MobileMe

Apple said it would pull MobileMe's plug in 2012, months after it is to be replaced by iCloud. We answer some questions about what parts would shift to iCloud and what would be ditched.

Apple's MobileMe cloud storage service has never been so popular, and the reasons for its newfound regard are fitting. The latest comes from The Music Void, saying that "informed sources" say that MobileMe's new price tag will be $20 per year, an 80 percent decrease from its current price -- and a significant deviation from the original rumors of a 100 percent price drop.

Eric Boehs believed that he had accidentally thrown away his iPhone and iPad. Alas, that's not exactly what happened.

MobileMe has been tough to defend since day one of Mac.com. It costs a hundred bucks a year. What do you get for that dough? Oh, a whole pile of world-class, useful features.

Even though Apple Inc. recently upgraded the back-end infrastructure of its problem-plagued MobileMe, the online service was offline for nearly six hours Monday.

Apple's MobileMe and Google's Gmail online e-mail services suffered hours-long outages Monday, leaving millions of users unable to access their accounts.

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs has given MobileMe to the executive who heads iTunes, part of a shake-up over the sync service's public problems since its launch last month, according to a memo sent to company employees earlier this week.

Although Apple Inc. has restored full e-mail service to about 40% of the subscribers who have been locked out of their accounts for more than a week, the company today acknowledged a new problem with the sync service.

Synchronization is hard. It may sound simple: copy personal information, such as contacts and events, between computers and keep them all up to date. But over the years we’ve seen sync programs that don’t quite work. Apple has thrown resources at this problem over time, and the latest incarnation, MobileMe, adds the capability to synchronize some data to devices and other Macs lickety-split, the way Microsoft’s Exchange Server performs in the corporate world. (In fact, Apple calls MobileMe “Exchange for the rest of us.”) MobileMe definitely comes closer to fulfilling the promise made by the six-year-old .Mac (which it replaced), though it has more than a few rough edges.

Apple Inc. installed a control panel applet for its MobileMe online sync and storage service on Windows XP and Windows Vista systems when they were updated to iTunes 7.7 -- the second time this year that it's bundled new software with an update for an existing program.

Some Mac users are calling foul after discovering that information entered on their Mac and PC calendars and address books isn't pushed instantly to the servers in the MobileMe "cloud."