Go back far enough, and email addresses associated with the use of Apple's online services were of the form username@mac.com. Then MobileMe introduced username@me.com, but 'grandfathered' existing @mac.com addresses.

Now comes the news that users signing up for new Apple IDs or enabling Mail on an iCloud account for the first time will be allocated @icloud.com addresses. Furthermore, iOS 6 beta 3 users are being given matching @icloud addresses, so quite possibly that will extend to all iOS 6 users once it is released.

Presumably Apple will grandfather @mac.com and @me.com addresses. The amount of effort and resources required to do so is minimal, and a large part of the attraction of services such as iTools/.Mac/MobileMe/iCloud and Gmail is that you get a permanent address regardless of any changes of ISP, employment or organisational membership.

Yes, there is always the risk that a provider will go out of business, but if that's a worry you register your own domain - something I've been recommending for years.

I can't really understand why some people are so emotionally attached to @mac.com addresses (as opposed to the very practical issues around an address that you've been using for many years) and opposed to the @me.com form. With a gazillion @me.com accounts in play, nobody with half a brain is going to think you narcissistic for using one of them.

So is it really a big deal if new users (and at least some existing ones) get @icloud.com addresses as long as @mac.com and @me.com addresses continue to work? No, I didn't think so, either.

It looks like Apple will live up to its promise of July delivery for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Once the company last month refined the due date from (northern) summer to July, there wasn't much risk that it would be late.
This week has seen the release to developers of a golden master version of Mountain Lion, so unless any showstopping bugs are discovered, we'll see the new incarnation of OS X in the next few weeks.

Will 10.8.0 be bug free, even to the extent that bug-free software exists at all? No. 10.8.1 will be with us soon enough, but in the meantime let's keep our fingers crossed that any shortcomings that do actually affect early adopters aren't significant issues.

At this stage, I'm planning a reasonably prompt upgrade to Mountain Lion - certainly more prompt than my repeatedly delayed move from Snow Leopard. Here's hoping I don't regret it.

If you're hot to trot, make sure you've got around 4.5GB of your monthly Internet quota to devote to the download, as there's no indication that Apple will sell copies on thumb drives as it eventually did with Lion, though I'd be surprised if that option doesn't materialise.

A Samsung Galaxy S III has come into my life, so I wanted to sync contact data between it and my Mac. That task wasn't as easy as I'd hoped, but I got there in the end.

Mac OS X supports contact synchronisation with Google accounts, so that was a good start. The problem is that most of my contact information was stored in Outlook 2011, not Address Book. Somewhere along the line (I think it was the arrival of Leopard) the software I'd been using to sync selected Entourage contacts with my old phone had stopped working, so I had turned off Sync Services and the two lists gradually got out of whack. Yes, it was my fault - though I probably wouldn't have got into that situation if that developer hadn't reneged on a Leopard-compatible update.

Anyway, like Entourage, Outlook does support Sync Services, but simply turning it on didn't unify the two sets of data. If I created a new contact in one, it would show up in the other, but existing contacts in Outlook didn't find their way into Address Book. Resetting Sync Services didn't help.

What follows isn't a 'how to', it's just me relating a not very smooth process. In fact, there was so much trial and error involved, I can't even promise that the tale is 100% accurate.

My early attempts to sort out the situation kept resulting in duplicate contacts, but I fixed that by turning off iCloud contacts sync. A script written for me by AppleScript master Shane Stanley (using his ASObjC Runner to keep the code simple) identified contacts that existed in Outlook but not Address Book (or, with a slight change, vice versa), and that helped me manually reconcile the two lists.

Once I had a single list (in Address Book, as it happened), I exported all my contacts from Outlook so I had a backup, and then deleted them. Turing on Sync Services in Outlook didn't repopulate its contacts list, so I manually imported the data from Address Book. That meant the two lists were the same, and I then found that when I added or edited an entry in one program, the change propagated to the other.

Something I did notice was that the delay was quite variable - just because sync doesn't occur immediately, that doesn't mean it isn't working at all!

I then enabled contact syncing with Google in Address Book's preferences, and discovered that the Sync menu extra had gained a Sync Now command which, when selected, seemed to trigger the synchronisation of all three contacts lists (Address Book, Outlook and Google Apps).

Multiple sync operations were necessary before all three lists really were in sync. Part of the problem seemed to be that notes fields are stored slightly differently by Address Book and Outlook: Address Book allows multiple 'paragraphs' but Outlook concatenates them, and then Sync Services decides they are different. And where I'd stored a photo for a contact, it seemed necessary to accept the Google version of the image as the truth or a sync conflict kept occurring.

Eventually I got there: a common contact list across Outlook, Address Book, Google Apps and Android, and any changes on one flowed to the others.

