November 2, 2007

Back to My Mac? Well…. not so much

Filed under: TMUP-Blog — Victor Cajiao @ 4:21 am

I actually got “Back to My Mac” to work for about 10 minutes last Monday night. It has never worked since. I have an Airport Extreme and everything is configured per Apples instructions. I finally called Apple Support to get more help. Well, Apple phone support does not support dot mac issue and this is a dot mac issue.
The agent asked to go to to this Apple support site where I read the following

Attention Back To My Mac users
In the coming weeks, we will be improving compatibility with home-based routers and various network environments. So if you find that you cannot access your remote Mac right away, please be patient as we work to improve the service.
For instructions and troubleshooting information for Back to My Mac, click here. For more FAQs about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Support contact information, click here.

I guess I’m surprised to find out that you have to fill out a form (see below) to get support for something as hyped as “Back to My Mac.” Well I’ll fill the form out and see what happens. For now there no going back to my mac unless I use Apple Remote Desktop which works wonderfully.

dotmacform.jpg

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  • Simon

    Hey Victor, I no longer have a .Mac subscription as I spent 12 months trying to get my Apple mail account to work and found support to be poor. I have however looked on with interest at this feature and “was” going to give Apple the benefit of the doubt but I guess I will wait until they have ironed out the problems.

    Perhaps its me but I feel 10.5 was “rushed and pushed” out the door to save face, “missing features” and “some” expected and accepted bugs aside its usable.

    Well back to troubleshooting another bug I have just come across, Front Row not displaying Album Art when connected to a share library, its all good fun ;-)

    Keep up the great work Mista Victor :-)

    Simon

  • marie boyer

    Wish I could help YOU for a change. But I have yet to install Leopard. I am waiting for Superduper, and I will not update until I have Superduper in my arsenal. (You and Steve have been good tutors!)

    In short, I am very, very disappointed in the dot.mac support. If I had gone with Hostgator or Siteground, as I almost did, I would have received tech support much more quickly. I have had several dot.mac issues and the only one that was solved within an hour of the problem was the iCal-publishing problem that YOU solved for me. By the time dot.mac got back to me (more than 24 hours later) I told them that the problem was solved by a friend in tech.

    Now when I have dot.mac issues, I do not even email them. They take too long and the email responses are not nearly as helpful as you would expect. I will be interested in your experience.

    Dot.mac support is not, in my opinion, very “Apple-like.” Frankly, it has been my only disappointment with Apple thus far.

  • Oliver T

    I don’t think you know this, but .Mac has been down all week.

    Firstly, you can’t expect Back to my mac to work when they are working on it.
    Secondly, Apple Support (phone) don’t support .Mac issues. You have to email .Mac support for that.

  • http://www.typicalmacuser.com Administrator

    Oliver with all due respect. I’m sure Apple expected my credit card to pay for my version of Leopard when I bought it and… it did. If you listen you know I respect Apple a lot, however I also tell it like it is. In this case they promoted this feature and it should have worked in my humble opinion.

  • marie boyer

    “Secondly, Apple Support (phone) don’t support .Mac issues. You have to email .Mac support for that.”

    Exactly. You cannot talk to a human-being. You send an email and receive a response in well over 24 hours. Sometimes it has been several days for me.

    –With respect to Back to Mac, I have heard a lot of people on podcasts (MacBreak Tech, Macbreak Weekly, and some ohers) talking about how great it works. Something tells me Apple will have it fixed soon. Again though, from my perspective, anything that requires dot.mac to work gives me pause.

  • http://www.typicalmacuser.com Administrator

    Marie I do think they will get it to work correctly, they just should have been more ready. I saw this feature work and it did work, and it’s not magic. I’m sure their issue is infrastructure. So I understand nothing happens without some issues.

    I just think this feature has such potential to sell more dot mac subscriptions that if I were Apple, I would have busted my hump to make sure it worked better than it is now, so that it would have been one of the features that all of us were raving out.

  • marie boyer

    I could not agree more!

  • Oliver T

    I forgot to add this:

    frankly its lame for Apple to not handle .Mac support on the phone. I don’t see any reason why they can’t…

  • Oliver T

    Back to my mac feature is quite variable in its execution in that it works fine for some while it isn’t running smoothly for a lot of people regardless of .Mac maintenance.

    I hope Apple will make this feature flawless in the near future!

 

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