Apple’s MobileMe Takes a Dirt Nap

Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do? … So why the f–k doesn’t it do that?

— An Apple employee recalls CEO Steve Jobs’s post-launch comments on MobileMe

Apple this weekend pulled the plug on one of its rare missteps, MobileMe. On Saturday, the company shut down its much-maligned cloud-syncing service, preserving account holders’ data for a limited time so they might migrate to its new cloud service, called iCloud.

The closure brings to an end Apple’s first foray into cloud computing, one that, at the time it debuted, threatened to tarnish the company’s brand.

“Not up to Apple’s standards.” That was late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’s review of MobileMe service following its travesty of a launch. Plagued by recurring email outages and data-loss issues, MobileMe’s debut was, in Jobs’s own words, “not [Apple’s] finest hour.” Indeed, it was among the company’s most humbling, prompting a number of public apologies and not one, but two, free make-good service extensions.

With the announcement of iCloud in June of 2011, Apple effectively end-of-lifed MobileMe, retiring the flawed $99-a-year cloud services suite in favor of its successor, which was not only up to Apple standards, but free.