Product Description

Effortlessly share everything you create—pictures, movies, podcasts, blogs, and more—with one-click web publishing and Photocasting. Seamless integration with iWeb, the newest member of iLife ’06, lets you publish your websites with a single click. Deliver iPhoto 6 albums to your Photocast subscribers automatically, whether they use a Mac or a PC. Communicate with friends and family through ad-free email and groups. And back up your photos, music, and files with one click to your iDisk or archive to CDs, DVDs, or an external hard drive with powerful backup software.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2101 in Software
• Brand: Apple
• Model: MA361Z/A
• Released on: 2006-01-18
• Platform: Mac OS X
• Format: DVD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .18 pounds

Features

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Simply put, .Mac is your life on the Internet. With the latest version of .Mac you can effortlessly publish your websites, backup your important data, share files with distant friends and colleagues, sync your personal information across all your computers, check your mail wherever you roam, and much, much more. Whether it's for you, your club, or any organization, .Mac provides a vital set of tools that make life online a breeze.

With iWeb -- part of Apple's iLife '06 software -- and .Mac, you can effortlessly publish your websites and blogs. View larger.

.Mac Groups lets you create a website for all your group's most important information. View larger.

Publish your photo libraries via a Photocast. Subscribers anywhere in the world will automatically download your latest photos into iPhoto. View larger.

Backup 3 is the essential, and very flexible, tool for backing up all your vital data. View larger.

Publishing with iWeb
Seamless integration with iWeb -- the newest member of iLife '06 -- makes it easy to publish your websites with a single click of a button. With iWeb, you can create beautiful pages with Apple-designed templates and then publish them via your .Mac account with a single click -- no configuration is necessary. You can also post blogs and podcasts without the confusion of creating RSS feeds. Or, add stunning online slideshows to your photo albums automatically. And for total control, you can set a password to keep your sites private.

iDisk
.Mac iDisk makes it easy to exchange files with friends or centralize your documents so that you can access them anywhere, at any time. iDisk allows you to use storage space on Apple's secure servers and view your stored files and folders on your desktop. If you want to share your files, simply drag files to your Public folder and invite colleagues to download your documents. Plus, iDisk lets you protect your Public folder with a password. You can access your iDisk from a Mac or a PC, and store up to 1GB of data (upgradeable to 4GB). The data transfer rate is upgradeable to 250GB per month.

Groups
This is the ticket if you need to communicate, coordinate, and stay in sync with your club, team, or organization. Create a private password-protected website for group images, message boards, announcements, calendars, a member list, and links to other websites of interest. You can even set up a group email alias for efficient communications. Post or view group messages on the group's own private mac.com address that only members can use. Meanwhile, you can publish web pages with group photos, share files in the group's private iDisk folder, or keep track of group meetings, special events, practices and other important dates on a group calendar. Feel free to create as many groups as you like (each requires 30MB from your iDisk allotment).

Sync
.Mac Sync keeps up-to-date information at your fingertips, whether you use multiple Macs or whether you're on the road without your Mac. With .Mac Sync you can view and update Address Book contacts and Safari bookmarks instantly. Plus, synchronizing Mail rules, signatures, smart mailboxes, and Keychain passwords in Mac OS X Tiger is a breeze. You can even access contacts, calendars, bookmarks, and email on the Web via any Internet-connected Mac or Windows PC.

Photocasting
Let your friends and family subscribe to your shared iPhoto albums and view your full-resolution photos on their own computers. With Photocasting, you can publish your photo albums using .Mac and anyone can subscribe. Subscribers then receive your full quality photos directly within iPhoto 6 or via an RSS reader on a Mac or PC. You can use a subscribed photocast like any iPhoto album in your library; they automatically stay updated so your subscribers always have your latest photos.

Backup 3
Protect your precious memories with this powerful upgrade to .Mac Backup. Scheduled automatic backups are as easy as one, two, three. With Backup 3, you can back up your iLife files with a single-click and customize your backup plans in minutes using QuickPicks or a Tiger Spotlight search. Quickly archive your iLife photos, movies, and purchased music in a single step with preset backup plans, or set flexible schedules that automatically update archives for you. You can back up important files to your iDisk (keeping them secure on Apple's servers), a hard drive, iPod, CDs, or DVDs. Backup 3 saves you time by archiving only what you've changed since your last backup.

Mail
.Mac Mail is ad-free and elegant. Use your account through Mac OS X Mail or through .Mac Mail on the web. Virus protection is built right in, and you get 1GB of combined email and iDisk storage. You can keep your mac.com email address even if you change Internet providers, while enjoying up to five aliases for fun or to protect against unwanted mail. With .Mac Mail you can access mail from your email program or web browser -- any Internet-connected Mac or PC will do. Fix typos with integrated spell-checker, create text and photo signatures, and set an auto-reply to handle incoming email when you're away.

