Not everything Apple does is great for customers. For instance, MobileMe.

The salesman talked me into trying MobileMe 4 years ago when I bought my first Mac. I have been paying for this service for years and as far as I know I have done nothing with it. At least nothing important. I had it host a few photos a few years ago and I used a dotmac email address, mostly for Apple things like their own spam and my iTunes account.

This year I started to get the renew notices and I decided to cancel. Unfotunately, I was not proactive but I knew that my credit card had expired so I felt safe from their charges...

Until I got a credit card bill. They had charged me and I got the bill a month after the charge.

It took me another month to decide once and for all that I dont use this service for anything and to create a new iTunes/iPhone account. (The whole account business and Apple's DRM is still confusing to me.)

Today I finally put time into cancelling the service and getting a partial refund.

I checked my credit card bill - no phone number.

I got an email invoice which says: "Questions? Call - - http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme/ww" -- Nice phone number, Apple.

I log into the account and check the online help only to find that they dont do partial refunds:

If you don’t see the Cancel Account button, it’s been more than 45 days since you were charged for the subscription and you can no longer cancel it. To prevent your subscription from automatically renewing at the end of the year, make sure you’ve deselected the Renew checkbox in the Account Options pane.

You only get 45 days to cancel the service? Since I didnt even know I had been charged for almost a month, I didnt even get that much time.

So now I am stuck. I paid $100. Again. Wasted.

I can blame myself for not being more proactive about this. I can blame Apple for a) autorenew by default and mostly (b) not allowing partial refunds. Even 2 months in, I should be able to get about $80 back... Argh.

I wonder how much money companies make from services that customers pay for but never actually use...