Since server-side updates are a bit more innocuous than a standard software update to Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows, it’s easy not to notice that updates are occurring. Usually the only hint of these updates is that things just “work better”

MobileMe is .Mac’s replacement service and when is launched in July suffered serious issues for several weeks.

Any MobileMe customer’s email can potentially be obtained via information viewable in the form of their public folder’s name making it a possible lucrative source of valid email addresses for spammers.

Also via TechCrunch

“Apple knows about the problem but insists it isn’t an issue because no one has complained publicly. An Apple representative said to one of our readers: ‘We’ve never had a complaint from a customer about people spamming them because of their iDisk public folder name. There is no way to remove your account name from the iDisk folders. I’m very sorry.’”

When will the MobileMess end? It’s the name I tell you! If they kept it .mac, everything would be fine!

The announcement came via email, which read:

We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around. Read this article for more details.

The MobileMe Team

Since its launch in July, MobileMe has been dogged with issues. First subscribers were offered a free 30 day extension and then several days later some trial customers were given another 30 day extension to their subscription due to a billing issue.

Earlier this month Apple CEO Steve Jobs sent out an internal memo at Apple admitting many of the issues with MobileMe.

Team,

Steve

In the email Jobs reportedly acknowledges many of MobileMe’s flaws and explains how the entire launch could have been handled better, adding that more time and testing was also needed.

Jobs wrote that MobileMe’s services should have been rolled out slowly instead of launching it “as a monolithic service”.

“It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” Jobs wrote in an email to employees. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence”.

Additionally Eddy Cue is now heading up the MobileMe team, cue who previously was in charge of the iTunes Store is now in charge of Internet services, including MobileMe, the App Store and the iTunes Store.

“The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services,” Jobs says. “And learn we will. The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year”.

According to David G. the author of the blog, the issues have now been resolved but anyone still experiencing issues should make use of a dedicated support line.

We have completed restoring Mail service, including historical messages, to all of the 1% of affected members. Thank you all for your extreme patience during this trying time. If you have been affected by this issue and are still having problems we have established a dedicated chat line to reach a MobileMe Mail specialist for help. Please use this dedicated chat line for Mail issues only. By completing this restoration of Mail services, we hope we have put the vast majority of MobileMe Mail problems behind us and can now focus on improving other aspects of this new ambitious service.

In the same post Apple also acknowledges a bug that struck many users on Monday that caused contacts and calendar information to disappear from their devices but stayed on the MobileMe cloud and computers.

Late Monday afternoon Apple fixed the issues and everyone’s contacts and calendar data is said to have been restored.

Last week World of Apple detailed an issue where 1% of MobileMe users were unable to receive mail.

As the issue appears to be ongoing Steve Jobs has reportedly made a request for a blog to be setup detailing the continuing effort to resolve the issues.

An RSS feed of the blog is also available.

CNN Money is also reporting the issues:

The Cupertino, Calif., company has been migrating its .Mac pay email service to an upgraded version, called MobileMe. But in doing so, it has run into problems including service outages and customers losing access to their accounts. It’s the latest in a string of issues that have cropped up since the launch of the latest iPhone, an unusual turn for a company known for its attention to detail in its products and services.

The launch of MobileMe has been tarnished by a poor initial rollout and slow response in the past couple of weeks.

Dear MobileMe Member,

Sincerely,
The MobileMe Team

Last week Apple sent out an email apologising for the problematic and slow transition from .Mac to MobileMe and offered every user a 30-day extension to their subscription.

Apple also admitted in the email that use of the term “push” when talking about Macs and PCs syncing to the service was misleading.

Below is the email that Apple sent to customers.

We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.

Thank you,
The MobileMe Team

The article outlines that instant data sync only occurs to MobileMe from the web interface or a portable device such as iPhone or iPod touch. The main concern is that changes made on a Mac will not be instantly synced back to MobileMe but changes will be updated automatically every 15 minutes or manually by hitting the “Sync” button.

