I've always said that they should give free system updates to dotMac users. Apple would get $99 every year instead of $129 every two to three years, and more people would probably upgrade. Or how about iLife updates? The only reason I got iLife '08 was the $30 off from .Mac. Otherwise I would have just kept using '04 until I got a new Mac.

... thats the exact reason why there are competitors like fruux, trying to gain marketshare in this area.

they have a blog at http://blog.fruux.net
if you are just looking for a replacement for the sync part of dotmac, their service might be interesting. unfortunately currently fruux just syncs addressbooks, but today they posted about their roadmap (thats why i remembered, when i read this post).

I felt ripped off when they started charging for .mac. I had been using it as my primary e-mail account. Yahoo and Google give this away for free, and you advertise for Apple every time you tell someone your e-mail address.

The idea of backing up 10 megabytes of my hard drive over a 56k line just seemed too silly for words, so I stopped paying attention to this.

It was too expensive and the storage space was weak compared to free services. I canceled the service before they changed it to 10GBs. When you add in iLife and the latest OS to take advantage of some of the features, it adds up to even more. I couldn't keep up with the cost, plus I didn't want to be locked into a dot Mac email address anymore. I instead found a cheap hosting service to use as my own email address. If Apple drops the price to $50 or even better, includes a copy of the latest iLife, then I can see the value. Or, The latest Mac OS, iLife and Dot Mac all for $150. Currently if you purchase them separately, it will cost around $250-300. Each new Mac should come with a free years worth of Dot Mac, great idea! I’m thinking of signing up for a Flikr pro account, since the storage is unlimited and is around $25 a year. I will say this, when I was signed up, it was easy to use, but after a few years I couldn't afford $99 anymore. Anyway, that’s my 2 cents.

i agree with all of the above comments. plus seems like it is time to move dot past the the single user or family pac and have a small biz offering.

Many of the things I do are connected with .mac. Back-ups, photo galleries, website, e-mail and so-on. I have a family plan which has 4 seats on it and the sharing is great. All this in one box.

Considering the diversity of activities, I am OK with the price.

I agree with WetcoastBob. The people I hear complaining about .mac always mention one or two other services that together supposedly do what .mac does. But no combination of free or cheap services does everything you can do with .mac, is integrated with Mac OS and other Apple apps, and requires only one login and password. I haven't found any other service that syncs Safari bookmarks--perhaps my favorite .mac feature.

If it did, I'd buy it. Sync a user's entire Home folder to a portable device (iPod, iPhone, flash drive) or to another computer. I hope they're working on this, because it would convince me to pay for .Mac in a second.

.Mac is a failure if you compare the number of paying users (less than 1 million) with the total number of people with a Mac (more than 10 million). Apple should make .MAC free and enable it partially to work on Windows and Linux. This will serve as a marketing tool to show non-mac users what they are missing and how great Apple is. The problem with Apple is the greedy. This same greedy is making the iPhone fail in the long run. Here in europe, the iPhone lost 70% of its shine as a object of desire, as we still do not have it, in most europe, almost one year after launch. This is giving ground to competition, that is developing and launching similar phones that can work on any telecom. Greedy is one of the most disgusting characteristics of Apple and other companies. They are so greed that they lost money.