Save on .Mac Renewals

Note that .Mac just upped iDisk/email quotas to 250 MB or $50/yr. for a
full gigabyte.

A new (?) feature is that you have to manually moderate the split of
file space between mail and iDisk, which is not entirely obvious. It's
set in the Account area of .Mac.

--Nik

Not to take away from Small Dog, but Amazon also offers the .mac kit
for $80 and free shipping.

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002HTDUO/tidbitselectro00>

Christopher Appell

Oops, forgot to mention, if you don't want your account to auto-renew
you can go to the preferences section and uncheck the auto-renew
checkbox under account settings...

At 10:16 AM -0700 2004/09/30, Andrew Laurence wrote:
>Excellent timing, Adam! My renewal is due to roll on October 3. I just
>ordered from SmallDog - the race is on to see if the box will arrive in
>time!

        Unfortunately I don't think this works for Canadian orders - I just
renewed myself at full price after reaching the "few days left" state.

        I have seen links at Macintouch.com to amazon.com that give similar
savings, but unfortunately I don't think they ship to Canada. amazon.ca
seems to list both ".Mac fr" $120 CDN and ".Mac 2.0" $124 CDN, the later
being out of stock, the former on a couple weeks wait. Even if the box were
"French" I would think that it would still work to renew, but who knows?
Direct from Apple, they want $140 CDN. Free shipping from amazon.ca, I
don't know about apple.ca

<http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002HVDKW/johannsbookst-20/>
<http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000AR78T/johannsbookst-20/>

        People might want to consider ordering your best price finds early
enough to ensure no interruption of service.

Watch out, Apple may zing you anyway!

I renewed with retail box number about a week before my account was due to expire. Everything looked cool as it said that nothing was owed and that the account expiration date was now set for sometime in 2005. I turned off auto-renew just in case.

Then the day after the account was set to renew, I received an email with an invoice for $99.95 plus tax to renew my .Mac account. The day after that, Apple charges my credit card. WTF!

Apple still hasn't responded to my inquiries. I'm about to to dispute the charges and have my card company charge-back Apple for this. Apple seriously needs to work on their interface to ensure that this kind of double billing doesn't happen.

Moral of story: watch out that you don't get screwed into paying twice.

Adam spoke about being charged nothing.

I did something similar and expanded my disk allocation from 250Mb to 1Gb and was only charged A$1.XX. I as stunned at the great price until I read the fine print.

This amount covers the cost of the storage between now and when I renew, then I'll be charged the full rate for another 12mths.

Still useful though to have a 1Gb site available to me and others (beats memory sticks or burning CDs). ______________________________________________________________________ Regards, Mark (}-: Skype / AIM / iChat: gibsonm1

At 10:16 AM -0700 9/30/04, Andrew Laurence wrote:
>Excellent timing, Adam! My renewal is due to roll on October 3. I
>just ordered from SmallDog - the race is on to see if the box will
>arrive in time!

I just wanted to give a shout-out to the most excellent peeps at Small Dog.

After sending this message, I realized that most likely the box would
not arrive in time. Figuring "what the heck", I emailed Small Dog
and asked them to *open* my .Mac box, and please email me the
registration code. They replied with the code within 30 minutes!

Now that's service!

--
Andrew Laurence
atlaurenuci.edu

On Tue, 5 Oct 2004 06:48:02 -0700, gibsonm <gibsonmbigpond.net.au> wrote:
> Still useful though to have a 1Gb site available to me and others
> (beats memory sticks or burning CDs).

When I first tried setting up Photo pages on .Mac it was trivially
easy for people to hit the bandwidth limiters, making my pages
unavailable. Has this changed? It seems more times than not that I
try to load a .mac page and it is "temporarily" unavailable. 1GB (or
even 250MB) is not useful if it is unavailable.

--
 ::::== <http://2blog.kreme.com> ==::::

On 10/5/2004 6:48, "aardvark" <aarlomac.com> wrote:
> Watch out, Apple may zing you anyway!
> I renewed with retail box number about a week before my account was
> due to expire. Everything looked cool as it said that nothing was
> owed and that the account expiration date was now set for sometime
> in 2005. I turned off auto-renew just in case.
> Then the day after the account was set to renew, I received an email
> with an invoice for $99.95 plus tax to renew my .Mac account. The
> day after that, Apple charges my credit card. WTF!
> Apple still hasn't responded to my inquiries. I'm about to to
> dispute the charges and have my card company charge-back Apple for
> this. Apple seriously needs to work on their interface to ensure
> that this kind of double billing doesn't happen.
> Moral of story: watch out that you don't get screwed into paying
> twice.
>

I had similar problems with the interface renewal, and decided to let the
routine renewal go through, then turn it off for next year. Too good an
opportunity for double-billing, I thought. (I did this in mid-September, so
I would have had time...but the renewal "motor" was already running, and
even after letting it "cook" overnight one time, I was still told that the
account would renew Oct 1--not that it was due Oct 1).

