MobileMe: We’ve already told you about the less than silky smooth launch, the about-face on “push”, the exorcising of the “Exchange for the Rest of Us” slogan, and the apology letter from Apple that saw everyone — even people on the 2 month free trial — get a FREE month of service tacked on for good measure. What more could go wrong?
How about botching the credit card authorization process and having to issue a second apology letter and offer an additional FREE month?
Yup. Scaling any business, even one as tightly run and usually incredibly well managed as Apple is a nightmare, and it looks like what with simultaneous iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0, App Store, and MobileMe launches in up to 20+ countries at the same time is causing some cracks in Apple’s traditionally glossy shell.
Temporary bump or signs of things to come on the road to 10 Million iPhones and ever-growing Mac sales?
Full text of Apple’s second apology letter after the break!
Thanks to Ryan for sending it in!
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While noted Windows pundit Paul Thurrott might be an out-of-the-closet iPhone lover, it seems his experiences with, and feelings for, MobileMe have been more towards the negative.
There have certainly been problems with MobileMe, and Apple has reached out to users as Casey posted yesterday. Now Thurrott has a leaked Apple sales note, reportedly sent out to redefine their language in light of these problems:
MobileMe Messaging Update
MobileMe messaging is being updated effective immediately. In order to set appropriate expectations with our customers, focus your sales discussion on “automatic sync” rather than “push.” Additionally, we will no longer describe MobileMe as “Exchange for the rest of us.”
When discussing the sync features of MobileMe, you may tell a customer that:
Updates between me.com and iPhone or iPod touch will occur in a matter of seconds.
Updates between me.com and Macs running Mac OS X Leopard and Windows PCs may take up to 15 minutes when MobileMe is set to sync automatically (Macs running Mac OS X Tiger may experience longer sync times).
Ouch! Want some double-ouch with a hefty side dish of rant? Check out Thurrott’s complete post where he focuses on lack of IE7 and Firefox support and, in part, takes David Pogue’s iPhone 3G review out for a ride…
Is Thurrott justified given Apple’s painful and still botched MobileMe roll-out? Or is he upset the mass-media is still dissing on Vista and wants to throw some fire Apple’s way? Little of both?
Vindication! Well, kind of. Our MobileMe is still having problems but at least Apple admits that the transition from .Mac to MobileMe was “rocky” by sending an e-mail/apology letter to all MobileMe users. Billed as Exchange for the rest of us, MobileMe is still having problems with syncing, calendar, duplicate messages, etc. Not quite that Blackberry killer we envisioned.
Also, Apple will stop using the word push to describe MobileMe until syncing is “near-instant” on Mac and PCs like it is for the iPhone and Web Apps. Not that “15 minute” version of push it currently is. Either way, Apple is begging (read: bribing) for your forgiveness with a free 30 day extension to all current subscribers.
It’s good to see Apple admit mistake and take care of their customers, but I’m fairly certain most of us would have rather had a product that ‘just works’. Unreliability, problems, and false promises are for the folks over in Redmond, this is supposed to be Apple right?
Thanks for the tip Cherryhead25!
Read on for MobileMe’s full apology letter!
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MacRumors has discovered that though you receive your MobileMe email very quickly, the “pushing” of other MobileMe services is not as fast when coming from your Mac. Apple’s knowledgebase article states:
Selecting Automatic in Mac OS X allows your computer to immediately sync and update when there are any changes on the MobileMe servers. Those changes can come from your iPhone, iPod touch, the MobileMe website, or another computer. Changes made on your computer will be synced to the MobileMe “cloud” once every 15 minutes (or every hour in Mac OS X 10.4.11).
Automatic is not so automatic anymore. You can always manually sync your calendar, contacts and bookmarks, but if you leave it alone, it could take as long as 15 minutes to receive your updates on your device.
I have personally not experienced this. Even when I change information on my Mac (specifically iCal), I received the updates in a matter of minutes. I suppose this could have been because my scheduled 15 minute sync was about to happen, but I really have not noticed that much of a delay over all.
What do you think? Is this really that big of a deal? Should Apple’s push services be realtime from your Mac?
Ouch! Was that the sound of Crackberry Kevin Hulking Up for another NERD FIGHT, or RIM CEO Mike Lazeridis smashing the desks over at R&D?
Seems like Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz has just put Apple’s new MobileMe push Email, Contacts, and Calendars service through it’s iPhone paces and their verdict?
BlackBerry is dead, dead, dead. Dead.
And this from a self-confessed former Crackberrian, no less, using a Spanish SIM, on a UK Network, over EDGE! Along with the better, faster, and more powerful OS, Diaz credits the flawless App Store, media, and new enterprise and consumer features as making the Blackberry look “like a brick”.
Yowzer, they say there’s no such thing as bad press but… Yowzer…
As to MobileMe itself?
