To .mac Or Not To .mac :: My First Mac - Help Buying and Getting Started with Your New Mac

Quick Scan

.Mac Scorecard:

Ease of use with iLife: Excellent

Website Creation and Hosting: Excellent

File Sharing Page: Very Nice

Syncing Data between Macs: Good

Email Service: Mediocre

Online File Storage Amount: Below Average

Other Bells and Whistles: Well Done

Get it if you want simple, nicely done websites of your photos, movies, groups and blogs. Otherwise, look hard and compare the value with other services such as Google.

What Else Do I Need to Get With a New Mac?

What Software Do I Need?

What Email Program or Service Should I Use?

Backup Your Mac

To .mac Or Not To .mac – Is It Worth $99 a Year?

By: Mathew Duggan
Categories: Before You Buy, Getting Started

One of the more interesting features available for purchase with a new Mac is a service called .mac or dotMac as it is often written. Touted as the center of your digital world by Apple, it is a yearly subscription service costing $99 that provides you with an email address, web hosting, and 1 gigabyte of online storage available on a virtual drive called iDisk.

The real beauty of dotMac is how integrated it is with the iLife suite of applications. iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iDVD, iTunes and iWeb all have a button allowing you to publish material to your dotMac account. No technical knowledge is needed to do any of this, including setting up a website using iWeb.

Using Apple’s templates, you can have a beautiful looking website published in less than an hour, which can be a great way for a small business to get their website off the ground quickly. iWeb plus dotMac is also an excellent way to build personal websites for slideshows, movies and blogs, and the ease of use allows users to focus on produc-ing content and not worrying about HTML code.

DotMac is more than just a hosting service though; is also touted as a backup and online file sharing utility. You can store files, contacts and calendar information on your account and share this with fellow workers or family members. This drive can be accessed from any computer, giving you a great way of sharing and keeping files you might need within reach.

The online hard drive portion of the service is limited due to its size of only 1 gigabyte, but more is available for purchase at the cost of $50 for 2 more gigabytes or $100 for 4 more gigabytes of space. If you use a Mac for work, this alone can be worth the cost of the subscription. However dotMac is far from perfect.

The mail portion of dotMac is simply called Mail and is by far the weakest offering of the features touted by Apple. It is a slow email service that doesn’t handle large email files well. Overall, the Mail service in dotMac is easily beaten by free offerings in the web email world such as Yahoo mail or Gmail by Google. There is also the risk of using dotMac for your primary email due to the headache of changing email addresses should you discontinue the dotMac service.

Additionally, there are a bunch of smaller features that are nice to have, but don’t warrant the use of dotMac on their own. They include: syncing your data across several computers, forming online Groups to facilitate communication for a group such as a class or soccer team, sending email cards, as well as calendar and photo publishing. So now that you know what .mac can do, is it worth the cost?

It depends on what you are going to use it for. This is a service that is a jack of all trades, master of none in that there are far better options in every category that can be had for cheaper. However the true strength of dotMac is the ease of use that allows users with no technical knowledge to be sharing files, building websites and just generally doing things that less technical users have been unable to acheive. The iDisk is also beautifully integrated within OS X, providing online storage that works like another hard drive in your computer.

In the end, dotMac is an excellent service in the way it’s integrated with iLife and for its ease of use, but for the cost the size of the storage space along with the bandwidth allowed for the websites posted to dotMac accounts, it is not the most economically friendly option.

The bottom line is that if you want to make a small website, share some pictures, movies or mp3’s, or organize several calendars across multiple machines, dotMac is right for you. A quick and easy website alone can be worth your $99 if you haven’t learned to make a web site on your own. But if you just need high-speed hosting, lots of online disk space or excellent mail management, you may want to look elsewhere.

One last note: It is widely expected that dotMac will get an overhaul this fall when Leopard comes out, so if you use it, you might be looking at a free upgrade in the short term.

If you do decide to get .Mac, you can throw MFM a bone by clicking our .Mac link on our Support page before you subscribe and Apple will throw us a few dollars. Thanks!

Did this article answer your questions about getting .Mac? Let us know in the Comments section below!

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Your Comments:

My mother is a recent Mac convert. I placed her on .Mac, temporarily, for the few times she travels. That way, she has a familiar interface and synced contacts when she is away from her Mini. Having a shared section of iDisk has enabled me to EASILY get files to her, as I support her from another city. I see .Mac as a temporary solution, until I can set her up w/ free services. As geeks, sometimes we forget the perception of novice users, as they convert to a new computer. My mother had enough of a learning curve when switching from PC to Mac. Email being one of the most critical apps was one thing I wanted to ease up on her with.

Mark
07/20/2007 at 07:07 AM

Im sort of new to the mac and went and bought the .mac account mainly because of the ability to backup my address books, bookmarks, keychains, etc.. online for secure and easily restorable backup in case it was needed. If your one that has two macs in the house say a imac and macbook then the ability to synch information between the two is a great feature.

Like many users, I dont feel its worth the $99 price tag considering what you get. Of course you can save yourself $20 instantly just by buying it somewhere like amazon http://tinyurl.com/26gv3w.

