Forums | MacLife

I would only get it for the syncing. If you're working on multiple Macs and you want to keep Mail mailboxes and rules, iCal, Address Book, and Safari bookmarks synced, you can't go wrong.

If you're only using one Mac, I wouldn't bother. Then the main benefits would be the mac.com email address, and the ability to save files to your iDisk and retrieve them from other computers. But yeah, you don't get a ton of space. I think I get 1GB. A 1GB thumb drive is like $40 now. (Oooh, look, 2GB thumb drive for $24.95.) I just use my iPod anyhow.

The backup tools are nice (easy to set up, operates without any hand holding from you), but you can find tons of backup software. If you know you're going to be creating sites with iWeb, having .Mac is nice because you can publish with one click. But your college probably gives you web space, and it's not that much harder to publish iWeb sites that way. You just tell iWeb to publish to a folder on your hard drive, and then upload that stuff to your web space via FTP. Not rocket science.

You're in college, so I bet you can think of better things to spend $99/year on. Steve made some mention at the D Conference of wanting to overhaul .Mac, but as it stands today, I don't think you need it.

.mac is only worth it if you're really want an easy to use website and have multiple computers that you need to sync and don't want to screw around with it.