[whatstheproblem]

And your biased why? Because you love Apple? This program offers very little. It has shut down more than 30,000 peoples email services for 8 days now. Open your eyes son.

[melvinharmon]

This review is a bit disconcerting, given that at least 20,000 MobileMe users have been without email service for 8 days. Apple has given no reason, no estimates, nothing. If we are able to reach customer service, we are told that they know about the problem, they're working on it, they have no idea when it will be fixed and "sorry for the inconvenience"... Otherwise, we are left in the dark, not knowing if our email messages have been lost forever and not knowing if the service will ever be recovered for us. On top of it all, Apple has behaved in a very pompous and non-communicative manner.
In my home, we have MacBooks, MacBook Pro's, iMacs, AppleTV, Airport, Airport Express, iPhones and iPods. We're an Apple family that has always believed in the quality of Apple's products and services. This has destroyed our enthusiasm for Apple and, after 8 days of being completely ignored and left out in the dark, we're inclined to look elsewhere in the future.
To see you give 3.5 mice to MobileMe, as you can imagine, creates shock and dismay.
It pains me to say it, but I'm inclined to think that had this been a Dell product, I might have gotten a better response than the silence and cold shoulder extended by Apple.

[MLO]

I had problems with mobile me. I deleted my account on the iphone then recreated it. I checked what I wanted synched after it veryfied my account and it's working. I feel for all of those who are not getting email. Let's hope Apple does more than a 30 days of free service.

[Jason Snell]

flybynight said:

No one tunes into Rush Limbaugh and complains that he is biased toward the political right. You know what you are getting and there is no attempt to hide it.
Good, bad or otherwise, I would expect a publication called Macworld and the company that hosts the biggest Mac-related trade show of the year to "have a bias for Mac."
That said, I think they do a very good job of calling out Apple's failings. Yes, they have a Mac bias, but they don't cross the line to blind fanboi's.

We speak to Mac users and to users of Apple products. We approach what we write from that perspective.

But it's not our job to be advocates for Apple. It is our job to be advocates for Apple's customers.

Unfortunately it's very hard to review a product like this, which works just fine for many people but apparently is horribly broken (at least the e-mail piece) for many others.

You may disagree with Jeff Carlson, but he doesn't write out of some sort of attempt to prop up Apple and certainly not because he's on the take.

We have covered the problems with the MobileMe roll out and will continue to.

Personally I've been using MobileMe since day two and it's worked flawlessly for me, but I'm not using the web apps or the e-mail, just the calendar and contact syncing.

[tompow99]

I'm amazed at the fluff in your article. This is the worst software release that I've ever seen. I have been a faithful .mac customer for years and thanks to this Mobile MeSS software replacing .mac I have been without my email for 8 days now. And I'm not alone. Read the forum pages and you'll find out that there are thousands of subscribers with this problem. The worst part is that Apple isn't telling us a thing. I paid for .mac and I'm not getting it and I paid for Customer Support and I'm not getting that either. This software release has been a disaster.
Come on MacWorld. Tell it that way it is - not the way Apple wants you to tell it.

[whatstheproblem]

Mr. Snell,

With all due respect stand up for your readers. As a long time user of Macs and a long time reader of your magazine, I am horrified that you seem to be trying cover for Jeff Carlson's unfairly biased article. First let's just say that you seem to be defensive about being "on the take" from Apple. I have to guess that Apple throws you free things here and there but no one is accusing you guys of being bribed, only unfairly biased.

You say MacWorld is for the Apple customer and not an advocate of the company but that's not the point. A major event has happened here, effecting me and tens of thousands of customers. So MacWorld magazine which according to you, "it's not our job to be advocates for Apple. It is our job to be advocates for Apple's customers." What does MacWorld do to cover a major outage effecting it's readership? Nothing! Your magazine doesn't cover it!!

Please we are without email, without service, and no response from Apple for a week. Stand up for your readers sir! Write about our side of the story. Thank you.

[Cristian]

10 days without mail service (and counting) and we have no info from Apple about it.
Mobileme service level is a joke!

