Why mobileme so expensive

MobileMe started its life as iTools, a free collection of Internet-based tools for Mac users that launched on January 5, Two and a half years later, Apple rebranded the service as. Mac and added several new features to the bundle, including a virus scanner and a backup utility.

While previous web-based services had been free,. Mac was the first version of the bundle to cost anything. Apple priced. In , Apple once again renamed and revamped the system, calling it MobileMe.

As Apple gets ready for the fall launch of iCloud , its brand new Internet service for Mac and Windows, it seems only right to mark if not exactly mourn the passing of MobileMe, one of the rare product flops Apple has seen in recent years.

While there was much to praise about MobileMe, there were too many problems—both real and perceived—that ultimately doomed the service. Why did Apple feel that its only option was to demolish the MobileMe brand? In part, it was a simple matter of established pattern. Mac , when Apple is ready to move on, these services simply cease to exist.

MobileMe is on the same path, despite its being granted an unprecedented year to wave goodbye. MobileMe featured several elegant-looking Web-based applications including Mail, Contacts, and Calendar, and offered corporate-style sync functionality to all users. Apple also threw in 20GB of online storage, the ability to synchronize browser bookmarks, an online photo gallery for all computers and devices, and more.

Despite its valuable features, the technical problems it eventually solved, and the improvements made to the service over time, MobileMe never was able to commnad the esteem of the Mac community. Here are some of the reasons why. No doubt, products have survived a worse rollout and managed to prosper.

MobileMe aka ImmobileMe, MobileMess collapsed on contact alongside otherwise notable multiple product launches. From the start, it was plagued with infuriating technical problems—from syncing bugs that erased iPhone customer contact lists, to a mail server crash that locked people out of their e-mail accounts.

These breakdowns forced Apple, at the dawn of the service, to apologize to its subscribers and make it up to them with a free day, followed by a day subscription extension.

Those events overshadowed the service from then on. Today, we know that because of its technical glitches, the boss hated MobileMe from day one, and the only thing more amazing than its initial malfunction was its continued existence.

We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence. You should hate each other for having let each other down. And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year. It was not our finest hour, but we learned a lot. A suite of online-based productivity and communication offerings, MobileMe was launched into the marketplace to provide e-mail, calendaring, online storage and more.

It would work with the iPhone, which had potential to make it immediately useful to millions. Apple had pre-announced MobileMe months earlier, and demand was off-the-charts. In addition, it was buggy. Managing the storage service was kludgy and not very intuitive.

But then Apple did what Apple does best: it learned. The company announced it would build a new data center, add capacity and make its Apple cloud-based offering more reliable.