Comment by WiseWeasel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WiseWeasel | Hacker News Reader

The author apparently has too short a memory to recall when .mac was called "iTools", and it was free. It turned out to be a much larger money pit than they anticipated, one that was only ever going to be viable by violating their users' trust and selling their privacy away.

I'm of the opinion that Apple made the right choice in keeping their brand clean from all the privacy issues with those free ad-supported services, opting instead for classical b2c relationships (service to client in exchange for money) with the implied privacy protection of typically confidential business to customer relationships.

The author [also] makes the repeated mistake of assuming cloud services are better than the obviously obsolete trail of tears that is syncing to a computer. What if my personal and relationship data is valuable to me, and I don't want to have to upload it to ANYONE WHATSOEVER? What if I want to be able to transfer it directly to another device I own without having it reside on a third party device? That's worth money to me, and that's what I'm paying Apple for.

[edit]Made it slightly more clear that I'm talking about two different topics, .mac and syncing of data from iPhones and iPads.[/edit]

I'm of the opinion that Apple made the right choice in keeping their brand clean from all the privacy issues with those free ad-supported services, opting instead for classical b2c relationships (service to client in exchange for money) with the implied privacy protection of typically confidential business to customer relationships.

It seems like Apple could retain these benefits by including a MobileMe subscription with every iDevice, but not making it outright "free". Once 90% of iCustomers have MobileMe accounts, Apple would be motivated to improve it and add more Google-like cloud syncing.

I'd like to see them split up the various features of .me, and allow you to buy only the ones you want, similar to what they're doing with iWork on the iPad. I'd buy email for $20-25/yr, maybe idisk for another $20, and Find My Phone for [$5 per incident or $15/yr] (which I'd hopefully never have to buy, but would be more than happy to fork over for should the need arise). The rest of the stuff, they can keep.

[edit]Changed suggested price of Find My Phone from $10/incident before someone had replied to it, but then I noticed my edit made his reply not make sense, hence this note.[/edit]

I use Find my iPhone all the time; not just when I've left my phone at the diner (I never have), but when I can't find my phone in my apartment also. A roommate once used it to find her phone, which turned out to be in the fridge for some reason.

You could just call your iphone, that would have the same effect if it was in your apartment.

Not if it's muted, which mine is 90% of the time.

I don't use an Android phone, but I am a user of MobileMe. What are the benefits of the Google system that you don't get from MobileMe?

As an aside, I have to say that I can't imagine using an iPhone without MobileMe - it would lose a lot of its appeal for me!

This argument doesn't seem to make much sense, as MobileMe does store all of your information on a cloud service on machine's not owned or operated by you.

Sorry, my argument could have been made more clearly. I was talking about two different topics, .mac and syncing of iDevices with computers, and I didn't do a good job of separating them.

For .Mac, the fact that the service is paid and not ad-supported means that I don't have the awkward situation of my vendor being incentivized to sift through all my information with a fine comb in order to sell me their partners' products.

For syncing of iDevices, the fact that the data goes directly from the device to my computer is much more acceptable than having to make everything pass through Google's servers.

I'm much more comfortable with both of these situations than their equivalents on Google's platform.

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