[danij]

My biggest complaint with MobileMe is my missing email; on July 17th everything was fine. Starting on the 18th, I became one of the 1% whose email mysteriously disappeared.
I am all for the new features offered by MobileMe. I am still a Mac fan and probably will be for life. But I am very disappointed in the way this was rolled out. No email for a week and no word on when it will be resolved is not the Apple way. This launch has been rocky, to say the least, and while I am not necessarily looking for compensation, I would very much appreciate communication.

[Jason Snell]

whatstheproblem said:

With all due respect stand up for your readers. As a long time user of Macs and a long time reader of your magazine, I am horrified that you seem to be trying cover for Jeff Carlson's unfairly biased article.

You might want to read it again. Either you didn't read the article, or you didn't read my post, or you may be coming to this situation with a bit of an unfair bias of your own. Or is bias only evident when it disagrees with yours?

>First let's just say that you seem to be defensive about being "on the take" from Apple.

I've only been accused of it three times this week, that's all. You've got to draw a line somewhere. I'll let accusations of incompetence go, and of course disagreements are what it's all about, but that's where I draw the line.

Quote

I have to guess that Apple throws you free things here and there

As a matter of clarity: Every Mac system that we test for Macworld is purchased with our own money... Apple doesn't give us stuff. Sometimes they loan us stuff, but we have to give it back. We also don't have free Mobile Me accounts, we have to pay for those out of our own pockets as well.

Quote

A major event has happened here, effecting me and tens of thousands of customers.

And we will continue to write about that event. But -- again, if you read what I wrote -- it's quite difficult to quantify in a general review of a service something like the fact that it works for most people, but not for all people. How do you rate a product if it works for you, it works for people you talk to, but that clearly isn't working for everyone? I thought Jeff was pretty fair about it all. I know you want a screed about how the entire thing is broken, but it worked for Jeff and it's worked for everyone I know. Not denying that people aren't angry and there aren't problems, but do we run a story that says "it works for us but posts on Internet boards say people are mad so we're giving it a bad review"?

We'll continue to cover Apple's screw-ups in this regard, but we hired Jeff to review the product, he spent time with it, he didn't see the issues you see, and he gave it a slightly positive (3.5 out of 5) but mixed review. That's his prerogative as a reviewer. The alternative would have been to wait and not post the review until Apple resolved all of its issues with affected customers, just to avoid the pushback from readers. I guess we could have done that. Not sure it would have accomplished much.

Dealing with the other issues about Mobile Me breaking stuff for people, we need to keep doing that coverage and we will. It's still news. But I'm not how we can do "Review: Mobile Me: Day 59: America Held Hostage." Reporting about people having problems is not a review. It's like when a new Mac comes out, or a new OS update. If it works fine for us but a few people get on the Internet and complain that their product is a bust, what do we do? How do we gauge if the product is broken 1% of the time, or 10%, or 50%? Or .01%? It's a tough situation. But it's very hard to write a nasty review of a product because we've read reports that some people aren't happy with it, when we've seen none of it directly and it (apparently) isn't affecting the majority of users.


>What does MacWorld do to cover a major outage effecting it's readership? Nothing! Your magazine doesn't cover it!!

Except the story we posted July 23, the one July 18, the one July 16, July 12, and of course July 11. We might be able to cover it more, I'll grant you, but we've been covering it. And again, how do you define major? If it's 50% of Mobile Me, that's major. If it's 1%, it's not. It's very, very hard to tell, especially since the people who are affected by this are coming online and posting angry message (some of which are in this thread), while people who are unaffected are relatively silent. It makes it very, very difficult to determine just how bad the situation is.

But we will continue to try.

[UKmacnut]

As someone who has been with .mac for some months now, I found the change to MobileMe brought a smoother service, particularly when accessing the website access via a PC using Firefox. I was really pleased about this because I took two whole months before telling all of my friends and family about my new .mac address, and I had always been frustrated with the web access. The idisk feature was working so much faster. As someone who is part of the 1% group who have had no access to email for over one week now, I have never been so disappointed in Apple. Luckily, I had my mac mail desktop client set to 'keep copies of messages for offline viewing.' So I signed up with another company who offers IMAP email, I'm happy to pay for it. I moved all my messages, I've only lost what was sent to me during the outage, and I don't need Apple to retrieve my email. I've told all my contacts about my new address and moved on. I still would like the idisk, calendar and address book syncing capabilities of MobileMe, but seriously, I wouldn't lay down money for a renewal without better service.

