The MobileMe online login screen.
I thought it would all be good. The .Mac service wasn’t amazing, and certainly wasn’t worth the money for the yearly subscription unless you had more than one Mac and needed to keep them in sync. iDisk was slow, Sync routinely broke iTunes contacts syncing with my iPhone and so on. Then Apple announced MobileMe at WWDC, which looked absolutely amazing. Instant push updates between my Mac and iPhone - even my Windows installation - of calendars, contacts and any mail sent to my @mac.com (now @me.com) email address.
Trouble is, it doesn’t work and has been an amazing cock-up on Apple’s part, a company normally renowned for their flawless execuation of product launches.
It came alongside the iPhone 3G launch, which was predictably insane with demand far outstripping supply and the inevitable server issues as O2 and iTunes tried to handle thousands of people all activating at once. The iPhone 2.0 software update was good despite a small delay in pushing it to iTunes, but the iPhone and the new iTunes expects the MobileMe infrastructure to be in place.
It isn’t. It’s been up and down and unreliable for around 48 hours now, and I still don’t have the update which enables my Mac to talk to MobileMe, rendering it useless. Apparently there was a 1.1 patch hovering around briefly, but this has been pulled, despite some people still not getting 1.0 (Me included).
Guess it’s back to waiting.