.Mac Storage Now 250MB 77
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."
Bandwith or storage? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Gmail comparison is unfair... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure why other companies, especially google, haven't gotten into this sort of package deal. Something that lets you work online a little better- some sort of portal/hosting service aimed at individuals rather than businesses.
It'd be nice if they offered some basic PHP/MySQL functionality. I mean, if you're just hosting a blog or something, a full domain hosting might be overkill, and how much does it cost, really, to make this functionality available?
Another feature that might be nice is if you Apple provided the option to have your e-mail attachments automatically stripped off and sent to your iDisk. Then you leave a link to the e-mail to the attachment. Specifics would need to be worked out, but it should work.
Hmmm... 1gb of off site backup (Score:5, Interesting)
$150 a year for 1gb of off site backup. That doesn't sound like that bad an idea. Does Apple say that they will back things up and guarantee that your data will be there? If so, this isn't that bad a deal at all.
kiwi
Re:The Gmail comparison is unfair... (Score:5, Interesting)
Although, I do agree that for 100$ a year, you SHOULD get 1gb, at least... I mean, there are a lot of other, cheaper alternatives (slashmail) that are better suited for your everyday geek. In fact, I think that for 100$ a year, you should get 250mb iDisk and 1gb email, and for the extra 50$, you should get a 1gb iDisk and 2gb email.
Re:I've never understood... (Score:5, Interesting)
But okay, so .mac does include iDisk, it seems, from looking at the homepage, so they do intend for people to at least partially use them as a datastore. This makes .mac rather fundamentally different from the email serviecs offering the ridiculous 1GB storage space though. Your gmail account isn't designed to hold data like that (regardless of whatever someone's done with gmailfs), and you can bet that they'll frown on anyone trying to use it as anything but an actual webmail client. Maybe the other free webmail services offer more, I guess.
I suppose that I'm just of the opinion that if you find something like 250MB too restrictive, you should really be going with something that's directly suited to your task (ie: just transferring the files directly to your box, or purchasing some actual space somewhere) rather than complaining that you're not getting a 1gb limit.
Re:I've never understood... (Score:3, Interesting)
iDisk isn't just for backups. It's also an extremely convenient way to exchange media files. I use it all the time to swap Photoshop resources and find it much more convenient than using FTP (since I don't use
Considering what a staple Final Cut Pro is to Apple, I could see where the ability to exchange raw video files (or DVD Studio Pro or Motion projects, which also tend to be huge) via a 1gig+ iDisk would come in handy... Uploading and downloading would of course be time consuming, but it would still be faster, cheaper and less hassle than using FedEx.
Re:Being sure what action you are inciting (Score:4, Interesting)
But the 100MB only applies to the iDisk. The previous email limit was 15MB for the entire mailbox! Trust me, that's an easy limit to hit, and hit, and hit.
This is all well and good that they upgraded, but I took my money elsewhere this year (my bank) because I feel that Apple did not treat its subscribers fairly by not informing us what to expect as far as upgrades go. A lot of people say that it's worth gambling on features in Tiger, but I say hooey to that. I'm paying for services, and if their services fail to meet my needs, I'll go elsewhere.
Now the services meet my needs, but I just spent the last 2 weeks switching my online identity, only to have the upgrade occur today. If they are okay with announcing products such as Tiger, or the iMac G5, or the Dual G5 PowerMac and making the consumer wait, why can't they respect a currently paying customer that's supposed to be a guaranteed money source by letting me know that my service needs will be fulfilled. That would have been fair to the initial subscribers (since the iTools ->
Re:The Gmail comparison is unfair... (Score:5, Interesting)
Enough with storage, we need security features (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't really care that they increase it anymore.
However I WISH they had full https access. Currently only the sign-on is optionnaly SSLed, however after authentification you are back to plain http. This means that in my company, the proxy administrators probably have a clear view of what I am sending and receiving.
Does anybody know if
Now inly if Yahoo would come out with mac clients for the address, calendar and even briefcase sync (they did have at one point a win98 client to mount the briefcase however they never fully developed it as I assume this was a bandwith hog...)
Re:Enough with storage, we need security features (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Enough with storage, we need security features (Score:5, Interesting)
What Apple needs to do... (Score:3, Interesting)
Right now if you happen to lose your hard disk (and didn't make a CD/DVD backup earlier), you'll lose your iTMS-purchased songs.
Which sucks, since you have to buy them again.
If Apple were to offer an iTunes backup feature, it'd definitely be a killer feature. This would be one of the last things that still make me reluctant to ditch CDs for good.
Besides, they'd save on storage and bandwidth, as they would only need to keep on the iDisk the key used to generate the end user's file from the original file. Whenever the user wants to retrieve their files, the
They could advertise "back up 20GB of iTMS songs" while it'd actually eat up only a couple MB.
By the way, if you're living in Germany or Austria, make sure you check out GMX.net, a free e-mail service that is offering 1GB (combined) for free for e-mail and file storage, or 5GB for 3 EUR/month, 10GB for 5 EUR/month.
They also have a WebDAV client and their features are unmatched worldwide.
(not affiliated in any way, just a happy customer since 1998
I dunno, I think it's kinda handy (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted, I have one referral credit as well (so I'm actually paying $79.95), but between iSync, the disk space, and all the goodies I've been able to download I've gotten very good value from my
The only thing I'd like to see addressed is easier integration of other data sources into iSync. I know that's something that Tiger is supposed to address, but I'd really like to see iSync support devices other than Palm (discounting for now the somewhat kludgy PocketMac suite of tools), and support some easy way of doing DIY sync modules. Plus I'd like to see Entourage supported in iSync by either Apple or Microsoft. That would add a little more value.
A great deal for me! (Score:4, Interesting)
I send out about 60 GB of data a day from my