Apple MobileMe - 1.1

Now that we're rapidly approaching the new age of Snow Leopard and the one-year-plus extra months renewal of MobileMe, I feel it might be helpful to both long-time as well as potential new MobileMe users to have a place to read about MobileMe.

Please make your reviews balanced and free from angry rhetoric so as to not prompt "big brother" to disappear this thread.

My "kick-off" review below:

Over a year ago now I got my brand spankin' new MacBook Pro and with a little extra money to spend, I splurged $99 on MobileMe. The idea of being able to be somewhere else and "call home" to virtually work on my desktop Mac was appealing to me.

Long-time "charter" members of MobileMe are fully aware of the initial startup fiasco that we faced with MobileMe, so there's no real need to go into this. Apple was fairly up-front with this and gave us all 3 months extra in exchange for the kinks--which were not un-monumental.

That aside, I, like many "charter" MobileMe users, are now approaching our 1-year-plus-three months of MobileMe, so I am now faced with the decision whether or not to renew.

Up front, I do not plan to renew MobileMe. The $99 I spent, even in light of the extra months, has not been worth it for several reasons:

Back-To-My-Mac: It isn't reliable. The virtual computing versus NAT issues on other networks has made this feature consistently useless all-around. I am always at the mercy of another network and having to plead for fixes from another network administrator to "help a poor Mac user call home" is not only a tiresome chore but they really shouldn't be expected to have to put up with us. MobileMe was touted to "just plain work out of the box" and unfortunately it doesn't. This feature alone might have been worth a little subscription money but certainly not $99. Also, there are VPN alternatives that can be explored and implemented for free on "friendly" networks. As a caveat, nobody should expect Back-To-My-Mac to work on a public WiFi network. You will find it never will, mostly for security reasons.

iDisk: 15G of online storage "in the cloud" certainly isn't worth $99 alone. Combine it with all the other features MobileMe offers and even then it's just icing on the cake--if all the "useful features" worked consistently--but iDisk is just a pretty extra. There are numerous free alternatives to "cloud" storage already, not to mention potentially more as this new age of "cloud computing" sets in. I personally have found iDisk slow, even on very fast networks.

MobileMe Sync: As mentioned above, iDisk sync is cumbersome and slow. For me MobileMe Sync in general has been the only useful feature, but unfortunately as I approach my decision not to renew, I have found various free alternatives and have already implemented them in advance of my termination. These free alternatives work flawlessly so far and when put against the $99/year MobileMe membership, it isn't worth spending money on.

Overall, MobileMe is not worth the money I'm sorry to say. Free alternatives are out there and they just plain work.

Suggestion to Apple: Mac users already spend a lot of money on a premium product. Make MobileMe free. The cloud computing age is already on us and there are going to be a lot of free alternatives out there anyway. MobileMe as a paid subscription just doesn't offer anything more. Integrate/absorb it into the "new and improved" Finder. That would be much more attractive to long-time and potentially new Mac owners. Keep the "switching" trend alive.

Boo! It took forever to get downloaded! Apple was just like Microsoft Windows Vista when it first came out, though this was a smaller update. My computer still says it's .Mac everywhere except in System Preferences and Mail.