Interesting how the mainly US-centric AI membership ignores MacFormat UK (to which I subscribe) - it has for years been way ahead (and thicker, and better) than MW or MU or any other Mac magazine in other countries. And it's in English, too...
May I suggest substituting ''publication' in place of 'rag'?
You may, I can't change the main page myself though, you have to suggest it to the article author. You can PM the author by clicking the name Appleinsider and hitting send PM or use an email address on the contacts page:
I can understand people getting offended at the use of 'rag', but strictly speaking, it’s not necessarily historically a derogatory term. It can be used as simple slang shorthand for publication.
Edit: I see Martin Turner above has already given the accurate historical description.
I agree that real content means a lot. The paper subscriptions I have are Consumer Reports, Backpacking magazine, the AARP magazine (comes free with the membership - uh oh... I guess that I'm old), one of the Consumer Reports health letters, and a local newspaper. I also have the electronic iMagazine version of Backpacker but I almost never use it. The advertising is too intrusive. With paper, I just flip past it. With the electronic version it takes over your screen and you have to cast it aside.
One thing I noticed in the Backpacker magazine is that the contributors are getting relatively older. They all used to be young. When I first thought about it, I thought that not as many younger people may be backpacking but maybe it is something else. Maybe it is that older people are sticking with the magazines and younger people contribute and read about their hobbies online?
It's true I don't buy much print either these days, but the Mac magazines had a quality and format you don't quite get on the net making me miss them. They were characterized by a blend of what's new (where they simply can't keep up with electronic distribution), reviews (where the internet again trumps them in getting these out) and how-tos.... ...which take more time and effort to put together and can't be refreshed as often as today's mix of rumors, press-releases hastily edited into "stories," inside baseball, tech company politics and raging forums. That's partly because there's incessant pressure to keep fresh stories near the top of the masthead - which isn't the optimal way to get readers for "how-to" type articles to remain easily discoverable after a few days. The newish story rotating banner at the top of AI is one way to handle this, but succeeds (IMO) only in a limited fashion.
(Notwithstanding outliers like DED's long-form "we're here now, and here's where here is compared to everyone else, and here (along with twenty infographics, old stock photos, etc.) is how were got here, notwithstanding as he can apparently crank those out as fast as most can manage 500 word or else doesn't take meal and bathroom breaks or days off)
Mac World (and MacUser) tried to keep a similar blend online (sharing their work between outlets) and again one can see that hasn't worked out either, with MacWorld Mag gone and the site a shadow of what it was.
Leaving us to find specialty sites for some of the kinds of content that are relatively rare. I'm getting most of my how-tos from YT vids these days which are often dated, frequently amateurish and often wrong. While sites like Lifehacker and How to Geek throw out the occasional Mac bone.
Which has created a niche for paid services like Lynda.com, btw.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Geekmee
LOL... Now that I think about it, I use to routinely rip out the center page cardboard ads to make it easier to find PC Mag content... Because there were so many ads!!
...A brutal reminder that the content was only there to deliver the ads.
Cart before the horse: some mags obviously exist primarily to be ad vehicles ("If we crank out crap on celebrities we can sell a lot ads to companies targeting that demo), but others, like these Mac Mags came into existence at least as much via a real interest and affection for the Mac platform as by a business plan.
Still they are businesses and they could either go ad free and charge their true costs off on readers (probably doubling or tripling issue prices) or use ad revenue to subsidize printing and other costs). Which would have left a very thin magazine with a high cover price next to thicker one bolstered by ads or with a much higher sub cost, and most customers would have been herded to the lower price tag long ago anyway.
That's what's brutal here: the economics of publishing, especially in an age where the competing model of posting has many built-in advantages.
I was a subscriber to Mac magazines before the Internet - issues with up to 300 pages and more than triple the useful content of what we have today. The loss of ad revenue has ravaged the print industry.
I remember how annoyed I was when MacWorld bought MacUser US. They did it in order to kill the competition, plain and simple. They did a great disservice to the Mac community, as the direct result was that there was that much less content for readers. MacUser UK is a great publication and full of interesting and useful content. I hope there can be some sort of online version. MacDirectory was a nice magazine as well, and it still continues as a virtual magazine. They pay their writers dirt (and many do it just for the NFR software and nothing else) but at least it exists.
