by Michelle Lentz

I’ve been a subscriber to .Mac since it was free. I think that was back in the “Think Different” days. I’ve had the email address for around 7 or 8 years and have continued to pay the $100 a year just because it’s easier than letting my entire world know my email address has changed.

I was initially excited over MobileMe. I use iCal and Contacts for my business and while they already sync’d with my iPhone, the idea of changes pushing between my devices had me rather excited. My excitement was deflated rather quickly.

On Wednesday, various parts of .Mac were taken down for the transition to Mobile Me. This continued through Friday, when I started noticing push on my email, but not calendar or contacts. Throughout this entire period, I couldn’t access my account (calendars, contacts, or email) via the Web, which was annoying. Early Sunday morning, the Mobile Me software update was pushed to my local machine. I installed it, and everything suddenly worked. For two days, in fact, I had wonderful and near instantaneous push with contacts, calendar, and email. I loved it.

Yesterday I noticed that changes made on my local machine were not updating through the cloud. At all. For two days now I’ve been fighting with Mobile Me to get my calendar and contacts synchronized with my Mac. This should not be hard. Blackberry does it. Palm does it. My iPhone used to do it. My calendar, portable on my iPhone, is my lifeline – insight into everything I do in a given day. It needs to be accurate. I checked out the Mobile Me discussion forums, only to discover I’m not the only one with this issue. There are a million other quirks I’m experiencing, all of which have had an impact on the way I do business. In fact, the only thing that does work, and has worked consistently, is push Mail, which is faster on my iPhone than in my Mail application.

It’s also worth noting that I cannot find a support contact email form, email address, or support chat. These were available from the Mobile Me support pages on Friday, but seem to have been removed.

Today Apple sent an email to Mobile Me customers apologizing. They admitted that “push” isn’t accurate. While email truly is push, Calendars and Contacts require an automatic sync, which has a 15 minute lag time (in Leopard). In an effort to make us all feel better, Apple has given everyone a free month of Mobile Me. I’m sorry, they said. We know it’s been “rocky.”

We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.

Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running.

I’m appreciative of the apology. I am. But what I really want from Apple is a service that works – consistently. The email reads “Mobile Me services are now available.” But they’re not, and dozens of threads in the Apple Support forums will attest to this. I can’t even view my contacts online and my iPhone is out of sync with my Mac.

When Twitter goes down, we can complain, but in the end, Twitter is a free service. Mobile Me is a service for which I pay $100 per year. In my book that’s a premium service. I expect premium customer support and a service that is worth what I pay.
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Tagged as: apple, Mobile Me