How Do You Like MobileMe For Free?

I would rather it just cost less as opposed to entirely free. If there were a paid alternative to GMail, I would move away from that too.<p>Paying for something reduces the likelihood that the provider will do unscrupulous things with my data for financial gain. Or at least I <i>feel</i> like they’d be less likely. And ignorance is bliss, right?

I have wondered if this was in the cards for a while now. I have had trouble reconciling it with a few things though. On one hand, from a competition standpoint, there is an argument to be made that google is providing free cloud-based sync for all users. Therefore, Apple needs to be competitive with them. However, Apple rarely (never?) releases products as loss leaders. They are always interested in breaking even or (ideally) extracting a small amount of revenue from every offering. I can't see them generating sufficient revenue using advertising, but perhaps iAd would be one way to do it.<p>On the other hand, the cost of hosting email, calendars, address book sync, etc... is fairly small. I could see a dropbox-like scenario where you get a small amount of free storage (plenty for contacts, calendars, and recent email). Then you pay for additional storage and/or access to premium streaming content. That offering could be built into the purchase price of most Apple gear without a dramatic price increase.

How would you like an already painfully slow service to be even slower? The rumor that this is based on has no credibility.<p>And even if it were free, I'd still avoid it like the plague, because there are better offering's out there, most of which aren't mostly tied down to an OS.<p>This is unlikely to happen, unless Apple becomes a mobile service provider which is likely a bigger possibility.

How will it be any different from the other providers ?<p>That would be the key, being free is not really a differentiator any more.

I would want/need the option of using it with a custom domain for it to be relevant for me.