Sunday, July 13, 2008 - 10:05 a.m.
Apple just upgraded their .Mac service, rebranding it as a new product named MobileMe.
According to the MobileMe features page,
Push email. Push contacts. Push calendar.
MobileMe stores all your email, contacts, and calendars in the cloud and pushes them down to your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. When you make a change on one device, the cloud updates the others. Push happens automatically, instantly, and continuously. You don’t have to wait for it or remember to do anything — such as docking your iPhone and syncing manually — to stay up to date.
Sounds great, right?
Well, even though I was making changes to my contacts online, they weren’t showing up on my comuter, which is odd, since it so clearly states that the changes should be pushed “automatically, instantly, and continuously.”
A quick search on a forum turned up an Apple knowledge base article that says, “Changes made on your computer will be synced to the MobileMe ‘cloud’ once every 15 minutes (or every hour in Mac OS X 10.4.11).”
What the hell? This type of miscommunication of functionality is so frustrating. They promise the moon in one place, and then hide the truth in another.
Apple needs to get their service up to their promises or stop advertising “push” and “Exchange for the rest of us.”
Update: Some may argue with my assertion that MobileMe is not a true push service. I consider an Exchange-like push service to be two-way, and Apple’s marketing clearly states that “[w]hen you make a change on one device, the cloud updates the others,” but that is not what they have delivered, as indicated by the knowledge base article
Update 2: I’m not the only one who thinks this is bullshit.
Comments
penguin
July 13, 2008
12:08 p.m.
What you’ve found is that it’s once every 15 minutes to upload changes from a computer. That hardly negates the ‘push’ quality of the service, rather it means your computer isn’t pushing updates to a server every second of the day. This would be less than ideal for both editing reasons and traffic reasons. All it’s saying is that on automatic mode, changes from your computer don’t get sent faster than 15 minute intervals. Push defines when updates come to the phone, and it has a data connection open all the time to receive those updates. Those updates are going to be things like new email which do not rely on the computer to get sent out.
Bret
July 13, 2008
12:27 p.m.
@penguin What you describe as being less than ideal is exactly how Exchange works, and it is what is described in the marketing materials.
I would like the computer to behave in the same manner as the iPhone (sending and receiving updates instantly). Isn’t that what they promise in the quoted text above?
Jeff Croft
July 14, 2008
12:10 a.m.
@penguin:
In what world does “wait 15 minutes” jive with Apple’s statement that MobileMe syncs ALL devices “automatically, INSTANTLY, and continuously?”
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