Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 56
 Great for seniors & kids August 19, 2006
MDP (Texas)
10 out of 13 found this review helpful
We recently bought .Mac for our 90 year old mother, who loves email & surfing on her iMac, but needs a very stable, simple platform. She recently moved to an independent living apartment with high speed internet, but the provider does not provide email addresses and expects users to access web-based email, which we know is just too confusing & too many steps for our mother, who is very used to Apple Mail. Now she has a .mac address, completely integrated by the Apple OS, & it took less than 5 minutes. Yes, it's an expensive mailbox, but I'm so glad it is available.
 .Mac is something of a joke July 19, 2006
RedSoxNation!
6 out of 16 found this review helpful
Why would anyone want to pay for web services such as these when the same stuff can be found free at various sites? Gmail offers its free email services with 1GB space. Various photo sites allow you to post, distribute, and print your pics. Sure .mac allows you to work "seamlessly" with iphoto but is this really worth the yearly membership price? Evidently, many reviewers don't think so and I would heartily agree. I wish apple would put its energy into something more worthy. I love mac products and think their computers, laptops, ipod are top rate--so why waste their time on a service that resembles AOL?
 Reliable Email that doesn't change August 31, 2006
Stuart A. Evins (Fredericksburg, Virginia USA)
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
I've had a .Mac account since it was Free. If you want an Email address that never changes and has a high profile name, .Mac is the way to go. I've had a .Mac account for several years, meanwhile my Cable company has changed 3 times in 2 years just from companies buying each other out. I've moved 3 more times with different cable companies. My work email accounts have changed several times as well. I find that the .Mac account saves me from buying new business cards every couple of months because of email changes and it gives me a sense of permanence in a very temporal world.
Good, cheap, and easy October 14, 2006
A. TITUS (Michigan)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
If you don't mind spending $7 a month for very simple solution to certain problems, .Mac is the way to go. Yes there are free options that do the same, there are cheaper options that do the same, but you know what, if you are like me and don't have the time to search and decide and weigh features to save yourself a crummy $2-$7 an month, many easy to use (and therefore quick to use and learn) features are there. I can post pictures on the internet in 3 clicks from attaching the camera! This service simplifies several areas of my life, keeps me from having to carry a PDA, learning how to make websites, and lets me make good enough ones in a minute or two for various functions. I would complain that if you need to store and move large files back and forth from .Mac that it's not very fast, but it works just fine. I have never had a problem with my mail going down or other service interuptions.
THE BIG SPEED ADVANTAGE IS THAT SO MUCH CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED WITH SO FEW CLICKS OF A MOUSE.
 Depends on what you want from your computer January 7, 2007
Skydreamer (Somewhere, USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
How well the .mac account will work for you and whether it'll be worth the money really depends on how you work with your computer and how you want to work with it. You can definitely find other services out there that fill one or more of the same functions that you would get from .mac and you may also be able to add up all of the services you want and come up with a price tag lower than that of a .mac account.
What you really need to think about when you're deciding to buy this is how much the difference in cost means to you compared to the amount of effort that it will save you. In a service like this, I'll often see other computer users talk about how you can do the job with something much cheaper. What they sometimes forget is that some people just don't want to spend time (or don't HAVE time for) learning a number of different kinds of software and how to go about using them.
If you're in that group, having all of the services included in .mac as a set is a big help. It means that you'll have fewer different sets of settings to maintain, and the user interfaces will work in roughly the same way for all of them so that you can spend less time trying to figure it out. Also, some other software might require that you spend more time on things like figuring out what server names to tell it, what port numbers to use, and that kind of thing. With the .mac set, however, the software knows immediately that it will be contacting the .mac servers, so already handled for you.
If you're a power user, you'll probably find it easy to find other services to do what you want to do and you'll probably find figuring them out to be easy enough that this isn't worth the cost to you. If you use your computer more casually, and you just want to do what you want to do and then get back to the rest of your life there's a good chance this is worth it.
One warning that I should add, if you're considering buying this so that you can get the use of the excellent Backup program that comes in the set, it may actually not be worth it. The next version of OS X (10.5 aka Leopard) includes a feature known as Time Machine that adds similar function without the yearly subscription cost. Of course, the .mac Backup can put your files on their servers, which protects you from a total hard drive failure in a way that Time Machine (or any other backup system that keeps the files on the same hard drive) can't. On the other hand, you ought to be able to replicate that fairly easily by making sure that you copy anything vital to a CD, DVD, or external hard drive on a regular basis.
At any rate, the Time Machine feature is not available yet, but will be on the new version of OS X due to be released in the Spring of 2007. If you intend to upgrade to it immediately, that means just a couple of months before software is built into the operating system to do backups for you. Since you can only buy .mac subscriptions in 1 year chunks, if backups is your goal you may want to just save yourself a bit of money and wait out the couple of months. I'd strongly suggest looking around on the Internet for descriptions of Time Machine so that you can decide whether it will suit your needs better (or as well as) .mac Backup.
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![Apple .Mac 4.0 Online Service (Mac) [OLDER VERSION]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51X79574S3L._SL500_.jpg)