Also regarding MobileMe, Apple has confirmed that the iDisk File Sharing feature of the service will be delayed.

In response to a customers support email “Mike” of Apple’s MobileMe Support team wrote, “When MobileMe was announced, iDisk File Sharing was mentioned as a feature; however, the MobileMe webpage noted that all features listed on that page were subject to change,” continuing, “When MobileMe was released on July 10, 2008, iDisk File Sharing was not included. I apologize for any inconvenience.”

Apple’s website lists iDisk as coming soon but doesn’t offer any timeline as to when the feature will be enabled.

To help some users, Apple has pointed many users towards this support article, which describes other ways in which MobileMe users can share the contents of their remote iDisks.

“The Mac OS X Update For MobileMe is recommended for users running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.4 and includes general system fixes that enhance your Mac for MobileMe,” reads Apples description of the update.

There is no indication as to what exactly this update fixes or updates.

MobileMe login screen

The $99/year service replaces the original .Mac service and offers web-based email, address book, calendar, photos and storage. It also integrates with both Mac OS X and iPhone to provide “push” services that allows all your devices to be synchronised at all times over the internet.

MobileMe Launch
7/9/2008, 6pm-12am PT

MobileMe will be available as soon as possible during this maintenance window.

Apple has posted an article aimed at .Mac users to help them understand the transition.

This article helps current .Mac members better understand what to expect from the upcoming MobileMe upgrade. When MobileMe becomes available, this article will be updated with more details to help upgraded members get started with the new service. You may want to bookmark this article and refer back to it when MobileMe goes live.

In short the article outlines that your .Mac account will work as it did before, but you’ll have a choice of using either username@mac.com or username@me.com. If you have aliases setup at .Mac they will continue to work as well. All your .Mac websites will continue to work at both mac.com and me.com.

Web-based Contacts application

With a MobileMe email account, all folders, messages and status indicators look identical whether checking email on iPhone, iPod touch, a Mac or a PC. New email messages are pushed instantly to iPhone over the cellular network or Wi-Fi, removing the need to manually check email and wait for downloads. Push also keeps contacts and calendars continuously up-to-date so changes made on one device are automatically pushed up to the cloud and down to other devices. Push works with the native applications on iPhone and iPod touch, Microsoft Outlook for the PC, and Mac OS X applications, Mail, Address Book and iCal, as well as the MobileMe web application suite.

MobileMe web applications are 100 percent ad-free and provide an incredible, desktop-like experience that allows users to drag and drop, click and drag and even use keyboard shortcuts. MobileMe provides anywhere access to Mail, Contacts and Calendar, with a unified interface that allows users to switch between applications with a single click, and Gallery makes it easy to share photos on the web in stunning quality. Gallery users can upload, rearrange, rotate and title photos from any browser; post photos directly from an iPhone; allow visitors to download print quality images; and contribute photos to an album. MobileMe iDisk lets users store and manage files online with drag and drop filing and makes it easy to share documents too large to email by automatically sending an email with a link for downloading the file. MobileMe includes 20GB of online storage that can be used for email, contacts, calendar, photos, movies and documents.

MobileMe, available on July 11, is a subscription-based service with 20GB of storage for $99 (US) per year for individuals and $149 (US) for a Family Pack, which includes one master account with 20GB of storage and four Family Member accounts with 5GB of storage each. Users can sign up for a free, 60-day MobileMe trial at www.apple.com/mobileme and current .Mac members will be automatically upgraded to MobileMe accounts. MobileMe subscribers can purchase an additional 20GB of storage for $49 (US) or 40GB of storage for $99 (US) annually.

Using an iPhone or iPod touch with MobileMe requires iPhone 2.0 software and iTunes® 7.7 or later. For use with a Mac, MobileMe requires Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11 or the latest version of Mac OS X Leopard.

TUAW notes that .Mac “will no longer be sold by Apple after WWDC” and that existing users will have their @mac.com email addresses forwarded to @me.com addresses.

The popular blog also reports that the entire web interface will be given a new look with contacts looking like they do in Address Book and calendars looking like iCal.

