Apple comes clean on MobileMe problems, marketing

In an e-mail to customers, Apple admitted it had problems with its MobileMe launch last week, and is prepared to compensate them for lost time. Marketing of the service is also set to change.

"We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped," Apple said in an e-mail to customers.

While services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery seemed to roll off generally without a hitch, remaining services such as Contacts and Calendar worked sporadically -- if at all -- for hours after the launch.

At times on launch day, the service was completely unavailable, with consumers only able to access their mail accounts through desktop clients. The issues seemed to clear up late in the day on Friday, but the aggravation left many consumers with bad feelings.

Apple is apparently not tone-deaf to these concerns. Thus the company has announced a 30-day extension of MobileMe memberships. Most customers would be eligible for the program.

If your account was active prior to July 9, 2008, or you registered for your account before July 15 at 7:00 pm PDT, a 30-day extension will be added on to your subscription period. However, if you registered or were in your free trial period, the extension will be added to the trial period.

Extensions should be applied to all accounts within "the next few weeks," Apple said.

The company also said that accounts that had expired before that July 15 deadline have been reactivated in order to apply the 30-day extension. If consumers still wish to cancel, they could do so.

Apple is also removing all references to push from its marketing materials, likely in response to criticism over its syncing methods, which aren't so instantaneous as the company had first advertised.

"Even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word 'push' until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too," it said in the e-mail.