Why I’ve Had It Up To Here With Apple’s .Mac.

I was not an early adopter to Apple’s .Mac service, but forked over my annual tax to become a part of the community, resting assured that Apple would sweeten the pot.

They didn’t, and it’s been years already. I’m tempted to write a letter to Steve Jobs at Apple and ask, “Where’s the beef?”

With apologies to Clara Peller, I need to see a little more meat on the bun, otherwise, my soon-to-end-subscription to Dot Mac dies.

I’m a loyal Mac user and Apple watcher, but Dot Mac needs a little more this year to get more of my money.

It isn’t that there is no value with Dot Mac. Even I admit that value is in the eye of the beholder. I just can’t see it. Yet.

Dot Mac doesn’t have a soul, it doesn’t stand for anything, it’s a cornucopia of potpourri and doesn’t smell or taste like anything.

What’s it all mean to you? Do you use Dot Mac? If so, why? If not, why not?

It’s not as though the list of features is thin and wanting. It’s a healthy list, but smacks more of PowerPoint bullet points than value points.

Yes, there’s Publishing with iWeb. Exciting, huh?

Dot Mac gives you seamless integration with iLife’s iWeb which takes advantage of all those gorgeous Apple-designed templates.

There’s RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, and more—and it’s all point and click easy.

There’s the gigabyte of storage that comes with iDisk and that makes it easy to share files and store backups. A little extra speed in iDisk would be nice.

Dot Mac Sync is handy, I’ll admit that one. We’re a multi-Mac family and having easy synchronization of bookmarks, AddressBook, and Keychain is worthy.

But not worthy to the tune of $100 a year.

Email, despite problems for some Mac users, has worked well for me, but I don’t use my Dot Mac account as primary email.

Apple lovingly provides a bunch of goodies, such as the GarageBand Jam Pack Loops for Dot Mac members. Do you use GarageBand?

There’s a complicated and unintuitive way to handle Groups; communicaate, coordinate, and stay in sync featurs for clubs, teams, families.

Again, it’s great on a PowerPoint bullet chart, but I’ll bet there’s not 5-percent of Dot Mac users who get involved in Groups.

We used Backup for over a year. That’s a decent Apple utility that backs up important files to iDisk. It’s flexible and automatic, and mostly worked flawlessly for us.

I stopped using it when we got too close to the one gigabyte storage limit, and when some of our files became so important we didn’t want them out of the house and sitting on someone else’s servers.

Value occurs when the whole is greater than the sum total of the parts.

With Dot Mac, the sum total of the parts doesn’t add up to the whole that most of us probably use, which reduces the over all value to less than the yearly subscription cost.

I understand Clara Peller’s lament, “Where’s the beef?”

Even when I add up all the parts, there’s not enough to make a full burger here, let alone lettuce, tomato, cheese, and bacon.

Yes, I know. Your mileage may vary, and value, as they say, truly is in the eye of the beholder.

I’m not the only one who’s having second thoughts about Dot Mac, and yearning to see something new in the feature list.

Actually, scratch that. I don’t want merely something new. Over the past few years, Apple has added many things new.

None of them have captured the imagination the way that iLife does, or that OS X Tiger has, or that the iPod as to millions and millions of users.

Dot Mac is the pubescent child who’s perpetually never quite the adult we always thought, hoped, prayed he or she would become.

Maybe it’s Apple’s late bloomer. Maybe there’s something to come that we just haven’t heard about. Yet. Maybe not.

Since Steve Jobs’ last one more thing, and the pre-introduction of iTV, Apple is thinking different. Take Mail, for example.

Dot Mac is previewing a new web mail service which mirrors the look and feel Mail on OS X Tiger. That’s all well and good, but it’s also a so what?

Outside of the everyone-has-one Yahoo or Google or Hotmail email account, what’s new and different and better in Dot Mac Mail?

Don’t misunderstand my intent. I really want Dot Mac to work for me. But that $100 Apple Tax is coming due again soon and need another incentive besides I’m a loyal customer.

The feeling I get from looking at the feature list is that Apple is throwing things into a bag, lots of things, hoping there’s enough there to attract a few million loyal subscribers a year.

Do the math. 2-million users at $100 a year is healthy money. Otherwise, why is Apple even bothering with Dot Mac?

What about you? Are you a Dot Mac user? How long? What features of Dot Mac do you use? Which do you not use and why?

What? Me? Follow?

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