Betalogue

I am now totally confused by the situation in Apple’s iCloud for former MobileMe subscribers like me.

In the past couple of weeks, there have been a number of reports about the impending expiry of the “bonus offer” of an additional 20 GB of iCloud storage for free for MobileMe customers at the end of September 2012. MacRumours in particular noted that Apple began sending out notices on September 24.

I never received such a notice, though, and so today I was curious to see what would happen to my iCloud account.

Well, I honestly have no idea what my status is now. When I go to the iCloud preference pane and click on “Manage Account…“, I see this:

This seems to indicate that, at some point, I agreed to pay a $40/year subscription, which I never did.

Then when I click on the “Change…” button, it appears to confirm that I am subscribed with a $40/year subscription:

But when I click on the “Downgrade…” button, I get this:

For some reason, my current plan has an expiry date of September 30, 2050! And if I select the option to downgrade from the 20 GB plan to the free 5 GB plan, the “Done” button stays greyed out, which means that I cannot change my plan. This might have to do with the fact that there is a lock icon in the top-right corner of the dialog, but how am I supposed to unlock?

One might think that the user has to sign out first before trying to change the plan, even though this is not indicated anywhere. But when I try to sign out, I get, among other things, this warning:

Do I really want to delete my calendars from my Mac, even temporarily? Err, no, thank you very much. I’d rather not take chances with my data like this.

This situation is a complete mess. You can be sure that I’ll be keeping an eye on my credit card statement in the next few days to see if a charge of $40 from Apple suddenly appears. If it does, I will not be pleased. I don’t particularly need the extra space. If Apple wants to give it to me for free until 2050, that’s fine. But it needs to clarify this and not imply that I have agreed to subscribe to a $40/year plan when I have not.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, October 1st, 2012 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.