MobileMe is expected to be available in late June/early July, and is reported to be integrated heavily with the latest build of the iPhone OS 2.0 beta. One of the features said to be coming to the iPhone is over-the-air syncing of contacts, calendars and photos.

At around 5.30pm Eastern time on Monday .Mac mail went offline for around 6 hours.

During last years All Things Digital: D5 conference Steve Jobs was questioned on why Apple had let .Mac dwindle, Jobs answered “I couldn’t agree more, and we’ll make up for lost time in the near future.”

Me.com currently points to Snappville.com but a Netcraft page for the domain lists an Apple email address as the DNS contact.

Macworld is also reporting that Apple has snapped up multiple .me domain names which are up for grabs from the country of Montenegro.

The .me registry states that Apple has registered domains such as ipod.me, apple.me and itunes.me.

Trademark-holders have until 20 May to register their company and product names under the new .me domain, which is being marketed as a generic top-level domain by the country of Montenegro.

“The .me extension gives every company on the planet the opportunity to personalize their brands…and make them more relevant to today’s Internet-savvy teens,” says Roland LaPlante, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Afilias. “Companies should be registering .me names not just from an intellectual property protection standpoint, but because there is so much business opportunity to personalise products.”

Companies can reserve .me names from more than 60 domain name registrars. Anyone can register a .me name from 6 June through 26 June. The .me registry is scheduled to go live on July 17.

A reference found in the latest iPhone 2.0 OS beta points towards the use of “Mobile Me” as the new name for .Mac.

Codingrobots.com is reporting that changes to multiple strings in Mac OS X 10.5.3 point towards a new name for Apple’s online Mail, web hosting, iDisk, backup and sync services.

iCal’s Localizable.strings file contains the following string:

/* Label of .Mac button in iCal’s General preferences. %@ is the new name of Apple’s online service (was .Mac) (remove -XX02)

Safari has the following lines in its Localizable.strings:

/* Title of .Mac alert sheet, with .Mac brand name subsituted */
“You need a %@ account that has syncing enabled” = “You need a %@ account that has syncing enabled”;

Mail’s Prefs.strings:

/* Title of button used to open the .Mac system preference pane. */
“AOS_SYNC_BUTTON_FORMAT” = “%@…”;

/* Descriptive text for .Mac Sync. */
“AOS_SYNC_FORMAT” = “Use %@ to synchronize Accounts, Rules, Notes, Signatures, and Smart Mailboxes.”;

It appears that almost every reference of .Mac has been replaced with “%@” which means that the name will be inserted automatically by applications.

It was reported by TUAW in early-May that .Mac would see a complete revamp and see the introduction of over-the-air syncing with Exchange and .Mac syncing with Windows, the blog site noted that this would likely happen at WWDC 2008.

Apple’s .Mac Backup website shows a screenshot of what appears to be a new version of Backup. The screenshot contains new options such as, “Essential .Mac”, “Complete Archive” and “iPod Safety Net”.

.Mac Web Gallery lets members easily share photos and movies directly from iLife ’08 with anyone on a Mac, PC or iPhone™ in stunning quality. In addition, .Mac Web Gallery visitors can download high quality images for printing and even contribute photos using a standard web browser or email. Other new .Mac features include a tenfold increase in .Mac storage to 10GB, support for personal domains for iWeb websites and enhancements to .Mac Mail.

“.Mac Web Gallery is an awesome way to share photos and movies on the Internet with friends and family,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “You can share your favorite photos and movies with anyone on a Mac, PC or iPhone, and they can turn them into high-quality prints as well as contribute photos to your site using a web browser or email.”

.Mac members now have 10 times more online storage space for photo and movie sharing, email, website hosting, exchanging files and backing up important documents, increasing from 1GB to 10GB for individual members and from 2GB to 20GB for Family Pack customers. Members can choose to purchase an additional 10GB of storage. .Mac members can send and receive larger email attachments up to a maximum size of 20MB and manage unwanted mail better with improved webmail spam filtering. Using iWeb ’08, .Mac members can embed dynamic web widgets like Google Maps, Google AdSense, .Mac Web Gallery albums or HTML snippets in their .Mac website and host their websites at their own personal domain.