This thing about killing the competition is the same approach Adobe had with Macromedia. They grabbed Dreamweaver and Flash and killed Freehand, which was clearly superior to Illustrator. The sad thing is that they simply killed it without bothering to grab the features that bested AI. There are still things that Freehand can do that Illustrator can't and it's been dead for a decade. Director still lives but on a starvation diet. Too bad. It was way better than Flash.
When killing the competition hurts users it is a sign of the lack of respect.
O really looked forward to it. But those were also the days of the Mac Show on TV. Like the Mac Show it was killed because of the decline of the Mac market during the nineties.
I have the first few YEARS of both MacUser and MacWorld, complete. Why I've kept them all these years, I can't really say, other than I like them and think they're cool.
I have them in a eight or nine large boxes in my upstairs office. Every once in a while I will dig through them, enjoying such stuff as the triple debut of the LC, Si and Classic and checking out drive prices (only $699 for a 240 MB LaCie external!). Those boxes weigh a ton and, as my office is at the back of the house, I do not doubt that they contribute to the reason why the doors up there are no longer square with the jams.
I have them in a eight or nine large boxes in my upstairs office. Every once in a while I will dig through them, enjoying such stuff as the triple debut of the LC, Si and Classic and checking out drive prices (only $699 for a 240 MB LaCie external!). Those boxes weigh a ton and, as my office is at the back of the house, I do not doubt that they contribute to the reason why the doors up there are no longer square with the jams.
I am (or rather mostly was - I'm now trying to lighten my load) an omnivorous collector of memorabilia and can tell you they are likely worth a few bucks each (in good condition). Check eBay. Quite a few listed at quite a range of prices. I estimate my first issue of MacWorld is worth about $25 (kept mint) more or less.
I have weirder things too: An Apple Lisa catalog, Apple II brochure, Videotape from IBM explaining the "AIM Alliance" (Apple, IBM and Motorola, i.e., about "Pink" and the Power PC chips, and other such miscellany. No real idea how to appraise those. Guess I could name similar prices (to the magazines) and see if anyone bites. Could be someone as eccentric as me out there and it's not like they can go get one at BoxMart...
[EDIT: I was scrolling Lisa-related stuff and did find my brochure listed for $49.99! And an Apple catalog about 10-12 years newer than mine for $39 (<---1991). Ha. Now who wants my complete set of the four copies of the TV Guide issue that was published with four Star Trek variant covers...??]
Ahhh, the joys of packrattery....
But my comics (and a fair amount of my other) collecting over 50 years worked out really pretty well once I got around to liquidating big chunks of it.
PS: There's an Apple Lisa MOUSE on eBay... ..yours for only $568.10 (on sale from $598). Grab it while you can, haha...
(...while there's a "pre-production" Lisa logo priced at at $349.99 and a working Lisa 2 for 5 grand. And many other things Lisa...)
I'll agree with that. Besides the articles in those publications, one of the very useful things for me were the adverts, many of which were for products I might not have known of otherwise. Very diverse, as opposed to the highly-targeted and homogenous Google-driven page view.
I'll agree with that. Besides the articles in those publications, one of the very useful things for me were the adverts, many of which were for products I might not have known of otherwise. Very diverse, as opposed to the highly-targeted and homogenous Google-driven page view.
What you said. I was thinking exactly the same thing, but you articulated it very succinctly.
Website ads mostly now show things you've recently already looked at (or already bought). Magazine ads were often varied enough to occasionally be a useful aid to product and service discovery and were easy to flip past if you weren't interested.
Altho' one precept of caveat emptor is still true about ads, wherever you encounter them: The actual desirability, utility, quality and value of products tends to be inversely proportional to the degree of advertising done to incite you to buy 'em.
See e.g., Samsung phone marketing, "eat like you mean it," awful high-budget movies, etc., etc.
Interesting how the mainly US-centric AI membership ignores MacFormat UK (to which I subscribe) - it has for years been way ahead (and thicker, and better) than MW or MU or any other Mac magazine in other countries. And it's in English, too...
Interesting how the mainly US-centric AI membership ignores MacFormat UK (to which I subscribe) - it has for years been way ahead (and thicker, and better) than MW or MU or any other Mac magazine in other countries. And it's in English, too...
