In an attempt to push people towards iCloud and away from the imminently defunct MobileMe, Apple is reportedly offering users of the old cloud syncing service a free copy of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
With MobileMe set to be switched off for good in June, Apple knows that it needs to give people a helping hand towards the new iCloud service which needs OS X 10.7 Lion to function properly. The problem is, you need to have Snow Leopard installed in order to upgrade to Lion.
Now Apple is making that process a little cheaper for those still using older versions of the operating system. By removing the cost of Snow Leopard from the equation, customers now only need pay the $30 for OS X Lion. Considering iCloud itself is free and users were paying for MobileMe, the whole thing leaves customers better off. That is, assuming they never used any of the features that didn’t make the transition from MobileMe to iCloud. iDisk, anyone?
The news that Apple is making this gesture came after Macgasm posted news that the Cupertino company is currently sending emails out to MobileMe customers. Inside the email, Apple outlines its three step process to migrating towards iCloud.
First, users will need to install Snow Leopard, and then upgrade that to Lion via the Mac App Store. Once that is all done and users have hopefully not lost all their data from doing two upgrades in the space of a day, they need to visit me.com/move in order to take all their MobileMe data across to iCloud.
iCloud was released as a remedy to the debacle that was MobileMe. Often not working correctly and arguably overpriced when pitted against the free alternatives offered by Google, Dropbox and the rest, MobileMe was doomed from the outset. With nothing but outages and issues when it initially launched, MobileMe was instantly seen as a failure and then never really regained the trust of users after that.
iCloud, by contrast, is free and so far appears to be much more stable than MobileMe ever was. Being free also lends iCloud a certain level of leniency, too, as and when issues do occur.
Apple CEO Tim Cook recently announced that iCloud has already reached the 100 million user mark. With MobileMe users yet to make the switch, it is a safe bet that those numbers will continue to rise.
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