I'm about to abandon my .Mac account. My hosting needs being satisfied already, it does not provide me enough value to put up 100/year when what I really use out of it is email. And since Apple has made it impossible to change an existing full membership to a simple email account (10/year), here you go, I'll just drop it altogether and all the spam I get at that address.
If it's not already the case, I guess that third-parties services that provide the backup/iDisk facilities will flourish at more competitive prices. Apple needs to realize that asking for 100 upfront then giving back 20 in Apple Store coupons later (or The Sims, a game that landed many years ago!) is much less attractive than reducing its price to 80 (or even less, but you see the idea).
I might change my mind with Panther. Or when Apple realizes the potential it has to bring the weblogging user experience to the same level as its iLife suite, i.e. simple, intuitive and smartly connected.
I'm actually surprised that .Mac is for anyone. Even when it was free I couldn't really use if for anything I wanted to do, so I just never did.
The money doesn't bother me, it's the fact that the suite of services aren't worthwhile to me. I like the fact that .Mac smoothly integrates with the OS but that's about it. I don't know. Perhaps during the excitement of Panther I will re-open my account but I actually hope I don't because I still think it won't be worth it to me. Can you sense my ambivalence?
I use it all the tim, the web page feature alone is worth it to me with the intigration that they have put into iPhoto I can make a page in seconds that looks great and is easy to host!
just my 2 cents
My view on this particular matter is of course linked to my own needs, I'm not saying that .Mac has no value whatsoever. It does provide some services -- starting with email and with the best webmail application I've ever seen BTW -- and it does it with the usual sense of design à la Apple.
But because of some new development today, I think I'm not through it yet...
iBlog's pretty decent, & comes free with .mac now.
Beyond that, it's the integration of services that does it for me (ex: addressbook & webmail).
But it's certainly not for everyone. I just wish people'd stop complaining when it's not for them!