“Apple has taken iLife ’08 to a new level that is years ahead of anything available for the PC,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think iLife ’08 gives Mac users even more reasons to love their Macs, and PC users even more reasons to switch.”

iPhoto ’08 automatically groups all photos into Events, each containing a day’s worth of photos represented by a single picture. Users can simply move their mouse over an Event to instantly “skim” through all its photos. Users can split a single day’s event into multiple events, such as a birthday party in the morning and a wedding in the evening, or merge events on multiple days into a single event, such as a weekend ski vacation. Users can hide photos they don’t want to see every day but don’t want to throw away, and a unified search allows users to instantly find all their photos across all Events by rating, date and keywords. Users can produce frame-worthy prints on a home printer with new Apple-designed photo themes, and order keepsake books with customizable dust jackets and professional quality hardcovers with elegant foil printing, new spiral-bound softcover books that can be laid flat for easy viewing, or new larger wall calendars.

With iMovie ’08, Apple’s movie-making software has been completely reinvented to let users rediscover and enjoy their video library, make movies in minutes instead of hours, and share their movies with family, friends or the entire world in a snap. iMovie ’08 can import video from the latest AVCHD, HDV and DV camcorders, as well as from digital cameras, and displays a user’s entire video library whether it’s stored on internal or external drives. Users can preview any of their video clips by simply moving their mouse over the clip to “skim” through it forward or backward at any speed, including faster than real time. Users can select video as easily as selecting text, make a movie by simply dragging the selected video into a project, then easily add a soundtrack from iTunes, voiceovers, and elegant effects and cinematic titles. iMovie ’08 makes it as easy as a few clicks to enjoy your movies on an iPod, iPhone or Apple TV, or share with the entire world on YouTube.

For .Mac members, Apple is also introducing the stunning .Mac Web Gallery. .Mac Web Gallery is fully integrated with iPhoto ’08 and iMovie ’08, letting users share their photos and movies on the web with just a few clicks. .Mac Web Gallery automatically builds a website containing photo galleries and movies that can be viewed on any modern computer or iPhone. Photos can be downloaded to print at sizes up to 16×20, and movies can be viewed at higher-than-DVD resolution.

iWeb ’08 offers new features to make websites more interactive by adding live web widgets such as Google Maps, targeted ads using Google AdSense and photos or movies from .Mac Web Galleries. Users can also add Internet video, news headlines, weather and more from any site that supports HTML snippets. A new “My Album” page template lets users easily organize photo albums and videos into one simple index web page. The new iWeb includes a range of beautiful new Apple-designed themes that users can change at any time to experiment with different web page designs, even after their site has been published. With a .Mac membership, users can also now host iWeb websites using their own personal domains.

GarageBand ’08 introduces Magic GarageBand, an easy and fun way for musicians and non-musicians alike to create a song. Users can pick from nine musical genres and interact with a band of “players” on a virtual stage by selecting an instrument and musical part for each player to create thousands of possible song combinations. Users can play along with a built-in software instrument or record their voice to sing along to their own music. The new GarageBand also offers powerful new features for more advanced musicians, including multi-take recording to capture the best performance, arrangements to cut, copy and paste intros, verses and choruses, and support for 24-bit audio interfaces.

• Steve is on stage.
• Jobs: The market share of the Mac is rising three times faster than the rest of the PC industry
• “Today’s focus is on the iMac”
• “iMacs have been very successful, and we’d like to make it even better,” he said. Apple is borrowing two elements from its pro products for this new generation of iMac — aluminum and silicon dioxide, better known as glass.
  
