Those of us with an Apple ID, that means most of us, have receieved an email to tell us we can now use @icloud appended our existing email addresses. I starter with @mac, then progressed to @me (which I really liked) and now we have @iCloud. The important thing is that none of our old email addresses are redundant. We can use @mac, @me and @icloud at will and, I hope, it will ever remain so.
The pity is that Apple feels it necessary to continue inventing new names for the cloud service. There was perhaps something dated about @mac once Apple entered the world of smartphones and tablets, but I can think of nothing particularly negative about @me. Nor is there anything bad about @icloud, except that in a couple of years Apple will have yet another rethink and saddle us with the fourth variation of our email addresses.
Is all this necessary? Wouldn’t it be nice to have one address that we could be sure of keeping through thick and thin? I believe Apple has stretched our patience to the limit by the wholesale move to iCloud and I sincerely hope we’ve see the last of the changes.
by Mike Evans, 7 November 2012