Mobileme Not
Posted on 02 September 2008, at 11:56 am, by Stan Lau
Hi Everyone. I’ve posted a few times for Gear Diary & you all know about my love of my iPhone and Apple products. That is until this past weekend. We’ve all heard the Mobileme horror stories. Add mine to the list…
This past Friday: (Been a .Mac member since the Spring. My 3G iphone has Mobileme with syncing for contacts and calendars) Waiting for my girlfriend for lunch in Central Park, I’m adding contacts to my favorites on my iPhone when suddenly, right before my eyes, the contacts screen moves from contacts to the listing of my groups and then back to my contacts, but my iPhone is suddenly showing a blank contact list!!! Where are my 659 contacts?
I calmly switch back to groups and back to all contacts. Nothing. I shut down the iphone and turn it back on. Not one contact. Now I’m really upset.
I call my brother and leave him a message: please help me get a Mobileme support phone number; all my contacts are gone from the iPhone…
Then I realize, I can dig up a suuport number on Apple’s website. I go to Safari on the iPhone to look up the support phone number for mobileme but can only find the iphone’s. After calling, wading through fun voice menu options and holding for a live Apple support rep for 15 minutes, I’m told, “sorry for your trouble, we sympathize, but Mobileme has no live support reps!” It’s all handled by e-mail or iChat. Now, the rep is very nice, assuring me that all my hundreds of contacts are still on the Apple server, but then he tells me for a solution I should check first on the Mobileme support forums! Am I crazy or is that a cop out of a solution? I’m out enjoying my weekend when Mobileme decided to bug out and do a magic trick on my contacts and now I’m supposed to spend the day surfing through forum entries trying to figure out what happened? Is this why I paid Apple $70 for a year for Mobileme?
Of course it isn’t. So I tell the rep I don’t care about looking up the forums for a solution and ask him to direct me to the Apple support page so I can contact Mobileme support.
So, I get onto iChat at Mobileme support, I get a Mobileme rep who’s nice and says “let me read your problem,” but then the iChat freezes up and I don’t hear from the rep for 40 minutes.
My brother calls. We talk about what happened. We end the call. I check iChat again. Still no response. I check my contacts. They’re back!
Apparently the Mobileme rep worked on problem and pushed out my contacts back to my iPhone. Or did he? I may never know.
But this story isn’t over.
Last Sunday: I’m on my way home on the train when I’m looking at one of my contacts when suddenly, before my eyes, my contacts disappear!!! All 659 of them yet again!!! Arrgh!!
Yet again, I get onto iChat on my iPhone’s safari. This time iChat is working and I have long conversation with a Mobileme support rep. No I’m not near a computer and can’t check to see if my contacts are still on Me.com. The rep says it looks fine on his end. He says I should delete the mobileme account from my iPhone and then add it back. That should bring back my contacts (note that during this incident and the Friday incident, my calendar entries, also synced with Mobileme, never disappeared).
By this time I’m off the train and walking home. At my front door I ask the rep if he can hold on while I get inside to boot up my mac so I can check Me.com.; he says sure.
I get in, boot up the mac and look at my iChat session with the rep on my iPhone – the session has frozen and I lose the rep. Ok. I get back onto iChat on the mac and get another rep. I update him on everything including the last rep’s solution. He says to try that but to also check for my contacts on Me.com. I check. All 659 contacts are there. I explain my fear about all my contacts on my MacBook Air also being wiped by Mobileme, especially since I have the Air on autosync with Mobileme. The rep recommends turning on the Air (I’m ichatting with the rep on a different mac) and setting sync preferences to manual. He says they know about what fixes are available for my problem because other Mobileme customers have been going through the same problems. He said Apple has been working on a software fix but that deleting/re-entering my Mobileme acct in my iPhone and setting my Air syncing to manual are the only things to do for now.
Well, I get onto the Air (which hasn’t been turned on in weeks actually) and try to switch sync preferences quickly from auto to manual but ah! Auto syncing just started as I get into the preferences panel-syncing starts and completes for my contacts and calendar and finishes. I go into contacts and all 659 contacts are there. Sigh of relief. Calendar entries. All there, including ones just made on the iPhone a few days ago. Another sigh of relief. I go ahead and set sync preferences to manual. No more fun like that for a while!
So, back to my iPhone. I delete my Mobileme acct. My calendar entries disappear. I re-enter my Mobileme acct. Several minutes go by when I realize I should turn on the iPhone’s wifi so it can use my home wifi (I have 659 contacts to download) and I turn on the wifi and, after a couple of minutes, my contacts, all 659 of them, return. And so do my calendar entries.