  --John

I am an Australian citizen living in Thailand. When I subscribed to .Mac, I paid for it with my Australian credit card. Apple promptly charged me Australian GST (good and services tax). I wrote to Apple questioning this. Even if I am in Australia, there is no requirement for an American company to charge me Australian GST. (TidBITS doesn't.) When I am resident in another country there is definitely no reason, even if Apple wants to credit the sale to Apple Australia. (I know these things. I was in business in Australia when this tax was introduced.) Apple did not respond to my question.

I have now deactivated automatic renewal.

--- begin forwarded text

From: Jamie Nimmo
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 2004 03:24:06 -0700

Only ten dollars tax for your .Mac account. You're lucky! For reasons
too complicated to fathom we Europeans (if you count Britain as part
of Europe, which is always guaranteed to start an argument) are
charged 21% tax (about $21.50).

Yeah, but death and tax; unavoidable - right!?

Well no, actually.

This 21% is the Irish VAT (value added tax) rate that Apple is
charging, not the British or any other European VAT rate. However,
Apple is cunning enough to only charge Luxembourg's VAT at 15% for
iTunes.

Jamie Nimmo

--- end forwarded text

Does anyone know whether Apple's renewal credits will be honored if
you use a .Mac membership box rather then renewing online? The
credits are worth $20 per referral (you receive a credit for each
friend who joins .Mac at your recommendation).

Something to think about since if you have one or more credit, you're
not saving anything by ordering the box from SmallDog or Amazon. I'm
not going to have a chance to find out because my renewal date is
tomorrow, and I did not read this thread until today!

Andrew
--
----------------------
Andrew J. Cohen
andrewsandrew.org
Alexandria, Virgina

Territorial issues decided upon by computer can be really stupid...
with no immediate way out.

Even when humans are called in they cannot help. I was forced to buy a
Japanese version iBook because I had a Japanese credit card and
address. They could only send an English version to my Canadian
address if I used a Canadian or US credit card. The result was that it
took me forever to learn how to use OSX and to get it set up to show
English menus. Small Dog could not sell an American Apple to a
Canadian citizen abroad. Apple absolutely wouldn't.

Computing is NOT international yet. Though some aspects are
improving... I think?

On 6 Oct, 2004, at 06:55, john025 wrote:
> I am an Australian citizen living in Thailand. When I subscribed to
> .Mac, I paid for it with my Australian credit card. Apple promptly
> charged me Australian GST (good and services tax). I wrote to Apple
> questioning this. Even if I am in Australia, there is no requirement
> for an American company to charge me Australian GST. (TidBITS
> doesn't.) When I am resident in another country there is definitely no
> reason, even if Apple wants to credit the sale to Apple Australia. (I
> know these things. I was in business in Australia when this tax was
> introduced.) Apple did not respond to my question.

You may be able to apply for a GST tax refund from the Australian
government? There are time and other limits involved for applying.

George

I have, again, been trying to get Apple to respond on this point of credit for referrals since I bought my retail box for renewal a couple of weeks ago. The biggest problem I think is that .Mac users are supposed to have support and all mails and attempts get get help result in being ignored. My account renewed yesterday and my referral credits were not added on as extra time pro rata, so how do you cash them in? I would use it them against added eMail addresses. Would it work? Even if there are no valid credit card details entered? I asked someone at Apple in Ireland this question last year and they offered me a game instead which I accepted. Needless to say the credit vanished but no game appeared and no amount of asking raised a reaction from Apple. The retail box would otherwise possibly be the cheapest way to renew in the UK.

Drew

One option to prevent automatic renewal is to go into your account and
modify your credit card info to have a bogus expiration date. When apple
goes to renew the account it'll fail. Your iTunes purchases will fail
while the expiration date is bad.

Kevin

I can't find the original discussion. Please forgive me if I am duplicating. I have had a reply from Apple! I feel truly prvileged :0| This is the official response on how the credits work:

Dear Mr Rodger,

Thank you for your e-mail to the Apple Store.

