I’m sure you have that favourite band, TV show, or movie that you absolutely adore and desperately pray to every God listening that you never have to defend in public.
I don’t. The awesomeness of the stuff I love is self-evident and even those who are dumb enough to mock, say, the pre-Batman film work of Mr Adam West are at least sensible enough to know that to speak up would only reveal their own idiotic ignorance.
Open it up to software and hardware and online services, though, and it gets itchy. The question I hate the most is a common one from new Mac users:
“Is a MobileMe subscription worth the money?”
Umm… It’s complicated.
MobileMe has been tough to defend since day one of Mac.com. It costs £59 per year. What do you get for that dough? Oh, you get a whole pile of world-class, useful features.
You get email which is every bit as good as Google Mail (although you can get that for free).
Online storage! If you’re a fan of Box.net or DropBox, you’ll love your iDisk so much that you’ll eventually forget that both of those other services are free, and that Box.net supports live online editing of Office documents, and DropBox automatically keeps your online storage in sync with folders on every Mac or PC you own!
As for publishing your photos and videos on the web, Apple has a spectacular solution for you: all of its iLife apps can export your media to lovely MobileMe online galleries.
Well, yes, I suppose it’s a lot like Flickr. And Vimeo. And Photoshop Express, and Picasa… Which are all free. Look, we’re getting off-track, dammit! Just buy the damned service!
I’m sorry to say that this is a typical exchange. It explains why I didn’t get a second interview at the Apple Store but was immediately headhunted by a recruiter for Microsoft Retail.
What finally turned the corner for me with MobileMe was the Find My iPhone feature on iPhone OS 3.0. It’s everything that an Apple feature should be. Access me.com from any browser and it’ll toss up a map that pinpoints your iPhone’s location. If you lost it in the house, click a button and your phone will start bleating like a lost calf; listen carefully and hope the sound isn’t coming from the washing machine.
It’s a great time-saver but it’s not a feature that I’d pay £59 per year for alone. It’s the whole package that makes MobileMe worthwhile. It’s like those academic teardowns of new iPhones that identify every component and attempt to add up the actual total cost of the device: run through every feature in MobileMe, assign it a value, and you typically come up with something greater than £59 per year.
iDisk: £15 to automatically sync of all of my personal calendars, contacts, and app settings across all Macs and backed up to a central server. Find My iPhone: £5; Back To My Mac: £20… It all adds up.
MobileMe isn’t a specific feature or function. It’s a utility, like water or electricity. Its actual purpose is to maintain a pipeline so that Apple can deliver digital services and feature enhancements to whatever device they’ve sold you.
I just wish they’d punch that button more aggressively.
Things I want MobileMe to do
1) Back To My Mac should simply work. I have a PogoPlug on my home network. It’s a £80 thing that shares any USB hard drive plugged into the device to any computer anywhere on the internet, with no special software required and no monthly fee. It always works. Halfway across the world in Beijing, I mounted my PogoPlugged drive on my desktop with one click. Whereas the iMac on that same home network remained utterly invisible to my MacBook, as usual.
2) With MobileMe acting as a go-between, standing on a street corner with an iPhone in my hand should be little different than sitting in my office. Some form of screen sharing should work; I shouldn’t have to buy an iPhone VNC client. I should be able to browse my hard drive, view files compatible with the iPhone’s viewer, and download files directly to memory. I should be able to stream content from my iTunes library.
3) Apps and widgets should be able to exploit MobileMe to create cloudlike spaces and intimate integration. My editor should be able to use MobileMe to find my MacBook, query the list of open documents of a certain type, and add a Note to the margin of the chapter I’m working on, highlighting a section we’d discussed and confirming that the legal department said, quote, “Absolutely no @!&#ing way.”
Okay, I’ve just written that I’d like to “intimately integrate with my editor” so I should wind this down. The thing to understand about MobileMe is that it’s here to support a thoroughly modern take on computing. In an earlier generation, your relationship with a PC or operating system maker was limited to dark threats of explosive violence if they didn’t get the damned thing working like it does in the ads.
Today, it’s an ongoing relationship and an open, two-way conduit. Particularly with a company like Apple, which likes to control the user experience. It’s main objection to deleting sucky music that Genius finds in your iTunes library is a PR one, not legal or moral reason.
Apple – with some justification – has a reputation for exerting this kind of influence. If that’s its reputation, why does’t it leverage it to the consumer’s maximum advantage? An Apple computer on an Apple network xusing an Apple online service to interact with an Apple mobile could be a glorious totalitarian state in which every app, document, and device has a passported conduit to everything else you use.
I have infinite control over my Linux boxes and bow to no earthly King. But I never use them for any real work. My Apples are the most restrictive systems on the planet, and they’re my favourites. It’s simple: I cede 80 mass units of personal freedom to Apple and they give me 402 units of power.
In the OS world, freedom is just another word for nothing left to use.
Contact Us
Digg
It's easy and free to get the latest news headlines, reviews and opinions straight to your email inbox. Sign up NOW to make sure you receive the latest Mac news, reviews and tutorials on your favourite topics.
