Mobile Me, Apple’s wonderful suite of tools and applications that Jobs dubbed ‘Exchange for the rest of us,” might be moving in the free direction it now seems.
Current pricing for Mobile Me is between $99 and $149 a year, depending on whether the subscriber is an individual or a family. A move from such high price points to a pricing scheme that includes a long-term free option would dramatically shake up the product. Apple currently offers a free trial of the service.
The core points behind the rumor are changing account names of current Mobile Me subscribers. Before, accounts were listed under the subscriber’s account information as ‘Individual’ or ‘Family Pack.’ Recently, and with some back and forth switching, many accounts are now labeled ‘Full Member.’
This is not a single case scenario. Across Mac forums, many users are finding the same occurrence, a change to the new ‘Full Member’ status. What this seems to point to is a new free version of Mobile Me to be launched at WWDC, and a paid version on top of it to attract the most hard core users. In short, Mobile Me could be going freemium.
This mirrors well recent calls by technology luminaries for Apple to change Mobile Me in order to compete with other market product offerings. The CEO of Posterous wrote an article entitled “To compete with Google, Apple has to make Mobile Me free,” which makes the case that Apple will fall behind the search giant if it does not up its game.
If you use Mobile Me, would you settle for a lower powered free version?
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