Apple appears to be attempting to set a new record for a service being down for "scheduled maintenance" with .Mac synchronisation of Contacts and Calendars – with this feature of .Mac now having been down for ten days.
For many people, myself included, synchronisation of contacts and calendars across Macs is one of the few truly useful features of .Mac. In fact, synchronisation is obviously such a popular feature that Apple has extended it in Leopard to include things like Dock items and Widgets.
Unfortunately, it appears that in doing so it has broken contacts and calendar sync. There are currently several threads on the Apple Support Boards complaining about this, including one from a customer who, thanks to the extended nature of the outage, has never been able to sync across the five accounts he needs to use.
For me, this isn’t such a huge issue – I have alternate methods of syncing, including Plaxo and SpanningSync. But for anyone relying on it, particularly if they’ve chosen to do a clean install, it’s going to be a complete pain.
Worse yet, there’s simply no indication from Apple on when it will be fixed. The service light on the .Mac home page glows amber, the post on the forums simply says the maintenance is continuing (and is still dated 19th October). This is poor customer service, from a company which is charging a premium price for it. Sort it out, please, Apple.
