Shawn helpfully pointed out that I could save a few bucks buy purchasing my MobileMe subscription through Amazon instead of directly from Apple.

The only complication with this is that I got the info on Monday and my free trial was expiring on Tuesday. If I bought MobileMe from Amazon on Monday, I wouldn’t receive the activation key until Tuesday at the earliest. This was a concern because I had no idea how MobileMe would handle it when I canceled my account, then tried to re-activate it without having ever had a paid account.

In the end I chose to cancel mainly out of curiosity, and ordered the MobileMe subscription from Amazon (with free 2-day delivery via Prime). It’s really annoying that they didn’t offer digital delivery of the activation key, but they didn’t so I waited until today to receive my little box with a piece of paper in it with the activation key. I was without MobileMe for a day, but that was hardly a concern as I only use it for contact sync.

When I received the MobileMe activation key on Wednesday, I went back to me.com and signed in with my old account credentials. I was allowed in, then shown a note saying I needed to activate my account. I followed the steps, clicked the “I have an activation key” button, entered the key and that was that.

I was pretty sure something in this process would break. My experience with software, especially sync, is that edge cases are not well handled. I really thought it would break.

It didn’t.

I was able to activate the old trial account, and my sync just started working again. I didn’t get dozens of duplicated contacts or have to do an “overwrite this machine on next sync” or anything. It just worked.

Nice job, Apple. I’m impressed.