Sweet merciful homina homina yikes, is it really July already? Well, you know what that means; Apple's coming up on crunch time for .Mac renewals, and unless our noses are sorely mistaken, the company's wearing a new cologne just for the occasion: Calvin Klein's "Desperation." You may just possibly recall that when Apple announced that the free iTools service was suddenly going to cost $99 a year (largely, we assume, to help defray costs incurred by the name change), there was a little bit of "resistance." There was also a pinch of "annoyance," a dash of "remonstrance," and a heaping side order of "death threats." When the dust (and blood) finally settled, though, Apple kept issuing press releases to inform us of .Mac's ever-increasing subscriber rate, which it described as a "phenomenal success."

There's just one teensy little problem; the 180,000 subscribers Apple managed to sign up in the service's first three months were probably almost exclusively former iTools members who bit the bullet and forked over the special "reduced price" of $49 for the first year. And now that the first year is almost up, we just have to wonder how many of those subscribers are going to feel that they got their $49 worth-- and more to the point, how many felt they got $99 worth, since that's what it's going to cost them to renew. Given the widespread reports of .Mac mail problems over the course of the past year, we're thinking the percentage might be a teensy bit on the low side.

Apple, of course, being the reasonably sentient corporate entity that it is, knows all of this, and decided to come up with a plan to keep .Mac users from jumping ship come September. Its model? Well, judging by what the company came up with, we'd have to guess they spent an awful lot of time studying pyramid land schemes in Florida. You can't access the details of the promotion at .Mac unless you're already a member, but MacMinute has the skinny: Apple is entreating existing .Mac members to recruit their friends and family into the .Mac fold, and for each new member you manage to sign up "at least 31 days before your account comes up for renewal," you get 20% knocked off your own yearly subscription fee. That means for every Mac user you can sucker into joining, your ol' buddy Andrew Jackson says a big fat howdy; "sign up five friends and your next year is free." Which means, of course, if you don't think .Mac is worth 99 smackers a year, all you need to do is convince other people that it's worth 99 smackers a year and you can whittle that price all the way down to nothing.

Now, personally, we hardly think such desperate measures are necessary, since we happen to be .Mac subscribers ourselves, and we think .Mac is worth every penny. Heck, it'd be a bargain at twice the price! And it's only going to become more and more essential as Apple continues to add benefits like the enhanced iDisk support in Panther. Plus, we heard an unsubstantiated rumor that when the G5 finally ships next month, anyone who's a .Mac subscriber will get six of them for free, plus a big sack of Pixie Stix and a pony. A pony that lays golden eggs. But only if they've been referred by us! So, uh, if you're interested, drop us a line and we'll refer you... purely out of the goodness of our hearts, you understand.