Apple’s MobileMe woes
The new iPhone 3G, the related software upgrade for old iPhones and the launch of Apple’s new MobileMe service have sure brought their share of glitches over the past two weeks.
At the top of the mess has been MobileMe, Apple’s long overdue upgrade to the old dotMac (.Mac) Internet portal that was supposed to offer instant push synchronization of mail, contacts and calendar data from the iPhone to desktop and laptop computers.
It’s been a disaster.
Jeff Bouchard, president of Detroit’s Gail & Rice ad agency, has been a big-time user of .Mac for years. He looked forward to MobileMe and July 11 when Apple migrated .Mac to MobileMe. It worked for a week.
But suddenly, for no explanation, seven of the 10 MobileMe accounts he has in his office stopped functioning.
“I started calling support on Saturday, they said they were aware that 1% of users were without mail and were working on it,” he says. “Soon after, phone support for MobileMe went offline. I used the chat support feature and I finally got a person to tell me that they were aware and had no time frame for repair. The chat support for MobileMe mail now has gone offline stating that ‘due to unexpected interest in the service’ they cannot handle requests. The e-mail page to request customer support for MobileMe mail was taken down yesterday.”
Across the country, Apple discussion boards are smoking hot with similar frustrations. Some users say data like stored e-mail on the $99-a-year service appears to have been lost.
Anthony Tsar Richards, another former .Mac user from Detroit, was also locked out of much of the functionality of his new MobileMe account. He has also been unable to get any support from Apple.
He says: “The whole premise of this is that you’re supposed to be able to ‘push’ your data across devices. However, it seems that Apple ‘pushed’ this down our throats. Nothing has been working over there but the censors. If you post anything critical or questioning this entire affair (on the Apple-run support boards), you’re promptly deleted and removed.”
Apple has conceded problems, saying the transition has been met with unexpected problem. It attributes them to growing pains and asks for patience and insists only 1% of its customers are affected. As a “we’re sorry” token, it’s given a month’s service free to its affected MobileMe members.
The MobileMe fiasco hasn’t been the only issue since the July 11 launch. The iPhone 3G activation process stumbled badly in the initial hours, with long delays that left tens of thousands without phone service for much of the first day. While that’s been straightened out, network problems with AT&T’s new high-speed 3G wireless system have been plaguing others.
Although I’ve had a relatively glitch-free experience, lots of other users around the country have complained of frequent AT&T network outages, dropped calls and sometimes slower-than-molasses connectivity. Probably some of that can be explained by the fact that, says AT&T, sales of the new 3G iPhone have been double of what they were when the first version of the phone was introduced last summer.
AT&T denies any widespread issues on connectivity. But there are hundreds of posts - 874 as of this morning - on one of Apple’s iPhone 3G discussion groups (http://discussions.apple.com/) discussing intermittent 3G connectivity and frequent but short “no service” messages. Read more
