http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/w ... leme_free/

Wonderful if it is true.

I am struggling to see Apple's motivation for making it free?

They may not be getting the numbers signing up for the service from iPhones and iPads that they expected. So if an iPhone is stolen it is not getting blocked?

The one that occurs to me is they make it free with the purchase of an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. The problem they have is that an Android phone has many of the same services via GMail and Google Calendar and etc and they are free. So essentially the 'market value' of MobileMe is nowhere near what they are asking for it. Combined with other services like DropBox that offer some of the services MobileMe does for free and nobody actually needs to pay for MM any more.

Me I use it quite a lot but some of the others have taken over - DropBox for example is way ahead of iDisk in terms of both usability and even basic speed. Plus many of the more recent iPhone/iPad apps can access a DropBox repository directly and they published a complete API last week, so that's only going to increase.

Essentially there's no positive reason to make it free it's just that large parts of it they can't really justify asking money for any more. So they should probably roll it in as 'added value' to the devices and be done with it.

Jon

The main difference is, with MobileMe you get 20gb storage, and with dropbox 2gb. To buy more is a minimum of $10 a month. OK, you get 50gb with that but it's still a bigger commitment than MM's £50(ish) a year.
Where dropbox works well for me is the client doesn't need to be manually reconnected each time you start Windows like Me does and they have a Linux client as well.
They could probably do the mail, calendar and contacts sync free, albeit ad-supported though.

They could restrict it to users of Apple equipment only like iPhones iPads macs etc that would keep the costs down, with out the chance of it getting used by Windows users without any Apple kit.

I'm not sure how many people that matters for. Unless you're doing actual backups to the cloud, 2GB of 'file access space' is probably sufficient for most people. I'm probably an average user ish and I currently have 1.14GB used in my MM space, including all the email I have store there. Most people probably don't actually know how much space is there, they just know they can keep stuff there and if it gets full they have to move some of the stuff they no longer need out to make room. So the quota itself is actually a fairly abstract concept to them. If Apple want to offer proper cloud backup services, that's a different kettle of fish of course.

They could roll the email and iDisk services out of MM and charge a nominal sum for them, then have the sync services and 'find my device' free. That could definitely work.

I think MobileMe is over-priced.

I get most of the functionality for free using Google's email/calander services and Dropbox.

The rest of the features are things I probably wouldn't use - stuff like publishing photo albums online, hosting email and websites etc.

However, I'm not a "normal" user because I'm quite techy.

For the non-tech customer, I'm sure these features are of real appeal, just perhaps not for the price.

If they are included with an iPhone/iPad purchase then it's another thing that separates them from the competition.

Even if you are using all the features, I do not, it is over priced. I still use Dropbox for syncing machines. By having it free they could get more people to use it, if the extra storage was at a competitive price they could make more money that way.

To be honest, it only really works properly with MS Outlook on Windows and not at all on Linux, so it's really only a token effort on non-Apple platforms.

The only reason why iDisk works on Linux is because the davfs2 works ok. WebDAV support sucks in Windows and I'm tired of reconnecting it every time I start Windows.

By contrast, Dropbox works flawlessly on everything, whether it be in Finder, Nautilus or Windows Explorer or my phone.

Well i've just renewed mine. Free would be good though.

Havn't been on here for a long time. Been sticking with the Macuser forum, but it's very quiet.

Well they've just announced a beta for some new features. Mostly email/web based ( so nothing new on iDisk for example) but still, something I've been praying they'll implement for oooh.... ages. Server side rules.

Halle-bloody-lujah.

Mark

Is the MobileMe web interface effectively a bog standard IMAP client? Can you set it to connect to another service, such as Google?

You can connect to your mobile me email via IMAP, yes. That's how the Apple Mail desktop works.