For the record, this is referring to the UK version of MacUser magazine. The US version was bought out (or merged) into MacWorld magazine back in 1997.
I have them in a eight or nine large boxes in my upstairs office. Every once in a while I will dig through them, enjoying such stuff as the triple debut of the LC, Si and Classic and checking out drive prices (only $699 for a 240 MB LaCie external!). Those boxes weigh a ton and, as my office is at the back of the house, I do not doubt that they contribute to the reason why the doors up there are no longer square with the jams.
hahaha. That's great. Well, it's not really great, but you know what I mean!
I am (or rather mostly was - I'm now trying to lighten my load) an omnivorous collector of memorabilia and can tell you they are likely worth a few bucks each (in good condition). Check eBay. Quite a few listed at quite a range of prices. I estimate my first issue of MacWorld is worth about $25 (kept mint) more or less.
I have weirder things too: An Apple Lisa catalog, Apple II brochure, Videotape from IBM explaining the "AIM Alliance" (Apple, IBM and Motorola, i.e., about "Pink" and the Power PC chips, and other such miscellany. No real idea how to appraise those. Guess I could name similar prices (to the magazines) and see if anyone bites. Could be someone as eccentric as me out there and it's not like they can go get one at BoxMart...
[EDIT: I was scrolling Lisa-related stuff and did find my brochure listed for $49.99! And an Apple catalog about 10-12 years newer than mine for $39 (<---1991). Ha. Now who wants my complete set of the four copies of the TV Guide issue that was published with four Star Trek variant covers...??]
Ahhh, the joys of packrattery.... :no: :smokey:
But my comics (and a fair amount of my other) collecting over 50 years worked out really pretty well once I got around to liquidating big chunks of it.
PS: There's an Apple Lisa MOUSE on eBay... ..yours for only $568.10 (on sale from $598). Grab it while you can, haha...
(...while there's a "pre-production" Lisa logo priced at at $349.99 and a working Lisa 2 for 5 grand. And many other things Lisa...
Sound eerily familiar. Just like home. Including the comic book collection, though I haven't liquidated much of anything. My comic collection is serious enough that the valuable stuff sits in safe deposit.
I also have pre-release versions of the Inside Macintosh developer guides. I suppose they would be valuable to a collector of such things, but I'm not really interested in parting with them yet.
I have really cool Apple promotional materials from all through the 1980s, system floppy disks that go all the way back to v1.0, pretty much all the early Apple developer CDs with cool movie-name references (before the lawyers got involved and made them stop doing that), you name it.
Of course this means that the house is full of clutter.
I have read both magazines as I have bought their print versions at Malaysian bookstores, albeit at a FAR more expensive price than in the US or UK (shipping, conversion rates, etc. come into play). Which makes me sad to see such great Apple mags meeting their end, even if one of them lives on in a digital version.
Even if I'm a big Apple user, nothing beats reading a mag in its timeless "hard-copy" method. The digital mags just don't give me the same feeling as reading a physical one!
Comments
Interesting how the mainly US-centric AI membership ignores MacFormat UK (to which I subscribe) - it has for years been way ahead (and thicker, and better) than MW or MU or any other Mac magazine in other countries. And it's in English, too...
Too bad, but that the way things go.
I used to buy one or two of the Mac mags each month, but stopped that several years ago, except for the odd issue.
Increasing these mags have become mostly ads, trying to follow google's ad success I assume.
I highly recommend the UK-based MacFormat magazine.
It’s available in Newsstand, and is a really beautiful app, not just a PDF.
MacAddict, Macworld, MacUser... the sources of my Apple obsession as a kid in the mid-to-late '90s are all gone.
I'm not so interested in iOSworld Magazine.
MacFormat is by far the best Mac magazine in the world right now.
Seconded.
May I suggest substituting ''publication' in place of 'rag'?
You may, I can't change the main page myself though, you have to suggest it to the article author. You can PM the author by clicking the name Appleinsider and hitting send PM or use an email address on the contacts page:
http://www.appleinsider.com/contact
I can understand people getting offended at the use of 'rag', but strictly speaking, it’s not necessarily historically a derogatory term. It can be used as simple slang shorthand for publication.
Edit: I see Martin Turner above has already given the accurate historical description.
