MobileMe

The Apple service Steve Jobs apologised for

Replaced
19902026

MobileMe was Apple's $99-a-year cloud service, launched in July 2008 as the successor to .Mac and immediately notorious for sync failures and a mail outage that locked some users out for days. Apple replaced it with the free iCloud and shut MobileMe down on 30 June 2012.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2008
  2. 9 July 2008 Launch
    MobileMe replaces .Mac

    $99 a year for push mail, contacts and calendar sync.

  3. 18 July 2008 Incident
    The mail outage

    About 1% of users lose email access for up to two weeks; subscriptions extended by 60 days.

  4. 5 August 2008 Incident
    Jobs replaces the team leadership

    The internal dressing-down becomes one of Apple's best-known management stories.

  5. 2011
  6. 6 June 2011 Shutdown announced
    iCloud announced

    Free, built-in, and explicitly framed as making up for MobileMe.

  7. 2012
  8. 30 June 2012 Shutdown
    MobileMe shuts down

    iWeb hosting and iDisk close with it; me.com addresses move to iCloud.

The site through time

Browse me.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Apple 2008–2012 Founded Successor to .Mac; replaced by iCloud

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Apple shut MobileMe down on 30 June 2012, migrating members to the free iCloud announced a year earlier.

Our analysis: MobileMe launched broken: sync failures, days-long mail outages and a $99 price for the privilege. Jobs reportedly told the team they had tarnished Apple's reputation and should "hate each other for having let each other down". iCloud was the do-over: free, invisible, and built into the operating system rather than sold as a subscription.

History [edit]

The launch that went wrong in public

Apple's online services had been through two names already (iTools in 2000, .Mac in 2002) when MobileMe arrived on 9 July 2008 alongside the iPhone 3G. The promise was push email, contacts and calendars syncing instantly between Mac, PC and iPhone: "Exchange for the rest of us", at $99 a year.

It failed at once. The transition took the service down for days, push sync dropped data, and around one percent of users lost access to their email entirely for up to two weeks. The press was savage, and Apple ended up extending every subscription by 60 days.

Internally it went worse. Jobs gathered the team and, by widely reported accounts, asked what MobileMe was supposed to do, listened to the answer, and replied: "So why the f--- doesn't it do that?" He replaced the leadership on the spot.

Replaced by the thing it should have been

Apple spent the next three years fixing it quietly, then abandoned the model entirely. At WWDC on 6 June 2011, Jobs introduced iCloud with a line aimed straight at his own product: "You might ask, why should I believe them? They're the ones that brought me MobileMe." iCloud was free, tied to the Apple ID, and worked without anyone thinking about it.

MobileMe accounts were migrated through 2011 and 2012, and the service shut down on 30 June 2012, taking iWeb hosting and the iDisk file storage with it. The me.com email addresses survived into iCloud, which is why a small number of people still have them.

Similar projects

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Sources [edit]

  1. Apple Officially Ends MobileMe Transition and Shuts Down iWork.com MacRumors 1 August 2012 [archived]
  2. Apple MobileMe transition FAQ Macworld 12 October 2011 [archived]

Last verified: 11 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).