I just received my .Mac retail kit in the mail today. After doing some research into .Mac and reading some articles I thought that I would give it a try for one year to see what I think. As a part of my experience I am going to write some additional articles for the PowerPage.

I paid CAD$99 (US$87.25) for .Mac from Best Buy here in Canada. It retails for CAN$139 on Apple's Canadian Store, CAN$119 at Amazon.ca, and US$79.99 (CAN$90.76) at Amazon.com (Canadians cannot buy items from Amazon.com, only Amazon.ca, which at this point is just a books-music-movies-software store). My first complaint (already?) is that .Mac is more expensive in Canada than it is in the US for essentially the same service. .Mac's retail price in Canada is CAN$26 more than it is in the US. Should I end up having to pay the full CAN$139 to renew my .Mac membership next year, it will most certainly be a factor in my continued use of the service. Then again, I may be addicted by then. The Canadian price should be lowered to be comparable to the US price. I only bought .Mac at this time because it was on sale at Best Buy for $40 off the retail price.

I decided to try .Mac because I wanted remote access to "stuff" that I use on a regular basis. I liked the idea of a my address book online (read: still no cell phone), my 469 bookmarks online, a home page or web page, the iDisk, Backup, and some other items. I suppose there are other sites that provide these services for free but I wanted a full Apple-based kind of service. I like what Apple does with most things and I usually find the end-user experience quite satisfying. I am highly critical of end-user experiences in all things. I have had past experience with programming and systems analysis when I was in school, but I am still very much an "effective and efficient systems" connoisseur. It is just the way that my mind functions. I am naturally drawn to Apple because of the simplicity.

I will update my .Mac experience after one week and then every few months after that until my subscription comes up for renewal. Stay ituned.

Contributed by: SCULLEY