For online backup you can get 2GB of free online backup at http://www.mozy.com. Or unlimited for about $5 per month. A far better deal IMO.

As stated on this site there has been some buzz about an upgrade to .mac when leopard ships so Im hanging in there to see what happens with that.

Darrin
07/20/2007 at 07:35 AM

I've been using dotMac since its inception. I have a lot of technical experience so I know my way around computers. The article gave dotMac email a bad rap. It has always worked well for me; fast and dependable IDAP with Apple's Mail program. In the year's I've been using dotMac mail, I can count its downtime on one hand! The ability to sync data, particularly bookmarks, with the click of a mouse, and move files back and forth from the desktop to an external server or other Macs in the house, is very valuable, even to experienced users. I call it invisible FTP, and love the easy interface. The integration with iLife is icing on the cake for home users and technophobes. I can't wait to see what Lepard brings to the party. The $99 admission price is cheaper than a year's supply of asprin and movie rentals.

Leo
07/20/2007 at 12:21 PM

I think the mail portion of .Mac has definitely improved over the past year or so, much faster and more reliable. Also the improvement to the web-mail portion making the browser based version work almost exactly like the application version that came with your Mac, it is a really nice touch and ads greatly to the integration side of .Mac.

Here is another take on .Mac, kind of more of the same:
http://www.switchingtomac.com/wp/should-i-get-mac/

Switching2Mac
07/21/2007 at 12:43 AM

Save your money, better free or cheaper emails. The backup to iDisk, when it works, is 1 Gig and only backs up the data to Mac Applications and ONLY the data, not the whole program. Invest your money in a couple of hard drives, from other world computing. com or whom ever and put them in a small firewire case about $20.00, get the one that has a power plug with it. Call in so they sell you the right thing for your computer now and in the future.
Never rely on one drive for your backups. The new release of X is promising a easy back up system. Yes, finally what has been missing since the original Mac OS . That was a a no brainer to back up. You do get to share your book marks between different browsers, the other applications are just not wort it in my opinion and I have used it for 5 years. I cut the family pack this year and unless they do some real magic, I will drop it next year. 1 Gig of space for 100 bucks. iDisk is also in that 1 Gig limit Please Apple and they don't even send a white Apple sticker . Go to Apple.com and look under support and select discussions and find .Mac you will see many questions. Many views but few posts for problems. For as I much as I like Apple products, have used them since the first 128k came out. Their are better ways you can accomplish what .Mac tries but comes up short.

geoffinak
07/21/2007 at 09:18 PM

I have had my own mac for about 4 years now. .Mac membership I've had in about 2 years. Last year my mac's memory got corupted and my mac got very strange. Before I found out what it was, I tried to install a new OS X from scratch. What happened? I couldn't copy back all my settings from my normal backup, it would just not work. My soultion? .Mac! It saved my day(s), and it was worth every dime, penny or whatever I payed! .Mac just WORK!

Eaglesaint
07/22/2007 at 03:04 AM

The one thing that has been really overlooked here is the .Mac syncing... I have a 12" Powerbook and an iMac and can keep my calendar, address book, etc in perfect sync with .Mac. When I'm at work with my powerbook and I make new appointments, add contacts, etc. all I do when I get home is sync up and then go to my iMac, sync my iMac with .mac, and it's all there.

Bowser
07/22/2007 at 09:07 PM

Buying .Mac service with a new machine is a great deal, only $69 instead of $99 and well worth it to see if the service is something you will use. Despite being a rather hard-core geek running my own servers and well-versed in unix, I still pay for .Mac. The annual fee is well worth it for me just for the synching, backup, and the extra email that is not at all associated with my company. Yes, I could replace almost all the .mac services with freely available software on my servers, but the convenience of the iLife integration just can't be beat.

Lewis
07/23/2007 at 06:59 PM

dotMac is everything you say it is and the integration with iLife apps makes it a uniquely Mac service, but one thing not stated that is important to newcomers... you need an account with an ISP to get Internet access before you can use dotMac. That is another cost, and since your ISP gives you an email address and free personal web hosting anyway, some of my Mac colleagues perceive dotMac to be an expensive luxury. I just feel Apple glosses over the ISP requirement, such that a new Mac buyer might believe it to be a total Internet solution, which it is not.

Ken D
07/23/2007 at 08:02 PM

I think .Mac is awesome. Yes, as others have said you can get fee solutions for storage and mail, but the Sync feature between multiple macs is great. And well worth the 100. I recently had my MacBook stolen and because of the sync feature, lost absolutely no data at all as everything was also safely at home on my iMac.

Sure, iWeb is a little too simple for me but for a lot of people it's just what they need to get themselves going.

And if Apple lives up to the rumours of an overhaul this Winter, I'll be delighted, but I'm already happy with what I've got.

I'm the President of our local Mac user group (http://www.applesbc.org) and we use our club iDisk for all of our club related information including our newsletters. All the members of the Executive have access and it's where we store all of our data.

VanMacGuy
07/24/2007 at 04:20 PM