[muglo] Re: iTools/.Mac

on 20/7/02 18:19, 'TDK' Tim Kearn at kearn@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> 
> Hi All,
> 
> Has anyone thought, figured out how the change from iTools to .Mac is going
> to affect Canadian users? Especially pricing structure.
> Anyone going for it so far?
> 
> Tim

Hmmm. Didn't I just see this post a few seconds earlier come though on the
LowEndMac.com Mac-Canada list... :)

I think most Canadians (or Americans or whoever) won't bother with it --
price to performance .Mac ain't a good deal. $150 for an e-mail address
(plus, a 100 MB home page/storage gadget) is an exorbitant rip off when you
consider what you can get for that much each year with a real ISP (you'd
have your own domain name thrown in for that kind of $$$).

For some reason I think Apple's number crunchers really missed the mark on
this one. I doubt it'll be worth paying $150 each year for an e-mail address
which happens to have a small & SLOW 100 MB of storage (it would take ~3-6
hours to back up that much at 5-10 K/sec).

If they could achieve a decent rate of access it *might* be worth $75-100
CDN/year, but AppleTalk over TCP/IP is god-awfully slow. I can get 1
MByte/sec off the best FTP server I've ever encountered (McGill), usually
get 100-200 K/sec and will kill a download if it comes in at under 25 K/sec
(unless there's no alternate server... yesterday I killed a 150 K/sec d/l
because I found a server that was willing to dish out the same file at 200
K/sec ;). In contrast, I've never seen more than 5-10 K/Sec, (1/100 my max)
off iDisk... transferring files over 56 K modem is *just as fast* as
transferring files over a T3 (or perhaps we have even more now) capable of
serving up over 1 MB/sec over a 10BaseT connection.

The other ridiculous thing about iDisk (now .Mac) is that it ties up your
computer while copying files to/from the disk (ok, under OS X I can work in
other applications, but the Finder is busy (supposedly Jaguar fixes this)).
$150 for that, hurumph. I'd rather use FTP, get decent u/l & d/l speeds
*and* be able to use my computer for other stuff (if running OS 9), *and*
get a whole slew of e-mail addresses *and* get my own domain name.

The short and the long of it is, .Mac is a thorough ripoff when you consider
what you could get from a real ISP, with you very own domain name for *less*
(of course, you don't have a mac.com e-mail address, but you would instead
have your own e-mail...
yourveryownname@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/.com/.biz/.org/.net/.co.uk/.whateve
rwillsellyouaname).

L8r, Eric.



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