Since Apple will stop supporting MobileMe Sync at the end of this month, at least for some of the operating systems still in contented use in our household, I have had to look for replacements for the datebook and address-book software. Apple's new services are intended to manage my recordings for me, something I regard as an offensive intrusion into my research life, since I still use iTunes for thousands of original recordings connected to my fieldwork and my study of accented Mandarin. One more bond to Apple, which I began using in 1985 and at one time adored, is about to break.
For the datebook, it is not difficult to make use of Google's calendar, whose API now conveniently supports many laptop and mobile applications — an earlier updating conflict with Apple's iCal was resolved a year or more ago. I have now settled on Mozilla's Thunderbird — not for the mail service but for the calendar alone — and found it easy to make the transition from iCal.
I am also going to have to find a replacement for Apple's address book, but in this case I don't want to use Google, since Google immediately does things with Apple address book information — among other things, it deletes all the notes, and combines the incoming entries with what is already in my gmail account, and tries to "help" me in ways that just cost me time to undo manually. It may be that I have to pay for a separate service like Zimbra, though a more interesting prospect is to set up my own contacts database on my own server and access the information that way.