Although Steve Jobs is expected to unveil new iMacs Tuesday, I hope he does what the rumormongers are suggesting and refreshes the stale .Mac web services, which have the dubious distinction of being Apple's most hated product.

When Jobs rolled out Apple's .Mac service in 2002, it seemed like a great idea. For $50 a year, subscribers got modern IMAP e-mail, homepage hosting with easy uploading of photos and video, and a syncing service that shared contacts, calendars and bookmarks between several computers.

Since then the price has risen to $100 a year, and Apple has added limited backup capabilities, free online Mac tutorials and Photocasting of pictures stored in iPhoto, among other features.

Trouble is, while .Mac was serviceable in 2002, the web has moved on in the five years hence, and .Mac has not.

To be fair, some .Mac services work well enough. Syncing, backup and the iDisk are well integrated with the desktop. The best thing is e-mail, which is very reliable and dead easy to use (and is the reason I personally keep paying for a family subscription).

But the remaining services are hopelessly outdated or underdeveloped. Take iCards, online greeting and anniversary cards that are a badge of shame for anyone who sends them,

The biggest problem is storage space. Apple offers a paltry 1 GB (up from 512 MB) with the basic plan – barely enough to accommodate a couple of active e-mail accounts. It's nowhere near enough to back up important data or move files between computers using the net.

Apple does a lot of things well, but web services isn't one of them. Dozens of rival services out there better .Mac's offerings on features or price, and often both. Who uses .Mac for blogging? No one. Who bypasses Flickr to host their pictures on .Mac homepages (except my mother)?

I have my fingers crossed in the hope that Jobs will hand the .Mac keys over to a few Google executives. This will never happen, but here's a few tips Apple could learn from Google:

1. Make Mail more like Gmail, offering several gigabytes of free e-mail storage. Google already offers 1 GB of Gmail storage for free; Apple should offer at least 100 GB for $100 a year.

2. Make iDisk similar to GDrive, Google's unlimited online storage service that is supposedly coming any day now. The .Mac GDrive wouldn't have to be unlimited, but it could be big enough to back up all your files, not just your personal data. And how about offering iTunes-library syncing over the net, and a virtual copy of your entire home folder, making it accessible from anywhere, even the iPhone?

3. Allow iCal calendars to be edited online through the browser, like you can with Google Calendars.

4. Jobs should insist his buddy Eric Schmidt update Google Documents to support Safari so that online Word and Excel files can be edited on the iPhone. Currently Google Docs allows online spreadsheets and Word documents to be opened but not edited.

Fingers crossed.

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Leander Kahney is managing editor at Wired News and the author of the Cult of Mac blog and two books about technology culture, The Cult of Mac and The Cult of IPod.