Learning Center
.Mac's integrated Learning Center offers step-by-step tutorials on the applications you use most, including iLife, iWork, Mac OS X, and .Mac. Follow along with QuickTime movies and text-based information that allows you to learn at your own pace and try out new skills on sample files. You can even learn about Apple's professional line of software including Final Cut Pro 5, Soundtrack Pro, Motion 2, DVD Studio Pro 4, Logic Pro 7, Shake 4, Final Cut Express HD, and Logic Express 7.

Member Benefits
Exclusive member benefits include free software downloads as well as special product discounts -- all available through Member Central. Go to .Mac Member Central for free downloads of popular Mac software such as GarageBand Jam Pack Loops. Plus, you'll receive special discounts on selected products and free updates to .Mac features.

.Mac in Depth
Learn more about .Mac.

Customer Reviews

Complete Mac Utilities Suite - Well, Almost
The .Mac services are a great intruduction to anyone in the Mac world. DotMac offers free online training and lessons to subscribers, this is especially useful to new users of the platform.
As far as the utilities, I'll say that they're great and could still be better. I use Apple's Mail as my main email and it works flawlessly both web based and through Mail. It synchronizes all my mail and I can see the same messages anywhere, unlike POP3.
iWeb hosting lets you publish your own websites to Apple's servers, and with 1GB of storage, you have plenty of space for all your family pictures, blogs, music and more.
iDisk is also a very useful tool; and I use it constantly as well. I can copy documents to my iDisk and view them from any computer, whether Mac or not.
My only complaint is address book synchronization. Sometimes I add, edit or delete a contact on my Mac, and it will take a while before I can see the changes online; even after manually synchronizing .Mac.
Backup is also a great tool offered with .Mac, and you can easily back up your stuff to Apple's servers. The Backup wizard is very easy to follow and self explanatory. If you're a regular user, Backup is a great tool because it does it all on its own; all you do is run the wizard to configure it.
Overall, the .Mac service is a great idea and it's easy to use. There are other alternatives to the services offered by .Mac, but the most important facts to consider are integration to the OS and its ease of use.

Overpriced and Underperforms; Alternatives
I wrote a review for the 3.5 version of .Mac here on Amazon discussing alternatives to the service. Many of my complaints are still valid: the service is unacceptably slow and the online feaures are rather weak. Rather than rehash those points, below is a revised chart for how to replace .Mac for free (in most cases):

Webmail/Email: Gmail. You'll gain address autocomplete, cell phone access, among other features. Plus, you can still have offline copies in Mac OS X Mail by using POP access (tip 1: set up a rule in Mac Mail to mark every message as read and use the Gmail online interface, or go POP-only if you prefer the desktop client; tip 2: try the Gmail Notifier program for handier integration of Gmail on your Mac.) Free.

Picture Sharing: Kodak EasyShare Gallery. The free Cocoa Kodak EasyShare program allows you to import photos from your digital camera, edit and organize them, and upload them to web for sharing with family and friends (no need to upgrade iPhoto as part of iLife every year for $70). Online albums can sync automatically with your Mac. Free (buying prints costs extra).

Calendar sharing: iCalX. This service is very easy to set up, and you don't need a special utility to use it with iCal. Also, you can have password-protected private calendars with iCalX unlike with .Mac. Free. (Google Calendar might also be an option for you.)

Sync: Plaxo works very well for address book synchronization (and it works with Thunderbird as well as the Mac OS X Address Book). You might also want to consider Del.icio.us for online bookmarks. Both Free.

Groups: There are many: Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups, Writeboard, Blogger... All Free.

Photocasting/Blogging (iWeb): Both are available easy-to-use and pretty at Blogger. Or, try the new Google Pages service. Both Free. RapidWeaver is a simple program for making websites. Mac OS X has built-in web hosting capability, you could try DynDNS (free) for hosting web pages on your own computer.

Backup (to disk): Silverkeeper by LaCie. Free. (Also see iDisk alternatives below for online backup options.)

iDisk: If you still need online storage you may want to invest in a hosting company that offers sFTP access. I recommend Yummy FTP as a great FTP client for Mac. Or, you can use Transmit by Panic and Automator actions (for Mac OS 10.4) for online file operations (Yummy FTP can also do automated sync). Alternatively, your internet service provider might already inlcude webspace with your account. Finally, Google is rumored to soon offer a Gdrive online file storage service as part of Gmail.

Depends on what you want from your computer
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.