[Glenn_Fleishman]

Jason Snell said:

>We might be able to cover it more, I'll grant you, but we've been covering it. And again, how do you define major? If it's 50% of Mobile Me, that's major. If it's 1%, it's not. It's very, very hard to tell, especially since the people who are affected by this are coming online and posting angry message (some of which are in this thread), while people who are unaffected are relatively silent. It makes it very, very difficult to determine just how bad the situation is.

The thing that's bothering me about this isn't Macworld's coverage (the rest of the world is making up for the fact that MW isn't posting a story on this every single day), but that Apple is being its usual close-lipped self, and it's not making extraordinary efforts to help its 1%.

This happened to me with a well-known but smaller mail hosting provider that I had been using for years and recommended. A major and smart system upgrade to provide redundancy went horribly wrong. This affected something like a 1,000 or so of their users, I think. The outage lasted four days, mail was bounced, etc. The company was not very consistent or smart about its communication, telling users, hey, just wait, we'll get it all worked out.

Instead, they should have set up alternate accounts for those who wanted them, so mail could be received and accessed in the interim, even if the stored email was unaccessible for some period.

Ditto, Apple should be setting up alternative accounts for folks, redirecting their email, allowing people to enter a forwarding address during the outage, etc., etc. There are a dozen things that Apple could do for these users and is not doing them. Providing updates every 6 hours, even if it's a, "We believe we're 24 hours from solving this" or "we continue to work for a solution" might be useful, too.

Even though it affects just an unknown percentage of users (the 1% is Apple's figure, of course; more, and we'd probably hear even more about), it seems like Apple's biggest .Mac/MobileMe screw up in history. I just don't understand why they don't understand that the loss of email could put small businesses out of business, among other problems.

[Jason Snell]

Glenn_Fleishman said:

The thing that's bothering me about this isn't Macworld's coverage (the rest of the world is making up for the fact that MW isn't posting a story on this every single day), but that Apple is being its usual close-lipped self, and it's not making extraordinary efforts to help its 1%.

Absolutely.

Apple's penchant for secrecy works really well when it's protecting a new product launch.

But it fails completely when it's screwing up and making customers angry. Like now.

[jeffcarlson]

shenry318 said:

The phase in the 'MobileMissing' paragraph "And HomePage, which was supplanted by Web Gallery" is very confusing. It implies Web Gallery can do what HomePage did, but thats not the case--Web Gallery only lets you make photo/video web sites.

I meant that Apple has replaced HomePage with Web Gallery and iWeb for Web page creation. They retired HomePage as an active and supported feature last year or the year before, I believe.

Jeff

[jeffcarlson]

Hi everyone,

I thought I'd post a few quick general comments here. I've been offline in Montana for the past week (except for several hours early in the week at a McDonald's - the nearest location that had Wi-Fi - attending to edits from my editors at Macworld), so I'm clearly coming to the party late.

I almost didn't accept the assignment of reviewing MobileMe because I knew it would be a moving target. The launch of the service was a big screwup, and I saw that lots of people were having troubles and reporting on Apple's forums. But I wasn't being asked to review the launch. In order to get the review online sooner rather than later, my experience was with about a week's worth of use, which I noted in the review.

The review represents my experience with MobileMe, and for the most part it worked well; I noted in the review where it didn't, and acknowledged that it wasn't working for everyone. This happens with every Mac product, and it's important to remember that there will always be some percentage of people for whom something doesn't work: a bad laptop keyboard, fritzed power supply, MobileMe email service, etc. I actually thought I might run into more problems, since my personal data includes years of cruft from being synced via Palms and iTools and .Mac and who knows what else. Furthermore, there are a bunch of other factors at play: each person's data, their Internet connection, browser, etc.

I agree that Apple needs to do a better job of addressing that 1% (and whatever else crops up); Glenn Fleishman wrote a good article at TidBITS about Apple's response so far (MobileMe Status Page Promises Updates, But Tone Rings Flat). People whose email has been biffed are right to be angry, but suggesting (or outright declaring) that I or Macworld is biased toward Apple are directing their anger at the wrong source.

Jeff