• “This is the new iMac design, and it’s just designing. This is the new iMac. Just gorgeous. You can see we have a full complement of I/O across the bottom. USB 2.0, Firewire 400, Fireiwre 800. Slot load superdrive. iSight camera and microphone. Can add memory with just one screw. New iMac will come in two sizes: 20-inch display, and 24-inch display. Both will be glossy. Customers say they love glossy displays.”
• New iMac. Also, new keyboard. You might have seen this on the web. Two USB ports. 0.33″, full complement of keys, including dedicated keys for screen dimmer and brighter, expose, media controls, volume controls, eject for optical drive. This is the new iMac with the new keyboard and mouse. Wireless? New wireless keyboard, beautiful, very compact. People love to hold them in their lap. Bluetooth 2.0, all these dedicated keys as well.”
• “What about the inside? Up to 2.4GHz Core 2 Extreme processor, up to 4GB of memory. ATI Radeon HD graphics card, up to 1TB of hard drive storage. 802.11n and Bluetooth 2.0 built-in. What models will we have? Up until now, 17-inch, 20-inch, and 24-inch. Well, today we’re replacing the 24-inch, lowering price by $200, 20-inch at same $1499. replacing 17-inch with $1199 model.”
• All models shipping Today.
• New advert to advertise the iMacs, shows iMacs rotating.
• Jobs shows picture of Mac lineup, Mac mini still there
• “Alright, next thing is applications that run on the Mac. Apple invented category of digital lifestyle applications. Computer is the hub of digital life. We’ve increased our lead over the PC industry. Introducing iLife ‘08. Totally new, biggest jump since we introduced it. iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD and GarageBand. We’re replacing one of the apps with something that takes it to a new level.”
• “iPhoto. We’re adding “Events”. Digital cameras have made it so easy and inexpensive, photo libraries have grown, not unusual to find photo library with 5 or 6 thousand photos. It’s getting hard to find ‘em. We make albums, go to some event, take photos, and look what’s happened. We have tons of albums. They’re centered around events. Birthday party, family reunion. We label the albums. We have a computer, we could do this automatically. Automatically makes events out of your photos. Around 50 photos per avg per event. What that means is, instead of looking through 5K, you’re just looking through 100 events. Makes photos manageable again. What photos go in an event? When it automatically makes an event, what does it do? All photos taken in a day. All photos yesterday, put in an event. photos taken two days ago in an event, and so on. What happens if I go to a b-day party in the morning and wedding in the afternoon? Just pick first photo and splits automatically into two events. Multi-day events can be joined together into single event.”
• iPhoto also gains new editing tools, including the ability to copy and paste adjustments you’ve made on one photo to other photos where it makes sense. Books and calendars have been improved, theme based home printing is now available and more. Jobs demonstrated the new features and held up a book example, which can now be printed with foil lettering.
• “When you get your hands on this, you’ll think it’s great. We’re all familiar with .Mac. It’s our internet subscription service. We’re pleased to announce we have over 1.7M .Mac subscribers, we’re going to see it grow even faster after today. Marry .Mac and iPhoto. Announcing .Mac Web Gallery. Works hand in glove with iPhoto ‘08. What does it do? Has one button photo sharing. integrated into iPhoto ‘08. Makes web gallery, uploads automatically. Users get rich Web 2.0 experience. You can see photos in gallary, mosaic. can see in any browser you’d like. Now people that view photos, if you let them, can download print quality downloads. Users can contribute photos from anywhere. You publish on .Mac, someone is on a PC, there is special email address they can get from the web gallery, and they will appear on your web gallery. Photos will sync to your iPhoto library, too.
• we’ve added “Send to Web Gallery” on your iPhone. Pick one, emails to special address, that photo will show up on your web gallery. Can tell friends about it, View others’ web galleries right on your iPhone, great iPhone experience, fully integrated.”
• “Now I want to show how easy it is for other people to contribute to my .Mac web gallery. Phil Schiller has his iPhone, has snapped a photo, gonna send to my gallery right from his iPhone. Went right into my .Mac web gallery. Will auto download to my iPhone as well. Going back to my gallery. So that is .Mac Web Gallery.”