I agree that real content means a lot. The paper subscriptions I have are Consumer Reports, Backpacking magazine, the AARP magazine (comes free with the membership - uh oh... I guess that I'm old), one of the Consumer Reports health letters, and a local newspaper. I also have the electronic iMagazine version of Backpacker but I almost never use it. The advertising is too intrusive. With paper, I just flip past it. With the electronic version it takes over your screen and you have to cast it aside.
One thing I noticed in the Backpacker magazine is that the contributors are getting relatively older. They all used to be young. When I first thought about it, I thought that not as many younger people may be backpacking but maybe it is something else. Maybe it is that older people are sticking with the magazines and younger people contribute and read about their hobbies online?
It's true I don't buy much print either these days, but the Mac magazines had a quality and format you don't quite get on the net making me miss them. They were characterized by a blend of what's new (where they simply can't keep up with electronic distribution), reviews (where the internet again trumps them in getting these out) and how-tos.... ...which take more time and effort to put together and can't be refreshed as often as today's mix of rumors, press-releases hastily edited into "stories," inside baseball, tech company politics and raging forums. That's partly because there's incessant pressure to keep fresh stories near the top of the masthead - which isn't the optimal way to get readers for "how-to" type articles to remain easily discoverable after a few days. The newish story rotating banner at the top of AI is one way to handle this, but succeeds (IMO) only in a limited fashion.
(Notwithstanding outliers like DED's long-form "we're here now, and here's where here is compared to everyone else, and here (along with twenty infographics, old stock photos, etc.) is how were got here, notwithstanding as he can apparently crank those out as fast as most can manage 500 word or else doesn't take meal and bathroom breaks or days off)
Mac World (and MacUser) tried to keep a similar blend online (sharing their work between outlets) and again one can see that hasn't worked out either, with MacWorld Mag gone and the site a shadow of what it was.
Leaving us to find specialty sites for some of the kinds of content that are relatively rare. I'm getting most of my how-tos from YT vids these days which are often dated, frequently amateurish and often wrong. While sites like Lifehacker and How to Geek throw out the occasional Mac bone.
Which has created a niche for paid services like Lynda.com, btw.
LOL... Now that I think about it, I use to routinely rip out the center page cardboard ads to make it easier to find PC Mag content... Because there were so many ads!!
...A brutal reminder that the content was only there to deliver the ads.
Cart before the horse: some mags obviously exist primarily to be ad vehicles ("If we crank out crap on celebrities we can sell a lot ads to companies targeting that demo), but others, like these Mac Mags came into existence at least as much via a real interest and affection for the Mac platform as by a business plan.
Still they are businesses and they could either go ad free and charge their true costs off on readers (probably doubling or tripling issue prices) or use ad revenue to subsidize printing and other costs). Which would have left a very thin magazine with a high cover price next to thicker one bolstered by ads or with a much higher sub cost, and most customers would have been herded to the lower price tag long ago anyway.
That's what's brutal here: the economics of publishing, especially in an age where the competing model of posting has many built-in advantages.
I remember how annoyed I was when MacWorld bought MacUser US. They did it in order to kill the competition, plain and simple. They did a great disservice to the Mac community, as the direct result was that there was that much less content for readers. MacUser UK is a great publication and full of interesting and useful content. I hope there can be some sort of online version. MacDirectory was a nice magazine as well, and it still continues as a virtual magazine. They pay their writers dirt (and many do it just for the NFR software and nothing else) but at least it exists.
This thing about killing the competition is the same approach Adobe had with Macromedia. They grabbed Dreamweaver and Flash and killed Freehand, which was clearly superior to Illustrator. The sad thing is that they simply killed it without bothering to grab the features that bested AI. There are still things that Freehand can do that Illustrator can't and it's been dead for a decade. Director still lives but on a starvation diet. Too bad. It was way better than Flash.
When killing the competition hurts users it is a sign of the lack of respect.
MacAddict is now Mac|Life. It's still around.
O really looked forward to it. But those were also the days of the Mac Show on TV. Like the Mac Show it was killed because of the decline of the Mac market during the nineties.
I have the first few YEARS of both MacUser and MacWorld, complete. Why I've kept them all these years, I can't really say, other than I like them and think they're cool.
