Re: Greetings, and a few questions
Re: Greetings, and a few questions
- Subject: Re: Greetings, and a few questions
- From: Yan Feng <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 22:34:54 +0800
Well, the folks over here in Beijing knew about the .Mac thing pretty
much right after the Steve announced it on 17 July. Of course most were
just foaming at the mouth, wondering how they'd pay this stuff. (USD 50
= CNY 400, which is a lot of cash - I get paid that much as an English
teacher weekly, some unemployed folks live on this for half a month.)
Also, the bad news is that the Chinese legal tender - the Chinese
Renminbi Yuen - is not freely floatable on the world markets, which
means that you can't directly exchange Yuens for dollars. This puts a
lot of free mac.com addresses at risk.
I'm familiar with the situation here in China. Those fortunate to be
ex-pats (like yours truly) and those fortunate to earn cash in USD/for.
currency (very few, but increasing in number), get a for. currency card
(I got mine outside of China), which is all that's needed for .Mac. The
rest don't, get unlucky, and lose their .Mac accounts. I know this
situation because it may be happening to one BeiMac member and of
course he's raving mad he'll lose his mac.com account.
As far as I know, there is no individual saleable .Mac package in
China, unlike in the US (so I've heard maybe.)
Best,
Yan Feng
President - BeiMac
Beijing Macintosh User Group
http://www.beimac.com/
---
On Sunday, Sep 22, 2002, at 21:08 Asia/Shanghai, Paul Richards wrote:
Hmmm. The others who have answered you seem to be overlooking this
question so far. Maybe the news has been a little slower getting to
Beijing. The .mac mail accounts used to be free when it was offered
under the iTools moniker. Apple has renamed and upgraded this program
under the name ".Mac" and made it a pay service, US$99 per year. It
was announced this summer. Those people who already had accounts with
iTools still have them as trial accounts under .Mac until September
30th. They also have the opportunity of a first year discount price of
$49. If they haven't paid for the upgraded .Mac service by then, they
lose their trial accounts. There has been a lot of discussion on this
list and in other circles about whether the new service is
appropriately priced.
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