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So Apple has finally killed of .Mac. Not before time, it has to be said. The old girl was beyond long in the tooth and was about as relevant in today's shiny, pastel-coloured post Web 2.0 world as it was useful. That is, not very.

Although Apple's loosely cobbled together suite of web services had recently had a bit of a revamp, the new clothes covering .Mac Mail's drooping shoulders couldn't hide its inner frailties. If you haven't had the dubious pleasure of using it in recent months, consider it a blessing. As someone who is regularly confronted by the ever-so-helpful 'unexpected response format' error message when I try to search for email messages in an, admittedly rather full, inbox, I won't be pining away for it when it finally shuffle's off Apple's servers.

Apple never gave the impression that it fully understood what it was trying to do with .Mac, just as it hadn't with iTools before it. At least iTools and the mac.com email address that went with it were free. When iTools mutated into .Mac, the only way to keep your mac.com address was to subscribe to .Mac (currently £70 a year). That £70 bought you a bunch of other stuff as well as mail, of course, but the trouble was that the other stuff either wasn't particularly useful or didn't work properly. iDisk was, and for some users outside the US remains, hideously slow. In fact, it was only with the introduction of iDisk syncing - which allows you to keep a local copy of your iDisk on your hard drive and have it sync with the online iDisk at a convenient time - that it

The one positive for Apple from .Mac was that there were plenty of us who were enough of a mug to keep paying the annual fee to use it. The good news for us is that we get a free upgrade to MobileMe, Apple's new suite of online services that's geared towards today's cloud computing environment. Why Apple needed to be so literal with the logo is anyone's guess, but at least it gets the message across: today's Apple is all about the cloud. It's a tad unfortunate that Apple's chosen iPhone service provider in the UK, O2, has a trademarked Cloud of its own, but hey what's a little confusion when there's a buzzword bandwagon on the go with a spare seat on it?

To be fair to Apple, MobileMe looks very impressive. Most significantly, it does away with syncing. That alone will be a boon for anyone who has found themselves repeatedly resolving the same conflicts every time they sync. In its place is a kind of 'always-on' syncing whereby any email you send or receive, or any contact or diary event you add is automatically and immediately added to all the devices you have linked to your MobileMe account, be they Mac, PC, iPhone or iPod touch. In other words, push email, contacts and events on all devices.

Assuming it works as it's supposed to, and given the experience with .Mac, that's a big assumption, it should be the easiest way yet devised to keep multiple devices in sync with each other without having to remember to actually sync them. One of the key points here is that it doesn't just work with Apple devices, nor only with a web browser on a Windows PC. It will, says Apple, work with Exchange too, so that email sent and received, and contacts and events managed through Exchange on a PC will be updated automatically online, as well as on your iPhone or iPod touch. Again with the caveat about it working as it's supposed too, that will be a huge deal, not just in terms of selling iPhones to large companies but helping encourage Windows users to make their next computer a Mac.