So it was time to extend that to Outlook on Windows. I downloaded and installed Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook (NB: requires a paid edition of Google Apps), and yes, it delivered contact synchronisation. But there was a downside: it creates a new Outlook profile, and also makes a MAPI rather than IMAP connection between Outlook and Gmail. For various reasons, I had that copy of Outlook set to only download email headers until messages are opened, and that doesn't seem to be an option with MAPI so Google Apps Sync downloaded around a gigabyte of emails into Outlook. If you know how to get just the headers, please tell me in a comment.

There's a looming problem.

Sync Services is a deprecated feature of (Mac) OS X. When it goes away, we'll probably lose the ability to sync Outlook and Address Book, as iCloud synchronisation is (as I understand it) only available to software sold through the Mac App Store and there's no sign of Microsoft taking that route.

Given the apparent falling out between Apple and Google, there must be a chance that Google sync will disappear from a future version of Address Book. The good news is that Mountain Lion reportedly supports simultaneous contacts syncing with Google and iCloud, so that scenario is at least a year away.

There's no indication that Google or Microsoft will provide direct support for contact sync between Outlook for Mac and Gmail/Google Apps, so where does that leave us?

The answer seems to be either to accept that it is an an increasingly balkanised world (OS X and iOS, or Windows 7/8 and Windows Phone, or Google Apps and Android), or to rely on third-party developers to provide connectivity. But my experience suggests such reliance could be misplaced.

The arrival of the Podcasts app for iOS is another sign that the Mac is no longer the centre of the Apple universe.

Don't get me wrong - I use my iPod mini almost exclusively for listening to podcasts, and I can see why it would be more convenient to download them directly to a device rather than using iTunes as an intermediary. Well, except for the fact that the iPod mini only has 4GB of storage, and I have a lot more than 4GB of material in the queue. I mostly listen to podcast fiction of various kinds, so currency is not an issue.

But Podcasts reportedly makes accommodation for paid podcast subscriptions, and I wouldn't be surprised if that feature appears in a future version of iTunes. Presumably the model will be much the same as for apps, and Apple will take a percentage of the revenue and pay the rest to the podcaster.

We're all aware that 'content providers' from newspaper publishers down to special-interest podcasters and bloggers are struggling to generate sufficient income to justify their time and money investment. Apple does seem to have the process of handling small payments down pat, and many millions of us have iTunes Store accounts.

The other good thing is that podcasters using the iTunes Store to monetise their offerings would have no reason to use MP3 rather than AAC. The latter saves space, and also allows the inclusion of chapter markers which makes it easier to skip over a section that you're not interested in, and - if you're a bedtime listener - easier to find the spot where you fell asleep first time around. There's practically no point in offering a free MP3 version of a podcast alongside paid iTunes subscriptions, as almost everyone would go that way instead.

I'm aware that some people donate to their favourite podcasts, but the impression I get from podcasters is that they are a very small minority. Still, making it easier to pay would presumably raise those numbers.

The downside (from a selfish perspective) is that it may mean that I'll have to decide whether to pay to continue to listen to certain podcasts or find alternatives that remain free. And as we're hearing so often in the context of our two major newspaper publishers' plans for paywalls, it is unlikely that people will pay when there's a free and 'good enough' alternative.

But the more iOS devices are sold and the closer they come to being completely independent of a host computer, the more the Mqc becomes a minority platform within Apple.

Just to ensure this week's piece isn't completely in the realms of Produce and Carry, I'll close with a question: what do you think about the apparent inclusion of an automatic Security Update feature (separate from Software Update) in Mountain Lion? I've got mixed feelings, but if I have to choose, I'll go for prompt patching.

I have a lot of time for Ted Landau - he's been around and he knows his stuff. And he seems to be firmly in the 'end of the Mac as we know it' camp.

Over at The Mac Observer, Ted's speculating that the absence from WWDC of a substantial revision to the Mac Pro or new iMacs (plus hints from executives that they will follow in 2013) could foreshadow a major change to OS X. How major? A split into 'consumer' and 'pro' editions.

The pro edition would be the next generation of OS X as we know it today, while the consumer version would work much like iOS in that software could only be installed from the Mac App Store, and that "system-level utilities" such as Terminal would be removed from the OS (and there would be no pathway for third parties to offer such tools). Oh, and maybe no Finder: Launchpad lets you start applications, and applications manage their own data a la iTunes.

In this scenario, OS X Pro would run only on pro hardware (MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro or whatever succeeds it), while the consumer version would be included with the MacBook Air and iMac.

I'm not wholly convinced, but it's not inconsistent with what we can see going on, including the recent integration of Aperture and iPhoto libraries. But I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like it if that did happen. Maybe Ted and I are both grumpy old men wedded to old usage models, but I don't believe that is the case. There are some tasks where the iOS model works well, and others that call for more flexibility to be left in the hands of the user. F'rinstance, I'd really miss AppleScript if it disappeared or became restricted in what it can do.

So why wouldn't I go 'pro'? An iMac-like machine suits me just fine, thanks.