.Mac: The Last Straw
I have had a .Mac account for two years. It expires tomorrow. I see no value in renewing.
I wasn’t going to renew my .Mac account anyway, but if I were still wishy-washy about the decision the following frustrating wild goose chase definitely would have plunged the balance towards “Don’t Renew”.
As part of the dropping-dotMac process I went to change my Apple User ID via the My Account Profile page, and saw the following:
It quite clearly says in the bottom left hand corner, “Note: .Mac customers click here to change your Apple ID.”
Clicking the link brings one to the .Mac homepage, and if you are a .Mac member and already logged in you will see something similar to the following:
Where is the “Change Apple ID” link? Hm, how about checking .Mac Help and searching for “Apple ID”:
Looks like there’s no luck there. Frustration is starting to settle in at this point. What kind of service is that $99/year paying for again? Maybe there is some information on Apple’s Support site.
Finally. We’re getting somewhere: “When a .Mac account expires, the user name and password are still valid for other services.” A little farther down it reads, “You can change the password and email address associated with your Apple ID at any time by signing in and clicking View Account at the My Info page.”
This page makes no mention that the Apple ID can be changed, and furthermore it looks like it can not be changed, and yet the first step I took towards changing my Apple ID quite clearly stated, “Note: .Mac customers click here to change your Apple ID.” I think someone at Apple is taking Apple’s street address, One Infinite Loop, a bit too literally.
This is an obvious oversight on Apple’s part. I can’t imagine Apple’s customers haven’t raised this issue with Apple before, and yet no changes have been made. I can only conclude that the leadership at Apple doesn’t care about .Mac, which makes me feel real good about saying “Goodbye .Mac. Sorry, but I won’t miss you.”
PS If you are an Apple fanatic and are interested in trying to “save my soul” and “help me see the light” don’t bother commenting here, it won’t be worth your time. Instead, contribute to the discussions found here, here, here, here, and here; and just to pretend that there is some balance in the whole equation look here. I’ve contributed to the comments on most of those posts, under the name ‘kevin’. If after reading the posts, my comments and the other comments you still think .Mac would add value for what I want to do with my Mac feel free to buy me a .Mac activation key. You can encrypt it with pgp and email it to me at kevin.in.china at gmail dot com. I’d be glad for the (glacially slow) convenience that iDisk offers.
August 27, 2006 at 9:41 pm
I’ll chip in an exploding Mac battery if that will help. (Not really).
August 29, 2006 at 7:58 am
[...] Kevin’s post (and the links therein) is most timely. John and I were today discussing our strategic approach for our new software (the codename keeps changing) in light of the recent Leopard announcements. Mail is broken and still will be from the looks of things. We’re going to fix it. Anyway, back to the subject of Kevin’s post – .Mac [...]
September 18, 2006 at 2:46 am
Did you ever get this fixed? I am struggling with it now and am trapped in the same circle?
September 18, 2006 at 7:28 am
I think that what this comes down to is that the Apple User ID can’t be changed once it’s set. When you drop .Mac you will still retain your .Mac name as your Apple User ID. I’ve had no problems using iChat, the iTunes Store, or accessing the Apple forums with my @mac Apple User ID since my .Mac subscription expired 2.5 weeks ago.