My MobileMe sub­scrip­tion recently expired (Full Dis­clo­sure: I had received my account as part of a pro­gram Apple offers to resellers as part of their train­ing web­site. I no longer work as a reseller) and so I’ve had to decide whether to renew my sub­scrip­tion or not. It’s $99USD/$109CDN per year for a MobileMe account.

Cur­rently these are the ben­e­fits Apple lists to hav­ing a MobileMe subscription:

• Mail, Con­tacts and Cal­en­dar sync­ing from your Mac(s) to your iPhone to the web
• MobileMe Gallery that allows you to show off your pho­tos in a very nice look­ing online photo gallery
• iDisk stor­age online — store or backup files with 20GB of stor­age. You can also access this through an iPhone app designed by Apple
• Me.com web apps includ­ing email, con­tacts, cal­en­dars, pho­tos and files. Used with the sync­ing men­tioned pre­vi­ously, this allows you to login from any web browser (Mac or oth­er­wise) and access your infor­ma­tion. Any changes made Me.com are synced back to your iPhones/Macs. The web apps them­selves per­form remark­ably sim­i­lar to their desk­top counterparts.

For a Mac desk­top, these are some addi­tional benefits:

• Back to My Mac is a fea­ture that has got­ten mixed reviews. For me per­son­ally, it’s worked as adver­tised. For oth­ers, it’s been hit and miss. It’s def­i­nitely a nice idea: wher­ever you are, you can access infor­ma­tion back on your home Mac. On the road with your Mac­Book Pro and for­got a pre­sen­ta­tion on your home iMac? Just log in and grab the file with­out hav­ing to worry about VPN set­tings and hav­ing some­one at home to send you the file. It works well — when it works.
• Sync­ing sys­tem pref­er­ences, dock items, Dash­board wid­gets and more is another fea­ture, though it’s also hit and miss as to it’s use­ful­ness. For exam­ple, sync­ing pref­er­ences from a desk­top iMac with a 24″ dis­play to a lap­top with a 13″ dis­play doesn’t always work but there def­i­nitely ben­e­fits to be had.

In addi­tion to that, there are added ben­e­fits if you own an iPhone or iPod touch:

• Find my iPhone is a killer fea­ture that is nearly worth the price of admis­sion alone. If you lose your iPhone you can sim­ply visit the MobileMe web­site and using either the GPS built into the iPhone or the last known WiFi access point of an iPod touch allows you to see on a Google Map where your device is. You can then play a sound and dis­play a mes­sage to alert some­one nearby to your iPhone’s loca­tion. Neat!
• If you lost your iPhone and can’t find it, or some­one stole it you can also remotely wipe the iPhone and all it’s data, restor­ing it to fac­tory set­tings. Com­bined with Find my iPhone, these two fea­tures make a strong case for MobileMe sub­scrip­tion for iPhone owners

The case for MobileMe is very sim­i­lar to the case you would make for buy­ing a Mac or iPhone in the first place: it’s sim­ple, easy to use and just works as adver­tised for the most part. Where it breaks down is you can con­fig­ure your Mac/iPhone with a lot of free soft­ware to do sim­i­lar, if not exactly the same, things as MobileMe offers you for a yearly sub­scrip­tion. The ques­tion for you is whether it’s worth it to pay for that or look after it your­self. I won’t list all the options out there here (watch for an upcom­ing arti­cle or see the com­ments on this post from AboutThisMac.com read­ers), but the main one would be using Google’s suite of ser­vices (Gmail, Cal­en­dar, etc.) and their Sync ser­vices. This is what I’ve switched to since let­ting my MobileMe account expire.

It’s been almost two weeks since mak­ing the switch and I can’t say that I’ve really missed much. I didn’t really ever use the Me.com web apps and my use of Back to My Mac was fairly min­i­mal — noth­ing that can’t be done with a free VNC setup. The sync­ing abil­ity is some­thing I will come to miss as I make more changes on my Mac­Book Pro that aren’t reflected on my home iMac. For exam­ple, any new FTP sites added to Trans­mit used to be auto­mat­i­cally synced to both com­put­ers along with the appro­pri­ate user name/password. Now I’ll have to remem­ber to add them man­u­ally or look at other sync­ing options. Two of which I’d heartily rec­om­mend are Drop­box and 1Password. When used together, these two apps cre­ate a great alter­na­tive to MobileMe pass­word syncing.

I’d have no prob­lem rec­om­mend­ing MobileMe to peo­ple if they actu­ally will make use of the ser­vices. Take a look at the fea­tures and hon­estly think about whether you’d use them. There’s alos a 60 day free trial that you can use to see if you like it — though I’m sure once they’ve got you hooked in, you’ll be much less likely to stop using it.

I don’t cur­rently have an iPhone so using Find my iPhone or remote wipe aren’t nec­es­sary yet. I have a feel­ing if I do upgrade to an iPhone I’ll prob­a­bly end up using MobileMe again — just for the insur­ance of being able to wipe it remotely and/or find it. Other than that, I can live with using a few 3rd party ser­vices to keep every­thing running.

How about you? Do you think MobileMe is worth the yearly subscription?

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I was stumped by this. One of the new fea­tures of iTunes 9 is Genius Mixes:

Meet Genius Mixes. This new fea­ture searches your iTunes library, finds songs that go great together, and cre­ates mul­ti­ple mixes you’ll love. All auto­mat­i­cally. These mixes are like chan­nels pro­grammed entirely with your music. You may dis­cover songs you never knew you had — and redis­cover for­got­ten favorites.

But after upgrad­ing to iTunes 9, I didn’t see the Genius Mixes in my playlist bar. I found the (now obvi­ous) answer over on MacOSXHints.com:

If you update to iTunes 9 and don’t see the Genius Mixes (even though you have the Genius enabled), sim­ply select Store » Update Genius.

Once the Genius update is com­plete, the Genius Mixes entry should show in the sidebar.

I’m com­forted to note that even Rob Grif­fiths — THE Mac expert behind OSXHints.com — was stumped by this one as well.

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