The .Mac report

• Article 35 of 53
• iCreate, July 2005
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 3.4MB

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Again, if you use iDisk you’ll be sharing that space with every other .Mac enabled app you have, so it might get to be a tight squeeze if you insist on saving anything other than your most critical data.

Backup’s other drawback is that it is occasionally unreliable, at which point it complains it can’t reach the iDisk server or it has to recover the catalogue and you might have to start again. This is not helpful in a critical piece of software like a back-up utility. Fortunately, it appears to be getting less irritating over time. The most glaring failing of Backup? You can only use it to back-up one of your Macs. Since .Mac’s biggest draw is its ability to bring several different Macs together over the Internet, why should only a single Mac be able to back itself up using a .Mac account? Ask Apple.

Apple, incidentally, from time to time provides other bits of free software. Jam Pack loops for GarageBand are popular faves; Apple also keeps promising some Dashboard Widgets exclusively for .Mac members but has yet to provide any, a full month after Tiger hit the market (at the time of writing). We wait with baited breath, so we can comment on whether they’re worth the delay. There are also occasional special offers, such as free shareware, and discounts off more expensive software such as Contribute, Spiderman 2 and StickyBrain, which can save you the cost of a .Mac subscription if they’re off bits of software you want. Typically, most of Apple’s other special offers are for US .Mac customers, such as a month’s free trial of T-mobile’s US WiFi service. Since UK customers are actually paying more for .Mac at current exchange rates, this only serves to annoy and make you less willing to renew your membership next year.

6 Learning Centre
If you’re new to the Mac or use some of Apple’s Pro apps, then the learning centre is a welcome source of tutorials and training videos. Look through the menu of programs, click on the area you need training in and then click on the icons to get the material, be it a PDF, a web page or a QuickTime movie. You’ll really need a broadband connection to get the most out of it, but all the training centre material is worth looking at for some basic hints. Don’t expect to be walked through every aspect of iLife, OS X or your iPod, even though there are resources for all of these, but do expect to get some insights into the software that you may not previously have had.

7. The Verdict
Overall, there are few parts of .Mac that excel, with HomePage being the obvious standout and syncing ready to leap forward to join it once the third-party developers really join in. It’s a pity really, since most parts of .Mac could have been brilliant if Apple hadn’t hobbled them: if you’re prepared to fork out for a full 1GB of storage, .Mac is certainly a worthwhile service, albeit an expensive one; Backup could have been a far superior utility if it had supported more than one Mac, and had a bit of reengineering in the background to make it more reliable; and iDisk could have really blown everyone away if hadn’t been built around a moped engine instead of a superbike.

If Apple hadn’t provided the Backup app, it could have been forgiven its stingy storage quota; but to expect everyone to store everything including their backup files in 250MB unless they stump up even more money for the 1GB option is like Bill Gates claiming he needs a few extra dollars to make ends meet: Apple makes the cheapest enterprise-grade storage system on the market – the Xserve RAID – so it should be able to afford a few extra systems for its regular fee-paying customers, particularly when so many services give away 1GB or more for free.

Nevertheless, despite our reservations, .Mac is worth the money if you can afford it. The integration of .Mac into OS X, iLife and other programs alone justifies the outlay, even if you grit your teeth while handing over the money. Even while competitors such as Spymac Wheel offer similar services, none of them ever does it as seamlessly or with as many features. You could, quite probably, cobble together your own version of .Mac from numerous different providers, but the effort wouldn’t really get you anywhere farther, with as many features and any more easily, and the time it would take you to manage it all would circumvent any savings you made. You certainly wouldn’t get the badge of Apple coolness: a mac.com email address.

Just as most people can get by on dial-up instead of broadband, so most people can get by without .Mac. But the Internet really doesn’t come alive until you get that fat pipe of broadband data gushing into your house. Similarly, to make your Mac really sing, grab hold of a .Mac trial account to see what you’ve been missing out on.

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