Apple MobileMe Family Pack

List Price: $149.00 Discount Price: $95.00

Features:

• Individual account plus four Family Member accounts, each with its own email address, 5GB of combined email and file storage, and 50GB of monthly data transfer
• Use a complete set of desktop-quality applications to organize and store your most important information; changes, new messages, and events are automatically synced up to the cloud and back down to all your devices, so you're always up to date
• MobileMe applications--Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery, and iDisk--feature an elegant, unified interface, drag-and-drop support, and more; works with native applications you use every day--Outlook on a PC and Mail, Address Book, and iCal on the Mac
• Create stunning online galleries for your photos; share photos with friends and family, let them download print-quality images, and even allow them to add their own photos
• Store and access files from anywhere using MobileMe iDisk; share files that are too big for email by automatically sending a download link to recipients

Customer Reviews:

Not family-friendly [Posted on 2008-07-27]
I've subscribed to the .Mac Family Pack for two years, was recently transitioned to MobileMe. MobileMe has been a giant step backward from .Mac.

Other contributors have noted significant problems with MobileMe, such as not being able to use entries in the Address Book to address email, or having access to email at all for over a week (I can just now view my email via Web, but not in the OS X Mail application, which means I can't file the email locally), but what's significant to me about my Family Pack is that during the transition, the account seems to have been reclassified as "Individual." I can't find an access point to correct the error, don't know if Apple is aware of the problem, or when the issue may go to the front burner for correction. On the bright side, the subaccounts seem to still be active.

Aside from problems with the rollout, some .Mac features have changed in ways that are less user-friendly, or have been discontinued. The .Mac home page has been discontinued, which not only announced new and updated features, but also posted current system status. Status information is now several clicks away, which is far less convenient for determining if one of the services is down. A popular .Mac feature that's not available in MobileMe is iCards, which many of us enjoyed for staying in contact with friends and family. No equivalent is available in MobileMe.

If you're only now considering a subscription, the changes won't disappoint you, but I recommend waiting until ALL of the well-publicized issues are corrected before purchasing MobileMe, especially the more expensive Family Pack.

Too difficult to use for work place [Posted on 2008-07-29]
I should have listen to all the negative reviews that have been posted everywhere and not just Amazon.com. It is easily one of the WORST product that I have ever used. It simply does not work as advertised.

Apple advertised that it works well with Outlook on PC but it never bother to tell you that if your Outlook connects to Microsoft Exchange Server, it will not sync with your Contacts and Calenders. It tells you only when you bought the package and then tell you when you are setting up. A big company like Apple could be so sneaky. I guess all the marketings are the same. Boast big deliver little.

Push emails, contacts and calenders that never push. I sent test emails, imported contacts and calenders. The following day, absolutely nothing got pushed to my iPhone. I finally gave up the following day and not bother to sync my contacts and calenders anymore.

What a waste of money!!! It is a product that is not ready for prime time yet. For all Apple fanboys, please don't tell me give Apple time to work all the bugs out because it promises a lot of features. If you charge people money, you better deliver good product instead of a piece of JUNK.

Problems still continue 8-4-2008 [Posted on 2008-08-05]
I love mac and apple products. But mobile me is a complete dud. I had .mac since 2007 and it was converted to mobile me.

I spent two hours on the phone will apple care yesterday, they got a specialist and still they could not get my account to work.

I have data lost that still has not been recovered. The web interface still is not working.

I hope this will one day be a good product, but right now it is awful. It is very frustrating that it simply doesn't work.

Love it! [Posted on 2008-08-11]
Just a little history about me and my use of the software. I was a .mac user prior to mobile me. I switched over from pc about a year ago and have enjoyed the transition. I really like not being asked to fix everyone else's pcs any longer because they are tired of me saying, "Yeah, I don't have that problem on my mac."

Now the review. What is with all of the hating of this product? I love it. It pushes to my ipod touch, it works well on all of my computers. I do not understand why people are still griping. Did the roll out of this new product go smoothly? No, not in the least but all is well now. It was a rocky transition but Vista is still in transition nearly two years after a roll out.

For those unluckly 2% that had real mobileme problems, yes, you had it rough for a few days but the rest of us were mostly mad because it did not get started until a day or so after we expected.

Benefits
The push feature on email, address book, and calendar are great. I can make a change on my ipod touch (or iphone) and my home computer in another country is updated.

As an added benefit I really like how everything flows together. I realize that I can publish my pictures on another site but I like how iPhoto integrates into my online gallery. I realize that I can publish videos to any site but I like how iMovie integrates to my gallery.

Some have said that all of these features in mobile me can be found in other places. Most of the online features are available but they are not integrated, they are unreliable, and who wants all of the advertisements? I had been using these work arounds prior to .mac and now mobileme... it is worth the $112 or so that mobileme family pack costs to not have to deal with the other services.

After using the service for a few weeks, I upgraded to the family plan so that my wife could use it as well. She loves it.

Working great for me now! [Posted on 2008-08-11]
I was like most here when MobileMe was launched...it was a nightmare...about the worse product launch I've seen in some time, if not all time. Couldn't get email, web apps didn't load, iPhone set up would crash, etc. Apple was slow and muted to respond.

But that was then...July 11.

As of now (Aug. 11), just about everything works great for me. My email is stable and functioning. My contacts are all there. Push calendars, contacts and email works perfectly and instantly with my iPhone, including my Entourage/Exchange items. Syncing between my office desktop and personal laptop is flawless (which by the way, what's the big gripe about a 15 minute interval between PC syncs?! When is it critical for you to have synced information on 2 or more computers within 15 minutes?!).

There are definitely things that need improving like the dual listings on Exchange/iCal-Contacts entries on the iPhone; the ability to have shared calendars (which right now is limited to CalDAV server solutions like Mac OS X Server); better photo editing/sharing tools on the Gallery; and updates for Backup or another file backup solution to better integrate w/ MobileMe, especially for the Family Pack members.

Anyway, I'd say give MobileMe a shot now. Lord knows, there have been plenty of other software releases that have had mountains of problems at launch (Vista, Leopard, Lotus, etc.) It definitely does not have a quarter of the issues it had at launch and really has become quite a nice replacement for us previous .Mac users. I find it to be an excellent solution for mobile users, especially those with iPhones and/or Macs.

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