Ah, .Mac, the poor abandoned stepchild in Apple's 360 degrees of spherical integration. It's the online service Google, Yahoo, and even Microsoft Live kick sand at on the playground.
Sure, Back-to-my-Mac can rock, and syncing can be oh-so-sweet, but c'mon, what have you done for us lately?
Could be a lot, if rumors pan out. We've already brought you word on possible iPhone 2.0 .Mac "push" mail, and even reports of a total revamp. Now it seems the revamp may be more of a full on renovation, including a brand spanking new name!
[Dmitry Chestnykh, the CEO at Coding Robots] went through the iCal Localizable.strings file in the recently released 10.5.3 update and found a number of changes. In particular, he found a lot of evidence that the .Mac brand name is going to be replaced. Apple is apparently using a placeholder %@ which will be dynamically replaced by the new name, whatever that is, when it's released.
If Apple wants to keep charging $100 a year, then changes, and big ones, are a very necessary way to justify it. Here's for something game-changing in the online "cloud" services realm. What do you think?
