Apple exploring major MobileMe revamp; considering making it free

Kane and Smith Report, “Apple is considering making MobileMe a free service that would serve as a ‘locker’ for personal memorabilia just as photos, music and videos, eliminating the need for devices to carry a lot of memory, the people familiar with the situation said.”

MacDailyNews Note: Perhaps our source was right all things considered! If true, you heard it first on MacDailyNews on May 7, 2010 (RUMOR: Apple to make MobileMe free. Otherwise, we for all that believe Apple was in all seriousness considering it last May.

Kane and Smith Report, “MobileMe, part of an industry wave known as cloud computing, as well could become a focal point for a new online music service that Apple has been developing for more than a year, the people said. Social networking would be another key component, one of the people said.”

This is one huge advantage that will develop in typical Apple fashion over time to be another unbeatable iTunes type hub.

I don’t think a free Mobile Me will attract that many more clients into buying apple products who weren’t earlier, especially since they can’t make enough iPhones as things now stand. Take into account the loss of revenue from existing clients and I just don’t see it being that beneficial to them. I don’t have any numbers clearly, perhaps it would work. A reduction in price and/or increase in offering would undoubtedly be welcome although.

I would have thought the major selling point of Mobile Me was the web interface to email on the me.com domain. Now how many people in fact use that as their main email address? The main reason I used it was for synching contacts / calendars with my iPhone and Macs, for all that my company has moved to Google Apps for the main email, which means I can sync my calendars with google and that works a treat. No need for Mobile Me, as good at this stage.

With sufficient online storage, one could in theory drop any need for a desktop PC to sync and backup an iPad or iPhone. This is where the future of MM lies – in eliminating the PC altogether from the equation. Grandma can buy an iPad and never need to be tethered to a desktop dock for storing her photos…

Big Apple fan

I am a big Apple fan and I have been a MobileMe user for since 2007. I kept waiting for the service to break out of its shell and become a real powerhouse. Nevertheless for $99 a year I don’t even get enough space to backup my iPhoto library, much less my iTunes library. Its just too much for too little and it has not improved that much over the past few years.

This is one area in which Apple has fallen far short of the mark. MobileMe is not even close to “insanely great.”

I will happily pay for MobileMe knowing that Apple isn’t using my data to advertise to me. My Gmail account is riddled with Spam and advertising. Just think what Google is doing with that treasure trove of data called Google docs. Kind of makes my stomach turn. Especially when you hear of companies using Gdocs. If a company has to use a free service to have their employees collaborate maybe they shouldn’t be in business.

MobileMe is pretty good–I use it all the time–now could anyway be “insanely great”! To boot to consumers who value quality, it should target small business. Imagine if you could colaborate live as so then as run a souped up version of Bento online using MobileMe! Small businesses without programmers would just eat it up.

Big change this year

S Jobs has stated that mobile me is having a big change this year. I’m hoping like everyone else for more capacity. Like some, I have google, nevertheless I dread having the thought of what they would do with my private info, can’t trust them! With mobile me it’s a different story. Safety is big at apple.!

About time Apple made that piece of turd free. I’ve always thought it was worth nothing. Actually Apple should pay me to use it as a freaking beta tester.

I just wish Apple would just do whatever it is they’re gonna do to MobileMe before long. I’m tired of seeing these rumors followed by inaction.

The syncing of the contacts

I can see them offering the syncing of the contacts, emails, and calendar for free. They would probably include 2-5GB of storage that could be used for both the syncing and iDisk. That type of service I can anyway see as a free option. Getting 20GB of storage and web hosting would probably be an upgraded package.

The biggest advantage of making MobileMe free would be the ability to integrate MobileMe functionality into the operation of the basic OS. This could be a marriage made in Heaven if Apple did it right.

Month for the service

I after all find it funny that people bitch over about 8 bucks a month for the service, assuming you paid the long price. You can get it for about half that pretty easily. If 8 bucks a month breaks the bank, what the hell are you doing with Apple products?!

For example, the Photobucket app is free, and easy to use, nevertheless iDisk can’t even be used on an iPhone for easily publishing photos online. There is probably a way to do it, yet I sure wasn’t able to figure it out. I was using Photobucket within seconds.