.Mac Storage Now 250MB

Lycestra writes "Apple today announced .Mac users now have 'More room for everything you do online' with an increase from 100MB iDisk and 15MB Mail to 250MB total. The space is shared between iDisk and Mail, but users of .Mac have control over how it is shared. A long overdue change, in my opinion. It's still not 1GB, and Apple openly states that for those who want it, 1GB would cost another $50 a year. I guess the Apple cup-of-tea just got a little bigger, but it still feels like it's at room temperature."

spymac

[therubberduckie]

http://www.spymac.com/ [spymac.com] already has this... for free

The Gmail comparison is unfair...

[hai.uchida]

I think the strength of having .Mac isn't the e-mail address... It's the iDisk, which is an extremely useful tool for exchanging large files and projects with other Mac owners (I use it quite often to exchange 30mb+ Photoshop files with companies I work for.) Gmail of course has a cap on attachment sizes, and anyway it's never a good idea to send files that size via e-mail even when it works (or attachments in general at this point.)

Comparisions to Gmail

[CrackedButter]

Which I am sure will be made, but one has to stop and think for a moment before thinking without the geek cap on and saying "you can get a gig from google or pay for a solution at a lower price". That line reminds me of the comparisions between desktop processor speeds and the megapixels in cameras, just its now storage space numbers people are pissing further and faster with.
Gmail for example, is a GB for email only while .mac isn't, its for mail, website creation, backup space and so forth wrapped into a half decent web gui and a slick interface when working offline with the various programs such as iDisk or iPhoto. I'd say it was worth it simply for the iPhoto integration, 3 clicks and your pictures are online.
I paid for .mac again last year knowing there were alternatives out there that offered a cheaper price, again my point is that with everything Apple, quality is involved. Its all the integration that makes me cough up the dough.
But I will admit, i'm being a bit ignorant towards myself, I know about hosting and such and such but I don't have the time to chase every offer on offer. I'm happy to give Apple my money knowing what they offer.
Still screaming about the 1 GB space you get from google? I got that gmail account as well so don't fret, but that 1 GB email account from what i have heard is compressed anyway. Assuming this is true, its works because you are dealing with text and the odd jpeg, its easier to compress as opposed to Apple going down that route and compressing all of your work and so forth just for the sake of a shitload of megabytes which not everybody would use.
To make matters even better, Apple lets you select how you would use the space, i have it set up for 235MB's for storage and 15mb for email.

Bad thing?

[adl99]

I'm not so sure the low-storage is a bad thing. Following a couple of recent hard disk KOs, I was forced to distill my essential digital life down to my 128MB flash drive, in order to have a backup. It made me seriously think about which information I both could and REALLY COULDN'T afford to lose - and I think the .Mac offers that piece of mind. Besides, an external hard disk works out to peanuts now and that's a lot quicker for regular backups. .Mac is more about essential info portability. I reckon it's fine.

Re:Bad thing?

[nine-times]

I agree. I see it all the time with e-mail. If you give people 1GB, they don't retain any sense of how much space they're taking up. When it comes time to clean up, they don't even know where to begin, and worse, when they want to look for something incredibly important, it ends up completely lost in 1 GB of e-mail and 7 GB of archives.

On the other hand, if you're pretty limited, then you keep things tidy and erase stupid messages in the first place. Having a lot of computer storage can be a little like having a big house. It's great to have all that extra space, all the way up until it's time to clean up after yourself, and then the extra space just means more to clean.

I've never understood...

[cjpez]

... the fascination with having 1gb of storage somewhere. Seriously, what are you storing there? Even if you're uploading pictures and movie clips, that's a *lot* of pictures and movie clips. Email itself is small as hell, gmail's 1gb limit is just ridiculous. I'm a complete packrat when it comes to email, I've been keeping basically everything since '95 and there's no way I need a whole gig for it.

"I guess the Apple cup-of-tea just got a little bigger, but it still feels like it's at room temperature." Bah, I don't know, that's just such a ridiculous statement. What on earth do you need to store over there that'll take up more than 250GB? There's these things called PCs that you're using to access .Mac anyway, and you can get your own hard drives for fifty cents a gig. You don't even have to upload the data to some third party to be able to retreive it later.

Re:Bandwith or storage?

[dhovis]

Apple operates the biggest movie trailer [apple.com] website on the internet and the most popular legal music download service [apple.com]. I don't think that Apple is hurting for bandwidth.

