MobileMe

» see me.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

mobileme was apple's $99-a-year cloud subscription. it kept your contacts, calendar, mail, photos, and a small disk in sync between a mac and the iphone you had just bought. the headline feature was push email and push contacts, the same way blackberry did it for enterprise users.

mobileme was the kind of thing apple users at us startups bought into. i was on a windows tower in ankara through that whole window, with a gmail account doing everything mobileme charged $99 for. the apple ecosystem had a tax in those years if you wanted things to work between your devices, and the rest of us were on free webmail and a usb cable.

the launch did not go well. mobileme came out the same week as the iphone 3g and the new app store, and apple's servers fell over for a week. internal company-wide mail surfaced later in which steve jobs reportedly asked his team why they had let mobileme ship in that state and what it would take to make tech press stop laughing about it. by 2011 apple had given up on charging for any of this. icloud launched free in october 2011, and mobileme was unplugged the following june.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

mobileme replaced.mac, which had replaced itools. itools had been free,.mac was $99, mobileme stayed at $99 with more storage. you got a me.com email address, a gallery for photos, idisk for files, and find my iphone, which is the only piece of mobileme that quietly survived the rebrand and is still loadbearing today.

the launch-week problems were not just slow servers. webmail outright lost messages for a percentage of users for several days. the gallery did not sync. push push email did not push. apple eventually extended every paid subscription by 60 days and issued a public apology, which is a thing apple very rarely does in writing.

~ what came after ~

icloud kept everything mobileme tried to do and dropped the subscription fee. apple then spent the next decade slowly making the service actually work. find my iphone became find my, the @me.com address aliased to @icloud.com. the rest of mobileme is the buried operating layer of every iphone backup people have done since.

the part of mobileme that aged worst is the marketing language. apple sold it as "exchange for the rest of us," meaning a sync stack for people who were not on a corporate mail server. by 2012 google had given everyone a sync stack for free, and the apple version was an expensive workaround for not using google.

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