Thwunk!!!

Yes, thwunk. 

That kids, is the sound of me slam­ming my head against the key­board. By the by, ergonomic key­boards are much bet­ter on the nog­gin than stan­dard. And why am I slam­ming my head into the key­board you ask. Well it may have some­thing to do with this bit of idiocy from The Apple Blog. The piece pur­ports to be a com­par­i­son of Apple’s .Mac ser­vice and the var­i­ous Google offer­ings, with an attempt to answer the ques­tion, “Is Google the next .Mac.”

We begin with the time­less call for the glo­ri­ous day when all apps run off of the net­work and we live in a won­der­ous cloud of vir­tual infor­ma­tion. Of course these pieces never do address the issue of what hap­pens when you can’t access the net­work; but what­ever, we’ll leave that for another day. So, hav­ing set the mood, we get into the “analy­sis.” The first thing we have is a nice table com­par­ing the fea­tures of .Mac and Google Apps. Right off the bat the table is fuck­ing wrong. It claims that while Google sup­ports POP and IMAP (IMAP sup­port being added very recently, and by all accounts buggy as an Alabama tweaker on St. Swithin’s day) wheras .Mac is IMAP only. Um, wrong, .Mac mail works swim­ingly with POP, I used it that way for years. The table also declares that Google’s stor­age limit is “unknown.” Oooh, unknown. I don’t know about you, but I sure love bas­ing reviews on “unknown.”

Having made our way past the shoals of not know­ing what the fuck you’re talk­ing about, we move on to the analy­sis of .Mac, The one para­graph analy­sis of .Mac. We hear a bit about .Mac Web Gallery, the bump in stor­age, and “Back to My Mac.” And here’s where we skid off the rails. The arti­cle pro­ceeds to waste one fifth of it’s analy­sis of .Mac bab­bling about how nifty it would be if “Back to My Mac.” extended to the iPhone and iTouch and included Front Row so you could stream…blah blah blah. Shuddering back onto the trail, the para­graph is rounded out with a men­tion of Backup and iCal/Address Book sync­ing. Absent is any men­tion of .Mac web host­ing, iDisk, book­mark sync­ing, iCards or the Learning Center tuto­ri­als. Shit fea­tures to be sure, but fea­tures nonethe­less. Prominently men­tioned is the $99.00 a year price tag, which breaks down to $8.25 a month, only 4 dol­lars more expen­sive than the fucks at EarthLink are charg­ing me just to keep an email address; but that’s a rant for another day.

Now that we’re done with the “analy­sis” of .Mac, we move on to the analy­sis of Google. Which clocks in at two para­graphs, for the record. Mentioned are Gmail and Gdrive, with its spoooky unknown stor­age limit; and, of course, a wild digres­sion into ram­pant spec­u­la­tion on what Google might offer in the future. The next para­graph touts the won­ders of Picassa (iPhoto), Blogger (iWeb), Google Docs and Spreadsheets (iWork), Google Talk (iChat) , Google Reader (Mail/Safari) and iGoogle (fuck, you got me Apple has no answer to the cut­ting edge world of web por­tals). There is a brief acknowl­edge­ment that all this crap is essen­tially Google only (yes, hacks and excep­tions exist) and another chance to ignore the ques­tion, just what the hell do I do when my ISP craps out. Finally, the para­graph closes with the note that Google is free, for val­ues of the word “free” that include hav­ing my data mined for advertisers.

Finally the pain-train rolls into cen­tral sta­tion with the “con­clu­sion” (and I use that word only in the sense that the fuck­ing arti­cle is over) that, based on the in depth com­par­i­son, Google will rule the uni­verse. Seriously, the final para­graph head­ing is “One Google to Rule Them All.” Sauron must be so proud. This “con­clu­sion” is essen­tially based on the premise that Google will add won­der­ous new fea­tures to make all of Nerdistan happy.  I counter than Apple will add free hook­ers and cocaine to .Mac; and I have just as much proof.

 Seriously, this is a web­site with a siz­able readership…get some fuck­ing writ­ers stat!