[fryke]

Well, I guess from Apple's view it's a little different. They don't make much money from iLife, since they give it away with new Macs. They sure sell some as upgrades, but the real kick for them is .Mac. And if they have over a million users, why stop getting that 100 million dollars a year? That's quite a lot of money, and since you're implying that the services would still have to be brought on, their costs would not only be 100 million dollars higher per year, but also what they have to pay for traffic (and they do!) and servers etc. would increase, since "free" would attract a _lot_ of users, wouldn't it. "Ads", you might say. But that would - for me - kill the appeal of the good service. (I'm not currently a .Mac user, though, and don't plan on becoming one.)

I guess they could give away a "light" version of .mac of some kind with iLife (and also new Macs, of course). It could allow you to have one E-Mail account (makes sure you'll want to keep .Mac afterwards), a bit less of disk space etc. They could make it work 6 months or something... But again: It would probably cost them too much.