.Mac users are doing it tough again according to a report 
on C|Net’s news.com site.
Of course that’s hardly newsworthy. As Hawk Wings has reported in the past, the service has been plagued with outages for months.
Previously, reports about these problems have been restricted to the Apple Discussion Boards, “insider” sites like MacInTouch or little blogs. As far as I know, the C|Net report is the first mainstream site to cover the news.
And the news is not good. The report points out that,
Over the past four days, .Mac users have struggled to get its Web site publishing features, iWeb, and related file-share capabilities, iDisk, to work. Users have complained not only about the length of the outage, but also what they say is a tardy response from .Mac’s technical support team.
Apple declined to comment.
“Apple reclined to comment”.
So they’re taking the criticism lying down? ;)
I, too, was similarly amused to see that Apple was putting up its feet before responding to criticism.
Leave it to a clearly capable site like CNET to be the shining beacon of accurate reporting as well.
Outages haven’t lasted FOUR days (seems everyone’s getting that number wrong lately). iWeb was out for 8 hours for some users, email down for 45 minutes for some users. Granted, it’s unfortunate that the service was out at all, but let’s all be sure to keep our facts straight before we toss .Mac into the water to see if it sinks or swims.
@David – hehehe…. Of course, I am not endorsing CNet’s fact checking. :)
What interests me more is that a mainstream media outlet – however erratic – thought it worth reporting.
For the record, here are the most recent outages listed on the dotmac site:
Some people have unkindly suggested that the outage reports are not comprehensive.
They’re not and they’re hardly kept up to date either. It’s sad really that Apple is struggling so much with something that should be fairly basic.
Indeed Derik and Tim. While I have committed to .Mac for the long haul, I’m getting pretty annoyed at their reputation as of late as well.
AAAAHAHA! “Apple reclined to comment.”
That is either one of the funniest unintentional typos I’ve ever seen, or an exceptional piece of wit, Mr Gaden :-)
Ok, now I get what all the clever comments were about :)
That would be a typo. Apple would never take that sort of criticism laying down and I am not that witty!
Well, I think you have coined an apt term for Apple’s relationship with the media, frankly!
Perhaps, like George on Seinfeld spurred a whole generation of people who eat chocolate bars with a knife and fork, you will spur a generation of journalists who gleefully write “Apple reclined to comment” and hope the subs don’t pick it up ;-)
.Mac outages used to drive me nuts . nowadays my main email address is the one connected with my personal domain . i have .Mac mail set to forward all mail to that address , and i’ve deleted the account from mail.app’s settings . i know , it’s not a solution – but at least now i never notice . the _only_ reason i still pay for .Mac is the ability to sync my computers …
I was thinking of joining because of iChat.
There’s a certain irony that Apple now has iSight cameras built-in…
Sell more Macs, get more .Mac users, get more .Mac problems to a wider audience…
My decision is on hold.
You don’t need .Mac to use iChat. When you set up your iChat account it registers with .Mac, but the iChat account is free and not tied to having to subscribe.
Also, there are other software solutions for syncing your computers’ address book, bookmarks, etc. Lookup MySync on VersionTracker.
[...] Will it be enough to silence .Mac’s many, many, many, many critics or even moderate their complaints? Only time will tell. [...]
Yeah , but this app. is still beta!!!!
I burned a couple of months tinkering with it and had to go back to dot mac in the end – not happy.
Hopefully Mark/Space can get it ironed out and onto the market ASAP !!!!!!!