MobileMe has Finally Shut Down

You may remember a couple of years ago when Apple launched MobileMe, a paid cloud service. And you may remember last year Apple introducing the iCloud, a free cloud service for iOS 5 devices. Logically it makes no sense to have a paid service and a free service of the essentially the same thing so Apple announced that they would be closing down MobileMe this year.

Well it has finally happened although it hasn’t completely closed down. An extension has been offered to those that still need to move data to the iCloud. But if you have a Mac that doesn’t run Lion then you may be out of luck. The OS won’t be able to run iCloud and thus you will be unable to transfer the content.

MobileMe’s end has been coming for years as back when the iPhone 3GS came out, CEO Steve Jobs believed MobileMe’s shaky launch could tarnish the company and should be shut down. Years later, that has finally happened and probably for the better. With iCloud, Apple has a unified system across all of their products, and offering two cloud services would have been a waste of services.

Really the only question in this regard is why it took Apple so long. The logical explanation would be that Apple hadn’t fully developed iCloud yet and even though they were dissatisfied with MobileMe it would look better if the company abandoned it because of a better service rather than get rid of it and have a gap until iCloud launched.

While some users a miffed that Apple is shutting down MobileMe, many are also glad Apple is recognizing its failures and doing something about them, even if it took a number of years to do so.