MobileMe renewal: Yes or no?

It’s a bit pricey. The standard fee is $99US/year. I’ve got one additional email address for my wife, so tack on another ten bucks. Before you fly into an iRage, know that I realize that one hundred bucks for push email, contacts and calendar, 10GB online storage, web hosting and so on is not a bad deal. It’s just that there are less expensive alternatives.

via MobileMe renewal: Yes or no? – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).

One thing people forget is they don’t have to renew at list price through Apple.

But the MobileMe subscription through Amazon, then use the code in the retail package to renew the account. It’s available for about $70, a significant discount off list.

If $99 is a price you think you’d be willing to pay, $70 should make the decision easier.

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  • http://www.chuqui.com chuqui

    I back up via jungle dish and S3 for my catastrophe offsite. I've used backup with my mom's mac at times, but I finally decided to just use a Time Capsule there, and I'm happy with that.

  • http://www.chuqui.com chuqui

    The integration, especially between Mac and mobileme and iphone, is the big win for me, too. The weakness is the occasional delays in mail that seem to be related to spam attacks overloading the incoming servers. Early reliability issues seem to be gone, at least as far as I can tell, so I'm definitely leaning in this direction.

    One thing I experimented with was having gmail suck in email from the other accounts, but it does so on a schedule you can't control that seems to average every half hour. Not so bad for an account that you have deprecated and are only monitoring for legacy email, but not acceptable for an account with an active email stream. Mobileme has a similar function, but when I tried it, I couldn't get it running, but that turned out to be pilot error on my part, so I need to try again and see, but I expect it'll be similar. End result: multiple accounts tied into mail.app and iPhone, which I'd kinda like to do away with, but not a huge priority.

  • Jim

    Don't overlook the integration with Backup.app.

    $99/year for (relatively) secure off-site incremental backups of important/critical items like Keychains (login, 1Password, etc) — or the more mundane calendar, address book, bookmarks, and anything else MobileMe doesn't include — and the extreme ease of use when restoring files as needed is hard to beat. The semi-insta-syncing with MobileMe is nice but there's no “undo” if you screw something up and don't notice before the mistake is synced to all your devices/computers.

    With incremental backups, at least there's a chance of reverting the mistake (Time Machine can help here but not for anyone who isn't using it or isn't running Leopard yet, and it certainly doesn't help when the hard drive fails or is stolen, etc). Mainly, though, it's the off site part that I think is a bigger deal than most people consider.

  • iacas

    The integration alone makes it worthwhile to me. Sure, I could cobble together a bunch of other services, but MobileMe – except for a few hiccups – “just works” most of the time. It might even work slowly most of the time, but it works.

    With four computers and two iPhones, that's a plus in and of itself. The wife and I each have our own full MobileMe account.

  • Jim

    Don't overlook the integration with Backup.app.

    $99/year for (relatively) secure off-site incremental backups of important/critical items like Keychains (login, 1Password, etc) — or the more mundane calendar, address book, bookmarks, and anything else MobileMe doesn't include — and the extreme ease of use when restoring files as needed is hard to beat. The semi-insta-syncing with MobileMe is nice but there's no “undo” if you screw something up and don't notice before the mistake is synced to all your devices/computers.

    With incremental backups, at least there's a chance of reverting the mistake (Time Machine can help here but not for anyone who isn't using it or isn't running Leopard yet, and it certainly doesn't help when the hard drive fails or is stolen, etc). Mainly, though, it's the off site part that I think is a bigger deal than most people consider.

    • http://www.chuqui.com chuqui

      I back up via jungle dish and S3 for my catastrophe offsite. I've used backup with my mom's mac at times, but I finally decided to just use a Time Capsule there, and I'm happy with that.

  • iacas

    The integration alone makes it worthwhile to me. Sure, I could cobble together a bunch of other services, but MobileMe – except for a few hiccups – “just works” most of the time. It might even work slowly most of the time, but it works.

    With four computers and two iPhones, that's a plus in and of itself. The wife and I each have our own full MobileMe account.

    • http://www.chuqui.com chuqui

      The integration, especially between Mac and mobileme and iphone, is the big win for me, too. The weakness is the occasional delays in mail that seem to be related to spam attacks overloading the incoming servers. Early reliability issues seem to be gone, at least as far as I can tell, so I'm definitely leaning in this direction.

      One thing I experimented with was having gmail suck in email from the other accounts, but it does so on a schedule you can't control that seems to average every half hour. Not so bad for an account that you have deprecated and are only monitoring for legacy email, but not acceptable for an account with an active email stream. Mobileme has a similar function, but when I tried it, I couldn't get it running, but that turned out to be pilot error on my part, so I need to try again and see, but I expect it'll be similar. End result: multiple accounts tied into mail.app and iPhone, which I'd kinda like to do away with, but not a huge priority.

  • reinharden

    Although greater care is necessary when going this route, I bought several renewals via eBay for under $50 each and at least a couple down around $25.

    That made my decision *way* easier.

    reinharden

  • John

    An article on MobileMe alternatives:

    http://rss.macworld.com/click.phdo?i=a79902b200…