Something scary the Mobileme rep said to me (if I have this wrong, someone please correct me): I told the rep how frustrated and unhappy I am with Mobileme. I asked what would happen if I just closed my Mobileme account, what would happen to all my contacts? He said all copies of my contacts, wherever Mobileme had placed them, would disappear or be yanked. Only those contacts originally entered on a mac would stay on that mac ( I assume the same would hold true for any contacts originally entered on the iPhone).
About 95 percent of my contacts on the iPhone were populated by Mobileme. All the contacts on my Air as well. Most of my contacts were originally from a desktop mac, or what I’ll call the home mac. So, Mobileme really has me. Now, I did look through the help section of contacts last night and it looks like I can do a back up of all my contacts & save a copy to CD (assuming Mobileme doesn’t have a way of disabling this copy of my contacts after I close my Mobileme account). I’ve already PDFed all my contacts do I can at least have them in hard copy.
So this is my weekend experience with Mobileme. Close to three hours of frustration & fear about where hundreds of my contacts went.
Mobileme cannot be trusted. If it can wipe all my contacts on my iPhone, could it also do the same to my Air? What about Me.com or the Apple Server AKA the Cloud? My advice to potential Mobileme customers is don’t bother. I may be joining you. And when I can find his e-mail address, Steve Jobs will be hearing from me.
Written on my 3G iPhone, 16G Black
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Ah, Push It - ultramookie Says:
September 18th, 2008 at 2:23 pm[...] huffing and puffing about how MobileMe is not fixed, it’s not. Contacts still continue to disappear for no reason, webmail continues to have issues, and other assorted issues continue to crop up. [...]
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Stan,
I’m sorry you’re having such a hard time here. However, this is part of the problem of computing in the cloud. You’re dependent on the cloud in order to computer. This is a huge hole in the SAaS model. If your account goes south/the service is down, what do you do? If you close the account, who owns the data, and how can you get copies on your end so you don’t lose anything?
I wrote a big article on this months ago, but I honestly don’t think its going to hit home with anyone until they get stung. YOU got stung; and interestingly enough, it sounds like you’re planning on closing your MobileME account as soon as you can determine that you can readd your contacts back to your Address Book after closing the account/keep your contacts without having to back them up and readd them.
Interesting how the service is holding your data hostage…isn’t it?
September 2nd, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Massive FAIL! This is why I’d like to have the ability to run my OWN server….be it a WebDav box or something similar to exchange, but open. However, ISP’s don’t WANT you to run your own servers. This ever appear to anyone that current broadband providers break the peering model? We use their service and way back when the internet was new, if you had a external IP, you could run a server. It’s not that way anymore.
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Stan, that’s awful! Sorry you went through that.
I do think the rep is wrong though. I can’t imagine your contacts are tied to Mobile me and will disappear when the account is terminated…will they just sit and wait for you to turn mobile me sync back on in order to yank them? I think he was mistaken (thinking of backups, maybe?) or trying to keep you from cancelling right then and there.
I’d find someone knew to chat with at mobile me and ask them…that just does not sound right.
(FYI, I gave up on mobile me as a sync solution since it won’t work with IE-default and only option at work-or with linux. So my macbook can talk to my iPhone via mobile me. Which happens anyway via cable. The other computers, that could use an actual wireless sync option? SOL. Bah. And I was going to renew for another year to transition the email address, but it looks like with all the extensions I have until November until it expires anyway.)
October 17th, 2008 at 7:53 am
I just got weak in the knees ….. I tried out mobileme but decided the service is not worth 100 dollars a year so I cancelled it before it became regular. Why whole calendar and contacts disappeared! It seems I have no recourse because I was never a paying customer to begin with? this makes me want to cry.
December 13th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
I am almost speechless with outrage at what has just happened to me, which seems to be very similar to others on this thread. I got my 3g iphone on the day of release and dutifully signed up for mobileme. Like a lot of others I found mobileme to be pretty substandard at the time and so cancelled the subscription when the trial period ended. All of a sudden, I have no contacts on my phone!!! It now seems that Apple are holding all my contacts to ransom until I pay them £59.00! what an extraordinarily arrogant and cavalier attitude to take with their customers’ personal data.
This type of rubbish is the reason I think Apple will really struggle to be taken seriously by businesses contemplating a switch from, say, Blackberry. I know that corporate users tend to run their own servers to handle mail and contacts, but what concerns me is the fact that Apple as a company seem to have culture that makes them think this sort of thing is ok. There is simply no reason why they have to delete your contact from your phone just because you no longer want the mobileme ’service’. The mature and sensible thing to do would be to simply stop syncing and leave whatever is on the phone there.
The chances of me ever buying another iphone are now zero.
January 5th, 2009 at 9:02 am
i signed up for the mobileme free trial and now i can't work out how to close my account. can anyone help? thanks