I can confirm that unfortunately the referral discount can only be used when >you are renewing using a credit card. They are processed automatically when >your renewal is going through. Please be aware that referral credits can >only be redeemed against the renewal of your account.

I regret that I am unable to be of any further service to you in this >matter.

Kind regards,

Claire Apple Store Direct Sales Support Apple Computers Ltd

And on VAT:

Dear Mr Rodger,

Thank you for your e-mail to the Apple Store.

With regard to your VAT concerns, I can confirm that at present there is no >plan to review this matter. However, please be advised that your comments >will be passed to the relevant managers on your behalf.

I can confirm that your account has been renewed until 9th October 2005.

If you do not wish to auto-renew at that time, you can go into your account >and turn the auto renew switch to no. You can do this at the following page; >http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=153336

I trust this will be to your satisfaction.

Kind regards,

Claire Apple Store Direct Sales Support Apple Computers Ltd

So, it would appear that if you are in the UK, it is cheaper to buy the retail box than renew on line but, if you have any referrals, the offset credit(s) make it worth renewing on line.

Drew

Adam Engst wrote:

All well and good, so I submitted the order, only to see on my Account Settings screen that my account was still set to renew on 13-Oct-04.

There was absolutely no indication that the system had taken my activation code, short of the zero-dollar total on the Review Order screen. So I turned off the Auto-Renew option in the credit card screen, and we'll see what happens when October 13th rolls around in a few weeks.

OK, so what's the upshot? Is all well that ends well? I may just have enough time to follow your footsteps if you tell me that your account renewed correctly.

[Sorry for not following up. Yes, my account did renew fine, and the .Mac support people told me in advance it would in response to my question to them. However, what I still don't know for sure is if the renewal was charged to my credit card (which it shouldn't have been). I'd say that this approach is likely to work fine, but Apple still really needs to improve the interface. -Adam]

In article <3c52529a.16webx.va7qaftEanA>, Michael Snyder
<mdslistmac.com> wrote:

> OK, so what's the upshot? Is all well that ends well? I may just have enough
> time to follow your footsteps if you tell me that your account renewed
> correctly.
>
> [Sorry for not following up. Yes, my account did renew fine, and the .Mac
> support people told me in advance it would in response to my question to
> them. However, what I still don't know for sure is if the renewal was charged
> to my credit card (which it shouldn't have been). I'd say that this approach
> is likely to work fine, but Apple still really needs to improve the interface. -Adam]

Like Adam's, my account renewed fine and I have confirmed that there
was no charge to my credit card (assuming that between Apple and
American Express they can process a charge in less than two weeks).

[Confusingly, my credit card was charged, but we think that's because of the renewal of Tonya's .Mac account, since we each have one. So yes, I think this method of saving $20 should work fine in most cases. -Adam]

--
Jerry Wilcox. My opinions are my own. YMMV.

        It is that time of year again for the early adopters. Does anyone
know any cheap sources in Canada? The best I can find is amazon.ca for $110
CAD.

<http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009319QC/johannsbookst-20/>

        It looks like Amazon.com is one of the lowest prices in the USA,
for about $80 US (which is only about $93.58 CAD), but they won't ship it
to me in Canada.

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009319QC/jbenterprises/>

        Has anyone managed to buy a box in the USA and use it to renew
their Canadian (or other foreign address) .mac subscription? I am tempted
to get Amazon.com or someone like that to send it to one of my USA friends
who can just read the registration code to me over the phone when it
arrives or something similar - that would save me the GST and PST too.
Heck, I could send the friend a book as well as a thank-you and still come
out ahead. Any USA residents on the list want to act as a mailbox?


--
* Johann Beda - contact link: <http://public.xdi.org/=j-beda> *
* Johann's MostlyMac Computer Consulting - <http://mmcc.beda.ca/> *
--
* Johann Beda - contact link: <http://public.xdi.org/=j-beda> *

The Amazon deal sounds like a winner. .Mac is overpriced, but I really am starting to need the sync capabilities. My question is can I first use up a 60-day trial, then enter an Amazon-bought reg code? Even if I bought it now and waited two months before using it? And lastly, if you do a 60-day trial, if you then sign up as a paying customer do you get 12 months from the day you paid or only 10 months (since you've had 2 months in the trial). I've had that trick happen to me too often of late: sign up for a "free" trial but end up paying for it if you actually do sign up. It's crooked, but more and more common. I don't like supporting misleading practices so if they do pull that trick I'll just forget the whole thing. Lots of questions, I know, but I can't find answers anywhere else after scouring the .Mac signup "terms" doc as well as the 'net via Google.

--Ken