Apple's much anticipated replacement for .Mac, MobileMe, hasn't had a very good start. For the first few days it didn't work at all at least not for me, and since it started working I've had nothing but problems. And with the increasing unhappiness with .Mac from recent years, Apple really needed to do better with MobileMe than they have so far.
I go way back with Apple’s online service, even to the previous rebranding when it changed from iTools to .Mac. That switch was fairly painless because the service didn’t really change, just the name. Now it’s different because it seems Apple has decided to completely overhaul .Mac and add a lot of new functionality. And that’s commendable and badly needed I think.
After downloading the MobileMe software update and installing it, of course nothing worked for the first few days at least. Then when it did start working, well, that was just a start of the real headache. I had four Macs syncing and even though they were syncing very happily before the switch, after the switch it all went crazy.
I ended up getting more and more signatures for Mail, for example. Before I turned off syncing I had on one Mac almost 200 email signatures. With every sync, it wanted to add or modify calendar entries and address book contacts too even though nothing had changed. Put simply, syncing was badly broken. I took all those problems for a few days but realized it was just not going to work, so I turned off all syncing.
Unfortunately, this episode has made me lose a lot of faith in a service I liked and could recommend to people. Now I'm not so sure and Apple will have to work hard at restoring that. I'm sure I'll turn on syncing again at some point and see how it works, and I'm sure Apple will improve it. But I hope they do a better job with future changes. If this is going to be some sort of sign of how things will be in the future, that's not a good sign for Apple or any of us.
And I’m the first to admit that I don't pretend to understand how big or complex MobileMe is or what exactly goes into setting it up and making it run. I'm sure it's no simple task though. However it seems to me that Apple should have been better prepared because they have a fairly known population (Mac users). But clearly something has gone very wrong and even though Apple now says everything is working can we really trust them? I think I will wait a little while yet before I turn MobileMe syncing back on again.
3rd August 2008, 04:47
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