Apple's doesn't make too many missteps, but the company continues to stumble implementing its MobileMe e-mail service. Apple issued a second apology over the weekend for service outages which left users without e-mail; the first came last week for similar reasons. The service was launched on July 9 along with the new iPhone 3G, which itself suffered from product shortages and network overload, according to reports I've seen.

Since the launch, the company has been migrating users of its .Mac e-mail and cloud storage service to MobileMe, which costs US$99 per year. Initially given 90 days of the service free, .Mac users will now get another free month for their trouble, which in some cases has been loss of access to data and e-mail for days at a time. Also, the company will stop using "push" to describe the synchronization capability it offers for keeping a user's devices in data parity. the operation can take about 15 minutes to complete, the company said in explaining the change of language.

I've also seen reports of Outlook users having appointments disappear or show up only in certain modes. Though as an Outlook user myself, Microsoft could just as likely be the culprit here. And buyers of the original iPhone, in addition to being angered by a US$200 price cur just months later, experienced trouble when upgrading to version 2.0 of the device software. In a letter to the MobileMe user community, Apple apologized for the rocky start, saying that it "was a lot rockier than we had hoped.