Yesterday I had posted a blog that I had dugg from about .Mac.
Even as I was posting that and at various points with rumors flying around about the
dawn of Apple's release of an online video store I have been thinking to myself that
.Mac is going to have to see an increase in at least storage capacity.
There was a slight increase from 100 mb to 250 mb, and then there was a jump to 1GB
with the introduction of groups, and the ideaology that iTunes users are going to have to
back up their digital downloads.
My prediction I think is going to rival AOL's recent announcment that all users will get a
5GB storage space. I am not exactly sure if .Mac will be upgraded today but it is likley that
it will be in the near future if Apple wants to keep any kind of a paying customer base for
it's online services.

What I would like to see for .Mac

Email: The number one thing is that email from apple should be free. As pointed out to me by a friend having a @mac.com address is pretty darn cool. I mean seriously email has become free pretty much everywhere. 2gb standard has been set by Google and I think is pretty reasonable for storing all of the emails you want to be saved. It is excessive though if you never save your emails, but there are some people who keep them. An email only account would be a very nice addition.

Storage: Something that has been a big issue with .Mac is storage, for both email and files. The .Mac service was quickly mimicked and enhanced by the arrival of the Spymac community. They have two levels of storage; for free you get 1Gb of file space and your webpages have banners, or you can pay $25 a year for 3gb of storage for files and various other perks.
I think that if apple takes this route that it would work very well for them. It would probably get usuers to buy into the paid service after using their free service. To get into the game though I think that what was said ealier about AOL's 5GB should be the maximum storage of any free accounts. Then the paid service would go up from there. I do not think that the price should stay as high as it has been though. Currenly I use dream host and for about what I was paying for .Mac I get an online storage capacity of 20Gb. I think that for about 10Gb of storage the price should be around $60 a year, and that any additional GB of storage that you would want would cost around $10.

Web Services: Last time I was a member of .Mac you could not due much with your server as far as using it as a webserver to run a full fledged website. Meaning that you could not use php scripts, or do anything with Mysql. It would be a big advantage for Apple to implament more web creation cabapilities into .Mac to make it a big selling point. Yes I know that the main purpose of .Mac is to sync and save all of your personal information in to have it all in one tidy location, but there are people out there who would like to have more power than running a base website that you can't do much with.

Benefits: The last thing that I would like to point out is one of the biggest selling points to .Mac seems to have dwindled to almost non existant. Maybe it's the fact that I am no longer a member of .Mac and do not hear about any offers. The thing that was cool about .Mac as a bonus was that you got offered free software, or pretty sizable discounts on software and or hardware (that's where I got my external hard drive that saved my digital life a couple of times.) At this point I don't think anything is offered to .Mac members anymore. I did here of an Apple loops sample being distributed on the site, but other than that the benefits are pretty much non existant. The ressurection of constant offerings would be another plus for .Mac.

Introduction of New Things: Something nice would be the introduction of online applications like Googles Spreadsheet and Picassa. iCal already can be integrated with .Mac, and the experience has been enhanced with phpicalender (on servers that use php). Some newer ideas that tie into Apple's applications would be a welcomed addition to the .Mac experience.


Today in about an hour and a hlaf we will see new products emerge from Apple's briliant mind. In the bunch I am doubtful an upgrade to .Mac will happen, but if it does than my short time with dreamhost will come to an end if the deal is just right.

Labels: Apple