• “Next up: iMovie. This is really interesting. Let me tell you the story. One of our video engineers went to the Cayman Islands, shot a lot of underwater HD, wanted to make a video for his buddies in half an hour. We found out he couldn’t do it. Engineer got out Final Cut Pro. Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do great movie in 30 minutes. So he created an app that could do it. We were so blown away that we decided to use it. We’re still calling it iMovie, but we’re giving a new icon so we can show it’s a whole new app. One library for all your video.”
• Support for AVCHD
• Like iPhoto, iMovie utilizes the “skimming” concept — you can use your mouse to skim through video, and don’t have to actually “play” clips to see what they contain. You can scrub, for example. “This allows you to have superfast movie creation,”
• Can view and share almost anywhere. You can go to share menu, make version for iTunes. Watch on computer, iPod, iPhone, Apple TV. Put on .Mac Web Gallery.”
• Also built-in YouTube sharing
• [Phone rings in audience! Jobs: “You might want to answer that”]
• Demoing iMovie, making a video real quick, looks good
• “We’re slinging around HD video we’ve taken. You can imagine making a movie in 20 minutes. It’s very well thought through. Can share it, pick resolutions that I want. One of things I want to show you is .Mac Web Gallery. put a few movies on there. You can see, it’s higher res than a DVD, anyone can see this. This is the movie our video engineered made. You can make it in 20 minutes and put it on the web. This is a much better and much faster way to do it. There’s a mobile resolution for watching on your iPhone. If you want, people can download to their own computer as well.”
• “So now I’d like to talk about iWeb. Enhanced version of iWeb, make even better websites. Live web widgets. Add GoogleMaps, we’ve made it so you can put it right in. You can add any web snippet, paste it into your website. Live web widgets. Another thing you can add is Google AdSense. Register with Google, type in registration, decide what format, Google will put ads in there that are appropriate. Media index page. A lot of us have sites with photos on them, we’d like index page. We’ve added that, you can create index page, add your content in. Page with all the photos. Taking up just one position in the navigation. Put pointers to .Mac page as well. Personal domain support. If you have a personal domain, that’s now supported. Themes, you can change theme now if you like. We’ve shipped some great themes. This is iWeb in iLife ‘08″
• iDVD’08 includes pro encoding codes, and 10 new themes
• “GarageBand, multi-take recording. Magic GarageBand, way to experiment, best way to communicate is just to show you. Let me show you.” Demo time! “Magic GarageBand gives me genres to play with: blues, rock, jazz, country, reggae, funk, latin, another rock style, and slow blues. I’m going to audition latin. Gives me little jazz club with my instruments.” Looks like you can switch instruments playing each part of the preloaded track. Changing violin to trumpet, removing the drums. “When I’ve got something I like, can add my own voice and instruments, loops, change around however I want to. Way for musicians and non-musicians alike to get into GarageBand. That’s GarageBand.
• That’s iLife ‘08, shipping today for $79 and free with all news Macs
• .Mac now with 10GB of storage as well as web galleries, new data transfer limit of 100GB
• iWork: Keynote and Pages. I’m very pleased to announce we’ve sold 1.8M copies to date. New iWork ‘08. New Keynote, new text effects, new transitions, Instant Alpha. Instant Alpha, get a photo, lets us take out the background, just keep part of photo you want. Smart Builds, lets anyone make very high production value animations. Go to Media Viewer, drag photos in, anything you want. Keynote generates animations for you. A to B animations, you can create your own animations. Easily build slides that mere mortals can figure out to use. Great new themes that are really beautiful. Of course you can add animations to these. These are so easy, so easy to make slides that look this good. So, these are just some of the features as part of Keynote ‘08.”
• Pages now has two modes, one designed for word processing and the other for page layout
• 140 built-in Apple designed templates
• New spreadsheet application called Numbers
• A spreadsheet “done in the style of Keynote and Pages”
• Numbers touts features like “intelligent tables,” which enable you to sort and filter by clicking on headers; “flexible canvas,” which lets you put multiple sheets on a canvas, tied together in formulas but not tied together by formatting. And it has the requisite set of features like chart creation, image management, text labels, the ability to add photos and diagrams, and so on.
• Ability to import and export almost any Excel document
• That iWork ‘08, costs $79. All application work in Tiger and will work in Leopard
• Starting a question and answer session
• Apple COO, Tim Cook now on stage as well as Phil Schiller
• “How well will you market this ecosystem to consumers, and show how seamlessly all this stuff works together?”