The issue here is that the .Mac email is different from GMail. For one, it is IMAP based (Webmail is available too). Plus, mac.com emails are completely ad free, even the webmail site. At 15MB, it was a questionable value, but 250MB is a nice bump.

.Mac also goes beyond just email too. iSync will use the .Mac service to sync your address book and calendar data between multiple Macs. It also syncs Safari's bookmarks. Really, how many times have you said: "Oh damn, I bookmarked that website on my Laptop". You can also access your address book from the .Mac webmail, so you don't have to keep multiple address books in sync.

Finally, the iDisk feature is pretty nice too, especially after the upgrade to Panther. In Panther, your iDisk is cached on all of your local computers and synchronized automatically with Apple's servers. So if you create a file on your laptop that you will need to look at later on your home desktop, just save it to your iDisk and it will automagically be synced to .Mac and then to your desktop. Plus, there is a "Sites" folder in the iDisk that also serves as webserver space. Just save foo.html to iDisk/sites and it will sync to Apple's server and then be available at http://homepage.mac.com/yourusername/foo.html

.Mac and GMail are not directly comparable services, and you get more utility out of Apple's 250MB than Googles 1GB. (GMail hacks notwithstanding).

Being sure what action you are inciting

[amichalo]

Apple is taking the appropriate steps to ensure the product is used for what it has been marketed (advertised as, priced at) to be. Apple wants people to use the iDisk as an extention of the iApps.

If the iDisk is used to sync contacts, e-mail, iCal items, Safari favorites, etc. even the original 100MB is plenty o'space. I think this a two pronged decision to (1) curb detractors with the Gmail comparison (totally Apples V. Oranges to me) and (2) prepare the world for iProfiles or whatever Apple will call the ability to log into any Net connected Mac running Tiger and get YOUR desktop, without the security risk that sensative info is stored locally.

This would be killer for schools, libraries, offices, traveling professionals, etc.

Email aliases...

[Mattintosh]

I just got my "Enhancements to your .Mac account" email, and it has something interesting near the bottom.

And you can now use aliases as email addresses either for fun or as protection when you need to provide an email address but aren't entirely comfortable with the requester. If your concerns turn out to be justified, you can then simply remove the alias and create a new one the next time you face a similar situation.

It also says "fr33 h3rb4l v14gr4!!1!two!", but I don't think they meant it. Unless they want me to test the service... ;D

Re:Comparisions to Gmail

[mcwop]

I think you are right and might add that with .mac you can run a site, which could be more bandwidth intensive than say a Google email account. Bandwidth does cost money, and most hosting packages have limits on it.

Now I can put up larger sized videos on my site.

Re:Bandwith or storage?

[Anonymous Coward]

And on top of all that, the more bandwidth you use, the cheaper it gets. I have no clue how much they are using now, but I will bet they are getting rock bottom pricing for volume.

Re:The Gmail comparison is unfair...

[nine-times]

I totally agree that Apple should be stepping up their service to include a simple blogging tool of some kind.

However, I think there's another aspect to this. Apple has positioned .Mac in such a way that, by owning a mac, it's like Apple's assuming you have an account. iDisk is integrated into the OS, and there's a .Mac button in "System Preferences". It's a little like how MS treats you like it's just assumed you'll be using their IM and Passport.

Now, I don't have too much of a problem with that. I think it'd be really good if they opened up an iDisk preference that let you use another service's WebDAV or FTP site as your iDisk, and still have it as transparent, or else have it not so integrated with the OS.

However, my real issue is that Apple's treating it as though it's a sort of universal service- like everyone's supposed to use it for e-mail and web-hosting and offline storage. Now, that's fine by me, but if they're doing this, they should really be improving the service constantly to be everything to everyone. Domain hosting, PHP/MySQL, larger storage space, whatever. Even if it costs extra to get a ".Mac Extreme" (Apple seems to like things being 'Extreme'), it should be available.

In short, if they aren't going to make keep their e-mail/web hosting services competitive, and more than competitive- leading-edge innovative, then they should make sure their client-end tools work well with other, professional, higher-end services.

What .Mac Needs

[aflat362]

I am a .Mac member. My biggest gripe about the service is this:

You can't update your iCal calendar from the web.

You can update your address book on your mac or on the .Mac site - then next time you run iSync they are both synchronized - this is nice.

iCal can only be updated on your mac and exported or automatically broadcast to the web - where it is limited in its use as a read-only calendar.