Not a single glitch—the thing just worked almost instantly. Knowing that Apple is using Sun Java Messaging Servers, probably paired with Synchronica or Consilient’s over-the-air synchronization modules, I’m not surprised. It feels like they have put together a rock-solid operation.
Sign me up! (D’oh, I’m already legacy’d in!)
This is it. We’re in the home stretch. Games in overtime, the shot clock is almost done, and Steve Jobs is soaring from mid-court looking for the slam dunk. In 3 days we find out if Apple brings down the net, the two-peat for smartphone (even gadget) championship, or if they bounce it off the rim (pun sorta intended) with their mostly evolutionary, not so much revolutionary, next generation handset.
Saturday we mentioned one big change: the fast 3G data chip. Sunday it was GPS. Monday we tackled the 2.0 Firmware update. Today we’re looking at the rebirth of .Mac: MobileMe.
Note: .Mac users have been able to send to username@me.com for a few days already, and as of yesterday, July 7, could both send and receive using me.com. (Just tried it out and it works!)
Now word comes that, to accommodate New Zealand, which due to their time zone gets the iPhone 3G way before anyone else, Apple has announced that it’s really not 3 days to MobileMe — just one! That’s right, MobileMe goes live on Wednesday, July 9 between 6pm and 12am PST. Mark your calendars, then get ready to “push” sync them!
Why should you want to? Read on after the break!
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.Mac has been up and down again over the last few days, which is nothing new, but this time it seems like the transition to MobileMe might actually have begun. Some people are reportedly able to receive mail at the me.com version of their alias (meaning name@mac.com is already mapping to name@me.com for some).
I just tried it, and received an “illegal alias” error for my trouble. Is it working yet for you?
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Woke up this morning and as per my usual modus operandi, checked mail on my iPhone and then went to read some feeds. That’s when it happened, mobile.mac.com (the interceptive RSS reading feature on MobileSafari) came back with a server error.
Seems to be working for me again, but reports have since sprung up of others having trouble with web-bound services of .Mac (though email protocols seems fine).
Server problems round Infinite Loop way? Transitions to MobileMe hitting some speed bumps? Karmic revenge for us knocking the RIM NOC again?
My guess is the road to MobileMe will be a wild ride, server side…
If the next great future of computing in the Cloud, as many pundits — not to mention Google — think, then the next great race is delivering that future via Rich Internet Applications. Right now, there are two major ways of doing this. The first involves using a proprietary, locked in technology (admittedly with increasing “openness”) like Adobe’s Air/Flex/Flash trifecta, or Microsoft’s .Net/Silverlight double team. The second is with truly open standards such as HTML, CSS, and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) like Google, Yahoo, and many others use.
With the iPhone Apple has squarely planted itself in the second category. They even promoted them as a pseudo-SDK for a time! (And maybe gave up too soon?)
Flash-free, Silverlight-less, but full of interactivity and cloud-based applications, Apple just unleashed .Mac upgrade MobileMe complete with “desktop class” mail, calendar, contacts, and photo gallery web apps.
And according to this year’s WWDC buzz, they used SproutCore’s Javascript frameworks to do it? Why?
SproutCore not only makes it easy to build real applications for the web using menus, toolbars, drag and drop support, and foreign language localization, but it also provides a full Model View Controller application stack like Rails (and Cocoa), with bindings, key value observing, and view controls. It also exposes the latent features of JavaScript, including late binding, closures, and lambda functions. Developers will also appreciate tools for code documentation generation, fixtures, and unit testing.
A key component of its clean MVC philosophy that roots SproutCore into Cocoa goodness is bindings, which allows developers to write JavaScript that automatically runs any time a property value changes. With bindings, very complex applications with highly consistent behavior can be created with very little “glue” code.
Check out the read link for more on Apple’s use of SproutCore, and how it might just be part of a growing trend for open standards-based web interactivity.
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Out of the closest iPhone lover and WinSuperSite maven Paul Thurrott once again proved a picture is worth a thousand words when it comes to just some of the complaints TiPb and our readers have leveled at the new MobileMe branding.
Particularly poignant, coming from the man behind the site in front of Windows, the above logos show how linking The Next Big Thing to The Last (Before Vista) Big Flop maybe wasn’t the best marketing discussion in the world.
In related news, what does Thurrott think of the new iPhone 3G?
I’d like to point out a simple bit of advice, and I cannot stress this enough: You need to get an iPhone. Sooner rather than later. With Apple dropping the entry price on this innovative device to just $200, while fixing all of the major issues I described in How Apple Can Fix the iPhone in 2008, there are precious few reasons to ignore this seismic shift in mobile and cloud computing. (One potential reason is the cost of the data plan: It looks like the minimum monthly outlay for an iPhone in the US is going to be $70 before taxes, about $10 more than it was before.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The iPhone is a dramatically important computing platform and one you should not ignore. Trust me, once you’ve used an iPhone, that Blackberry or Windows Mobile device you’re settling on now will seem like ancient Soviet-era technology by comparison.