I have them in a eight or nine large boxes in my upstairs office. Every once in a while I will dig through them, enjoying such stuff as the triple debut of the LC, Si and Classic and checking out drive prices (only $699 for a 240 MB LaCie external!). Those boxes weigh a ton and, as my office is at the back of the house, I do not doubt that they contribute to the reason why the doors up there are no longer square with the jams.
A joke, no doubt, but PC and Byte magazines were every bit as hefty.
I have them in a eight or nine large boxes in my upstairs office. Every once in a while I will dig through them, enjoying such stuff as the triple debut of the LC, Si and Classic and checking out drive prices (only $699 for a 240 MB LaCie external!). Those boxes weigh a ton and, as my office is at the back of the house, I do not doubt that they contribute to the reason why the doors up there are no longer square with the jams.
I am (or rather mostly was - I'm now trying to lighten my load) an omnivorous collector of memorabilia and can tell you they are likely worth a few bucks each (in good condition). Check eBay. Quite a few listed at quite a range of prices. I estimate my first issue of MacWorld is worth about $25 (kept mint) more or less.
I have weirder things too: An Apple Lisa catalog, Apple II brochure, Videotape from IBM explaining the "AIM Alliance" (Apple, IBM and Motorola, i.e., about "Pink" and the Power PC chips, and other such miscellany. No real idea how to appraise those. Guess I could name similar prices (to the magazines) and see if anyone bites. Could be someone as eccentric as me out there and it's not like they can go get one at BoxMart...
[EDIT: I was scrolling Lisa-related stuff and did find my brochure listed for $49.99! And an Apple catalog about 10-12 years newer than mine for $39 (<---1991). Ha. Now who wants my complete set of the four copies of the TV Guide issue that was published with four Star Trek variant covers...??]
Ahhh, the joys of packrattery....
But my comics (and a fair amount of my other) collecting over 50 years worked out really pretty well once I got around to liquidating big chunks of it.
PS: There's an Apple Lisa MOUSE on eBay... ..yours for only $568.10 (on sale from $598). Grab it while you can, haha...
(...while there's a "pre-production" Lisa logo priced at at $349.99 and a working Lisa 2 for 5 grand. And many other things Lisa...)
But www.macuser.com redirects to www.macworld.com ... So, the online information lives on.
The magazine referenced here is at http://www.macuser.co.uk
I'll agree with that. Besides the articles in those publications, one of the very useful things for me were the adverts, many of which were for products I might not have known of otherwise. Very diverse, as opposed to the highly-targeted and homogenous Google-driven page view.
I'll agree with that. Besides the articles in those publications, one of the very useful things for me were the adverts, many of which were for products I might not have known of otherwise. Very diverse, as opposed to the highly-targeted and homogenous Google-driven page view.
What you said. I was thinking exactly the same thing, but you articulated it very succinctly.
Website ads mostly now show things you've recently already looked at (or already bought). Magazine ads were often varied enough to occasionally be a useful aid to product and service discovery and were easy to flip past if you weren't interested.
Altho' one precept of caveat emptor is still true about ads, wherever you encounter them: The actual desirability, utility, quality and value of products tends to be inversely proportional to the degree of advertising done to incite you to buy 'em.
See e.g., Samsung phone marketing, "eat like you mean it," awful high-budget movies, etc., etc.
Interesting how the mainly US-centric AI membership ignores MacFormat UK (to which I subscribe) - it has for years been way ahead (and thicker, and better) than MW or MU or any other Mac magazine in other countries. And it's in English, too...
So all the words are all proper, like.
Right proper.
hahaha. That's great. Well, it's not really great, but you know what I mean!
Sound eerily familiar. Just like home. Including the comic book collection, though I haven't liquidated much of anything. My comic collection is serious enough that the valuable stuff sits in safe deposit.
I also have pre-release versions of the Inside Macintosh developer guides. I suppose they would be valuable to a collector of such things, but I'm not really interested in parting with them yet.
I have really cool Apple promotional materials from all through the 1980s, system floppy disks that go all the way back to v1.0, pretty much all the early Apple developer CDs with cool movie-name references (before the lawyers got involved and made them stop doing that), you name it.
Of course this means that the house is full of clutter.
Even if I'm a big Apple user, nothing beats reading a mag in its timeless "hard-copy" method. The digital mags just don't give me the same feeling as reading a physical one!