Q: icloud  vs. mobileme is it worth the switch?

It's a big download and obviously the time it takes depends on the speed of your internet connection: with a slow one it might will take some hours. You could try again later - try and pick a time when America is asleep if you can.

As you probably know, if youy don't migrate you will lose your @me.com account at the end of June. However you can migrate your MobileMe account to iCloud at http://me.com/move even with Snow Leopard - when asked to confirm that you have Lion on your Mac, just lie and say 'yes'.

If you have MobileMe mail set up to collect mail from external POP accounts you should cancel this before migrating, or you may find it still working in iCloud (where it isn't supposed to) and with no way of stopping it. You may find the MobileMe email settings will continue to work for a time after migrating but it will stop eventually so you should not rely on this. You should delete your MobileMe email account from Mail.

You can then set up Mail manually in Snow Leopard to access iCloud email; it's a slight fudge because the 'wizard' will attempt to connect you to MobileMe as soon as you enter an @me.com address. The process, which includes a workaround for this, is described here:

http://www.wilmut.webspace.virginmedia.com/notes/icloudmail.html

You may be able to sync your calendars to iCloud by means of an unsupported hack, but you cannot sync Contacts or Bookmarks and iCloud's other facilities will not work. This page outlines the situation when you migrate to iCloud, including a link to the calendar hack:

http://www.wilmut.webspace.virginmedia.com/notes/icloudSL.html

Roger - afterward, can you re-set up the external POP accounts?

No: iCloud does not provide the facility of checking external accounts. Of course you can simply set them up in your Mail applications as individual accounts.

Individual accounts - that's fine. I don't need them syncing all over the place.

Thank you for your help with this issue that many of us are having. You've been awesome!

Roger that was a very informative, helpful post that took a lot of effort.  If I could click the greenie I would.

Bikgrl23, you need to watch out, Lion perhaps won't run a lot of software you need, have a update or require a paid upgrade and possibly no hardware drivers for your present third party hardware.

Use this site to help determine if Lion is for you before you leap, if you should decide to do so.

http://roaringapps.com/apps:table

Ah! A very useful table. Thanks for posting the link.

your welcome,

another helpful tip is to clone your present OS X 10.6 boot drive to a blank, powered external drive and disconnect.

the advantage here is the clone can be 'hold the option key bootable', allowing you to use disk utility to erase the entire internal hard drive (important) and reverse clone 10.6 back onto your internal drive.

CCC is free/donationware and the first / best, Superdupes is free basic clones then payware for more features.

http://www.bombich.com/get_ready_for_lion.html

So this way if you decide to make the Lion leap, only to find out your third party hardware ceases to function and the dev won't write a new Lion driver, you can revert to 10.6.8 in about a few hours of letting the software do the work instead of a tedious manual install from 10.6 disk.

Does this mean that even if I upgrade or purchase a new mac, I will not be able to have my gmail account sync with my iPad, iPhone and computer? So if I delete and email on one device, it will not delete in another???

You would have to set other accounts up in the iPad's/iPhone's/Mac's own mail applications as separate accounts. For deletions in one device to show on the others the account has to be IMAP, where the messages live on the server (as with iCloud): I don't know whether GMail provides this.

ds store,

The link you provided : http://www.bombich.com/get_ready_for_lion.html  is by far the best thing I've read on going from OS X v10.6.8 to OS X v10.7

It put the steps in a clear, concise way that even a clueless Mac newbie, like me, can understand.

Thanks for posting that link!

DMerz