MobileMe Retail
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009
MobileMe is the Internet service from Apple that keeps your email, contacts, and calendar up to date across your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. You also get an elegant Gallery for sharing your photos with friends and family, iDisk for storing and sharing important documents online, and you can access and manage it all with a suite of desktop-quality web applications at www.me.com.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Mobile Me is a much needed item.
Mobile me makes life much easier for both personal and profesional uses. I could not get along without it.
1 Star A WARNING TO ALL USERS OF MOBILE ME
IT IS VERY LIKELY YOU WILL LOSE DATA - EVEN IF YOU THINK IT HAS “IMPROVED”
It is probable that you will lose, or at the very least, lose ACCESS to, some or all of your data on MobileMe. Like everyone else, I have endured the instability of MobileMe since its launch. Yes, it has gotten more stable since launch, and yes, they’ve done an okay job of fixing some of the early issues that users have been experiencing. But over the past couple of months, I have had at least one instance a month of something not syncing correctly. One time it was calendar entries. Sometimes it’s duplicate emails. Sometimes contacts. Maybe they’ll sync from iphone to MobileMe and my laptop, but not my desktop. Or vice versa. It’s been fairly annoying to have to spot-check and babysit these syncs over the months (e.g., I input a phone number into my iPhone but never am quite sure if it’s going to end up on my computer. 95% of the time it does, but every once in a while it wouldn’t.) As annoying (and, really, inexcusable on the part of Apple) as this has been, it has never been disastrous, and always easily fixed with a quick support chat with support people (or reading support documentation online) that usually resulted in doing a forced reset of one or more computers, and then everything worked smoothly.
UNTIL LAST WEEK. I noticed my contacts weren’t updating from my iphone. MobileMe had them correctly, but my desktop and laptop did not. I had been on a trip to Europe, and had input a few new contacts while I was there, edited others, etc. When I returned home, I noticed that none of them were on my local computers. I’m going to spare the boring details — but after an entire week of troubleshooting with MobileMe support personnel, escalating it to their supervisors and members of the MobileMe engineering team, etc., I received the message that I am reprinting below, which basically states that the contact data on the iPhone and MobileMe can never be synced back to my computers, and that the only way to restore this data is to manually re-enter it. They were also kind enough to include an activation key for another year of MobileMe. Which at first I thought was a joke (”you can get a whole new year of data corruption and instability!” “Lose your data for a whole new year!”) but, sadly, is their idea of compensation for lost data, lost hours, and the irresponsible launch of a service that, more than six months after it debuted, is still mangling users’ data.
NOTE TO MICROSOFT: I hated Vista, and those “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads were (I’m ashamed to admit) extremely influential in getting me to switch to Apple. I’m a huge Apple fan. I love my Macbook Air so much that I practically sleep with it next to me. And my iPhone is a close second. But not once — NOT ONCE — during my time with Windows Mobile and Exchange did I ever lose a contact, experience data corruption, or experience ONE SINGLE INCIDENT where data did not syncronize. NOT ONCE. You should exploit the instability of MobileMe for all it’s worth. Have the fat schlubby PC guy out partying with his friends, while the skinny cool Mac guy is at home alone because he’s lost all the contact information on his iPhone trying to sync to MobileMe.
APPLE’S IDEA OF SUPPORT:
This is XXXX again with the MobileMe Support Staff. I have heard back from my Engineer who was working on your account and they have stated they were unable to repair the data and sync it down from MobileMe.
Unfortunately, the only way to resolve the inconsistent data error is to re-create the data manually on the computer and the reset the sync data to replace the data on MobileMe with that of the computer.
I am terribly sorry for this, I have gone ahead and issued you a MobileMe Activation Key for a 1 year free of service.
Your Activation Key is: 3Q2TCXXXXXXXXX
You may use this key to extend your current account or activate/re-activate another account.
Thank you so much for your patience and understanding. I hope you continue to use the MobileMe services in the future.
Have a lovely day!
YEAH RIGHT.
“Have a lovely day?” Seriously?
It’s like at the end “Airplane” when the plane has crashed through all the terminals and the stewardesses are telling the departing passengers “Thanks for flying TransGlobal.” (Though if it were Apple Airlines, they’d be giving a 20% off coupon for the next flight and think that they were being generous.)
BOTTOM LINE.
Looks good, sounds good, and there’s no reason in the world (that I can think of) that it shouldn’t be reliable and stable. (For godssake, MICROSOFT can do it!) But for some reason it still is. And maybe you’ll be lucky and never have problems. But in my experience, it’s a pretty big risk, and losing important data is one of the most infuriating (and potentially devasting, depending on your backup scenarios) experiences a user can face. This is a substandard service which Apple has arrogantly marketed as reliable, and it’s a joke.
3 Stars It’s OK
It’s ok. The galleries/iPhoto/Mac/iPhone integration is hard to beat for a Mac head. But don’t be stupid: if you just need an e-mail address, this is overkill. Amazon’s price now ($70) is the most I’d pay.
5 Stars Rocky start to Mobile Me - Now Sync works great
I have two apple laptops an imac and a pc at work - this service keeps my important work files synced between all of my computers effortlessly! When mobileme was first introduced there was definitely some glitches but now it seems to work great. I rate this 5 stars because it is such a simple complete solution for synching all of my important info and the initial glitches are gone.
5 Stars Situation Normal, all as expected
I order MobileMe (formerly .Mac) every year from Amazon because it is less expensive here than if I directly renew on Apple.com. I simply enter the authorization code on MobilMe and my renewal is applied on the correct date, renewing me for another year.
No problems, No hassles, just as I expected.