  Steve: “We’ve got a phenomenal customer base, they show their friends and their friends get jealous.”

  “Why are you not participating in Intel Inside program and not putting stickers on your Macs?”

  Steve: “What can I say? We like our own stickers better. Don’t get me wrong, we love Intel, combined with our OS, we’ve really tuned them well together. Everyone knows we use Intel processors, we’d rather tell them about the product inside the box.”

  Phil: “Too much stuff on PC box, stickers on laptop, trialware, You don’t have to peel stuff off.”

  “How thin are the iMacs?”

  Steve: “Really thin. You’ll get your hands on it in a minute, but they’re appreciably thinner.”

  “Two thirds of your products on mobile side, where do things go on the Mac side.”

  Steve: “Desktops still an important part. Don’t require miniaturization of notebook, can offer bigger keyboards, screens, lower cost. Some consumers will want to own both. We think iMac has bright future ahead of it.”

  “Didn’t mention Mac mini today, how is it doing?”

  Tim: “We’re refreshing the Mac mini today.”

  “Mentioned AdSense, what’s the relationship between Apple and Google?”

  Steve: “We are working closer with Google, they offer back end services we want to tie into our offerings. Google likes our products, too.”

  Looking at what you’ve done with the iPhone, there’s volatility in the stock. How satisfied that the product is on track?”

  Steve: “We think the iPhone is a pretty strong success, we think most of the world sees it that way too. We’re really happy with how it’s going.”

  “How is Apple TV today? How does it fit into Mac?”

  Steve: “We’re here to talk about Mac, we’ll have some news for the Apple TV soon, but nothing to talk about today.”

  “What about AMD chips?”

  Steve: “We use Intel chips”

  “What about the iMac in business?”

  Tim: “We’re seeing a lot of growth in business use. Mac is growing and a lot of that is business.”

  Steve: “A lot of other apps that run on the Mac, MSFT Office. But don’t discount that more and more of business is communication, so lots of people have to sell internally, and they’re excited about the tools we’re offering. We see the iMac having some traction in business.”

  “With someone editing movies and going to publish, why not support HD uploads?”

  Steve: “We do. Turns out that HD camcorders don’t have sensors that are full HD, so they produce images that are slightly lower than HD, but are still stellar. We use that res, which is close, but not quite HD. Best you can do under $10k

  “Introduced multitouch on iPhone, what about for the Mac?”

  Steve: “Makes sense for the iPhone, not sure it makes sense in the Mac. Classify that as a research project.”

  “There has been a suggestion that Apple appeals to smaller elite than mass customer base. Is it your goal to overtake PC in marketshare?”

  Steve: “Goal is to make the best PC in the world, and make something we can recommend to family in friends. There is some stuff in our industry we wouldn’t be proud to ship. We can’t ship junk. Thresholds we just can’t cross. But we want to make the best personal computers in the industry. Our products are usually not premium priced. Price our competitors’ computers, and add in all the extras, we’re competitive. We don’t offer stripped down products. We compare favorably. Thank you very much for coming today.”

• All done.

Due to scheduled maintenance, .Mac members might be intermittently unable to access some .Mac services from 10 AM to 12 PM PDT on 08/07/2007. We apologize for any inconvenience.

The timing of the maintenance coincides with tomorrows special event to be held at Apple’s Town Hall, starting at 10.00am PDT.

When Steve Jobs was interviewed at “D:All Things Digital” he hinted at a possible .Mac update.

The subject of .Mac came up once when Walt stated that Apple had let it dwindle. Steve replied “I couldn’t agree more, and we’ll make up for lost time in the near future.”