Wednesday, April 30, 2008

.Mac = ?

Allrighty. I just got a new iMac at home, and am wanting to synchronize the information from my office Mac and my home Mac. So Mac offers these .Mac accounts, for which I signed up with a free 60-day trial.

I was excited about trying this, because I know it can provide an easy way to synchronize stuff, as well as a good way to publish websites. I am thinking of taking my youth group blog and making it into a full web page, which I think would be a good move. Then again, I've so far been unimpressed with iWeb. It is beautiful, as far as the templates are concerned, but I prefer the blogging features available to me on Blogger. With iWeb, you have the option of adding only 1 picture per post, and It's fairly rigid in your options on layout. So part of me is pretty uninclined to go with it, because I can do more with Blogger.

I have really grown to love Macs over the last year, and I don't think I'll ever buy another PC unless some drastic things happen (and they could). It's simple to use. It never crashes. The programs it comes with are fantastic, and they communicate well with each other. Even the PC programs like MS Office on the Mac are better.

But a lot of what .Mac is offering, I can already do using Google applications. I e-mail important documents to myself. I already have all my contacts on Gmail, and don't really have a need to put them all into my local hard drive, or onto an iDisk for that matter. I also use Google calendar, which works just fine. I publish photos of events on Picasa Web, which works every bit as well as the Mac galleries.

I'm trying to justify the expense of .Mac for the very few extra tools it would offer me.

Anyone know of some things I'm not seeing here?

4 comments:

  1. I've used Macs for a while and love the interface but I'm w/ you on the Google aspect of computer life. There isn't much I do these days outside of Google simply for the great "Office" product they have out there, free mind you.

    Gmail, Blogger, YouTube, Notepad, not to mention the search engine, etc. ad nauseum.

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  2. Glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. As much as Mac charges for .Mac, I just think they're too proud of a mediocre product. Surely they could either charge less or offer more.

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  3. iKnow what you're not seeing. Google runs on standard household PCs that cost less than your iMac. (Of course, they have a few thousand more.) Sure, I'm biased, but Google chose the product with the greatest benefits compared to cost.

    Wiki link.

    Maybe that's why you prefer the Google product.

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  4. haha...I'm reminded again of how much better you are than I am at a lot of this computer stuff. I'm trying to pretend that I understood the wiki link, but it's a little over my head. :-) I do see that they chose cost over overall performance.

    Google has made some incredible stuff; especially considering that they've kept the vast majority of it free.

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