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The news from Apple news today was updated .Mac services (no mention of new PowerBooks or PowerMacs). To sum it up, 1 GB of storage, Backup 3, and Group pages. Here’s my breakdown:

• 1 GB of storage: Finally! This is very overdue considering others like Spymac, Google’s Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail have been offering at least this much storage for email for over a year. They don’t offer backup and hosting like .Mac does, but the have the big advantage of being free. Apple really should have just skipped the move from 100 MB accounts 250 MB (which happened earlier this year) and gone straight to 1 GB. Perhaps .Mac might actually sell now, because honestly the most common reason people seemed to turn it down was that they already had a free email account with more storage. I’m being optimistic here, however I think the 1 GB does sound hugely better, marketing wise, than 250 MB. Now days, storage is measured in GB and now .Mac can join the party.
• Backup 3: I’ve been able to try a Beta for Backup 3 for the past few months and it is a very nice program. Backup 2 could handle only the most basic backup solutions and was totally entry level, but thankfully the new version is very full featured. The one thing I’m still missing is the ability to clone an entire drive. Until, Backup includes this I really won’t be using it very much since cloning is, in my opinion, the only truly safe way to backup all your data. Secondary backups should work great with Backup 3 though, and I’m excited about the plugin architecture that lets third party developers add their application data to the “Quick Picks” feature of Backup 3. Read more about it here.
• Groups: I haven’t had a chance to use it yet (nor do I think I will have much use for it now that I host my own site), however I could see this selling well to family’s with soccer mom’s. Actually, it should play well with anyone who wants to organize something but is not very technical or web-savvy.

All this is good news to .Mac members and (perhaps even more so) Apple Specialists (not that I think it will get attach rates up to 40%). However, I still see two major holes in .Mac.

First, blogs: Apple you might have heard of them (though you seem content to ignore them for the most part). .Mac is a great place to host a blog, and blogging is very popular amog the kiddies LiveJournal, Blogger, and *ugg* MySpace (I’m not really exempt from that critique, but may I point out that MySpace is still a hellhole). Anyway, my point is that Apple could easily leverage .Mac as a complete blog solution, however, currently, you really need a third-party application to create a .Mac blog. No one wants to spend more money after already paying $99 for .Mac. It seems that the new Groups feature of is awfully close to a blog, why not go all the way? Honestly, I could see it as one of the biggest .Mac selling points.

Second, tech support: I’ve heard horror stories from Apple store customers about problems trying to get help with their .Mac account. Currently (unless this has changed in the month), Apple only offers help for .Mac though email. Try to ask an AppleCare rep about .Mac and you get shut down, and there’s only so much that can be done at the Apple Store without access to account management features. This is perverse for a product that costs $99 a year and needs to be fixed ASAP. It’s a good thing there aren’t many .Mac problems, but those that exist really need something better than the “email and wait” solution.