.Mac mail service is down

And the Mac community has already started speculating that this is part of Apple’s efforts to rebrand .Mac…

.Me - Apple’s missing link

Except it’s not.

It’s a nice thought that the revamp of .Mac will yield a brilliant and usable service to connect everything in your digital life, but the likelihood of that happening just isn’t very high.

Colin Pape of Seeking Alpha thinks that Mobile Me (or .Me as some are calling it) is going to be the magic bullet for Apple, and it will suddenly tie all their products together. I’m sure that’s what Apple is aiming for, but they’ve neglected .Mac for so long that I’m not sure an overhaul and a new name is going to be enough to breathe life into it.

On the other hand, some rumors suggest that Apple will be turning .Me over to Google for a portion of it’s revenue. Though with Steve’s ego, I find this hard to believe. It’s a nice idea though, imagine a Google run service that would allow for unlimited email/file storage and instant syncing of your contacts/calendar/photos/email/music from your phone (iPhone or Android) to the web, and your home or office computer.

While the promise of an easy solution all in one place is nice, why pay for it? Nothing .Mac currently offers is worth the yearly fee, you can easily find free or cheap alternatives to most everything it offers.

Only time will tell I suppose. I’d be more than happy to be wrong on this, the more innovative products and services Apple launches the better.

[ In the interest of full disclosure, I currently hold stock in Apple ]

Mac users suck at sharing

That is according to Dave Munger of Science Blogs, he conducted a survey a few weeks ago (all because someone wouldn’t share their iPod with him) and says the results point to PC users being almost 3 times as likely to share their gadgets as Mac users.

His theory behind this?

I do have a guess at why Mac users might by stingier with their gizmos. It’s because Mac users have invested more in their technology. Not only are Macs considered “luxury” computers, but Mac users have to deal with the fact that their computers aren’t always 100 percent compatible with the rest of the world. If they’re willing to sacrifice this much for their computers, it’s a safe bet that they’re also more protective of their technology. It’s almost the same reason a BMW owner is less likely to let you borrow her car than a Ford owner. The same reasoning can be adapted to Linux users — while Linux computers aren’t more expensive than PCs, there’s little argument that they have a steeper learning curve than Windows PCs, and also have compatibility problems. Just as a person who’s lovingly restored a 1969 Camaro might not let you drive it, so a Linux user might not let you give his new Ogg Vorbis player a test run.

So, do you play nice with others?

.Mac to be renamed Mobile Me?

Clues in the recent iPhone SDK point to a impedding name change for .Mac, and after further digging the consensus is that its new name will be “Mobile Me”. Okay, kinda lame…

Hopefully they can make up for their poor naming skills with a revamp of .Mac, maybe some nice upgrades so it doesn’t suck!

$300 Hackintosh

This is just a concept, while the hardware should be compatible I cannot vouch for this as I haven’t built one yet. I am however planning on building one in the next few weeks after which I will post a full breakdown.

Case: Linkworld MicroATX Mini Tower with 430W Power Supply
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-G31M-S2L LGA 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX
Processor: 2.2GHz Pentium E2200 (Dual Core)
Memory: Transcend JETRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB
Optical Drive: Lite-On 20X DVD±R DVD Burner
[ View prices ]

The price of the above configuration comes to $297.94 (not including shipping and handling), you can of course save some money by switching to a slower processor, smaller hard drive, less memory, or downgrading to just a DVD drive. Also of note, this doesn’t include a licensed copy of Leopard, which adds a solid $119 to its pricetag.

Corkboard Mac

Kind of a cool idea…

So if you have an older PowerBook laying around and a corkboard and some push pins, why not give it a try? Or if it’s an iBook, go with the iBook server idea.

There’s another shot of the corkboard mac on his website.