MobileMe (the email, contacts, calendars and file service from Apple) is something that seemingly everyone loves to hate.  It’s too expensive, doesn’t work right, and doesn’t really offer anything that you can’t find for free.  This winning combination of traits have lead to more than a few articles detailing how to sync, share and publish without handing even more money over to Apple.

Even with the plethora of articles explaining how to save time and money, however, it is possible to find happy users of Apple products.  Users which will "vigorously" share their "carefully considered" opinions.  One user from MacWorld raises the following (somewhat legitimate) points:

Are you the pot or the kettle?  First you say don’t expect the rest of us to have the same needs/wants, and then you make a blanket statement … [which] is full of assumptions that are not necessarily correct ...

1. “It’s way to expansive.”  If you only use web hosting, then maybe.  MobileMe is $8.25/month.  how much is hosting?  Does hosting give you automatic sync of photo galleries, contacts, ect.  How much is Flickr pro on top of regular web hosting.
2. Alternatives are not that hard to find, set up or use.  Really?  It seems that not everyone knows of alternatives.  And then why did the commenter have to make suggestions and corrections?  It seems to me [that] it’s not as easy as you say.

This happy MobileMe user has essentially laid down a challenge.  He implicitly (and others explicitly) state that they are willing to pay good money for their time.  And in the same bravado common to members of the Cult of Cupertino, he almost dares someone to disagree with him.  Since this topic has become a bandwagon and I’ve decided to generally hop in its direction, I accept this challenge. You might even say that figuring out ways to avoid using Apple’s signature web service has become a bit of a hobby.

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Tags: Apple,Mac OS X,MobileMe
Categories: Computer, Cool Stuff, Featured, Raves
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