Yahoo recently bumped up its free email service to offer 100 MB of storage due to Google’s 1,000 MB offering. This is a jump from a measly 15 MB, which is what Yahoo was offering before the increase. Yahoo also improved its Mail Plus, increasing the storage to an amazing 2 GB while lowering the price from $29.99/year to $19.99/year.
Google Gmail is still in beta, but that is not keeping people away from the service. Some people can’t wait to get their hands on a Gmail account so they can rid themselves of less worthy email services.
So with these two services offering mass amount of storage, the question is when will Apple jump on the bandwagon? Apple’s .Mac email offers only 15 MB of storage. This needs to increase soon if they plan on keeping customers.
.Mac email does have one advantage, and that is the fact that you can view your email via webmail or by using an email application, such as Mail, Entourage and Eudora. With Yahoo and Google, you can only view email through webmail by going to the company’s site. Now if you pay $19.99/year as I stated earlier for Yahoo Mail Plus you get more space and you are able to use an email application to view email. This seems very reasonable given the other features Mail Plus offers. To view all the features for Mail Plus and the free Yahoo service you can check out the feature comparison.
Currently Google’s free email only allows webmail access as well. For many, this will not be good enough due to the limitations of webmail. Some will want some sophistication which you can only get using an email application. I know when I use .Mac’s webmail it is not up to par with the Mail application. Because webmail cannot do things that my Mail app does, I try not to check my mail through the web if I can help it. Even with this advantage .Mac has, I still don’t feel like the price is justified.
Now some people may say to me, “Apple offers more than just email for $99/year, so all the services justify the price.” Many people may also tell me that no other provider offers the seamless integration that Apple offers for the price. So the integration with the OS and applications such as iSync, iCal and iPhoto as well as many other offerings such as backup software and virus software is well worth the price. Well, all that may be true for some, but what about people who do not use Virex or Backup?
Apple is starting to lack in some areas of its service. I know some will tell me I am wrong. I really like the .Mac service, but I am starting to feel like it is no longer worth it. Some of the new features that were added to .Mac are useless to me. I don’t care about the Inside .Mac book from O’Reilly and I don’t use some of the software that .Mac offers at a discount. How about something more useful, like a $10 gift certificate to the iTunes Music Store or a discount to the Apple Store?
I understand that .Mac is good probably good for beginners and those who like the integration that Apple does so well at. Perhaps I feel like I am outgrowing the basic features and want something more advanced. Having .Mac email is cool, but when you can get free email with almost ten times the amount of space from other providers, it doesn't seem right. Like I said earlier, I will probably have people inform me that the price is right for all the services you receive. I personally don’t feel the service is worth the price anymore.
While we are discussing .Mac, am I the only one who feels they should have improved it more than what they did recently? Let’s talk about the other services you receive. Let’s begin with the iDisk, which should have been increased way above 100 MB. They need to increase it at least to 1 GB, preferably more.
Apple could set different prices for different services. $59/year could get you 1GB of iDisk space, 100 MB of email storage, and everything else that is currently available. Maybe for $99/year you could get 1,000 MB of email storage, 2 GB of iDisk space and advanced web hosting. Apple currently lets you buy more space for iDisk and email, but the pricing is way too high.
I mentioned advanced web hosting, but what do I mean. Well, currently Apple offers you to host your own web pages. For beginners you can create a simple site with Apple’s templates, and for the more knowledgeable you can create you own HTML and store it in the Sites folder. But what if you want server-side scripting and programming in your website? You are out of luck, since Apple is catering to the novice web user and does not offer such services. If you want stuff such as PHP, MySQL databases, and CGI scripting you will need to go elsewhere. I have seen many people discuss this topic on Apple’s .Mac support site. I am almost ready to get advanced web hosting for my website and when I do I am considering ditching the .Mac service.
The Bookmarks feature is probably the feature I use most. Since I am unfortunate to have a Windows based computer at work, I pull up my bookmarks to surf the web. One thing I have found out since Apple updated .Mac is that I have to log in more than I used to. If my Bookmarks stay idle for a period of time, then I will have to log back in to get my bookmarks back, and for get about the Bookmark preferences. I have to constantly change them back to what I had them because they get lost when .Mac logs you out for being idle.
Maybe Apple should do what lots of people are preferring, and that is a pay-per-use type service. This way you pay for only the services you use. If you only want email, you pay only for email. Apple will never do this, but at least offer more than one service.
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