Apple news and rumors this week!

Is/Was Microsoft Ever Serious With The Zune?

Via engadget comes word of a shocking development in the mp3 player world. Microsoft is bringing the Zune to Canada. More than a year after its release in America, the Zune is headed north.

This news came as I surprise to me, as I had assumed Microsoft's "iPod killer" was already available everywhere. After all, if you had more cash in the bank than any other computer company, (Apple's gaining fast though) an installed userbase of your operating system in the hundreds of millions, and you wanted to obliterate Apple, wouldn't you at least make your product widely available? You would, unless you're really not that serious.

It seems like the Zune has done more harm to marketshare of iPod competitors, than the iPod itself. Where Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" plan was aimed at creating an army of tech companies to take on Apple, it seems now Microsoft is content to cannibalize those partners' sales. This is the Zune we're talking about. It would be one thing if it were a revolutionary device, like the iPhone. Something like that can take time, and can require a slow roll-out to get it right. But to have the most engineers, the most money, and the most PC marketshare, and to still take 18 months to get your product to Canada? Clearly someone's not really trying.