You hit the nail on the head – .Mac has always had slim offerings in return for $99 a year. It will be interesting to see if Mac users think it has more value when it adds new features – assuming those features are great, and that’s yet to be seen.

I gotta say, I used to be a .Mac user for years, but I cut it off last year b/c I feel Google provides a better package—for free. MobileMe sure looks good, but I won’t call it “cloud computing” until it includes an online office app.

You don’t have to search that hard to discover all kinds of wild experiences when people checked the box and started syncing. In my instance, my 591 contacts on Address Book turned into 1207 contacts after sync – a wild orgy of duplicate and triplicate entries, and several contacts rejected because they shared a common email address.

Yes, we know why this happens, since Google’s approach to contacts is different from Apple’s. Yes, the duplicates are something you can fix, for the most part, using “merge duplicates” but to repeat what I wrote in my post: a mess – not the seamless experience one would want, if you could avoid it.

Syncing is really complicated. My hat off to companies like Spanning Sync and others that make syncing their core business.

As for the Touch prices – having another company (AT&T) subsidize the price of an Apple product does create a big crack in Apple’s pricing structure for the iPod products. Apple may drop the price of the Touch this summer – or give the whole iPod line a price reduction – although I wonder if the price drop will be as significant (percentage-wise) as it was with the iPhone 3G.

Thanks!