MacMinute

» see macminute.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i was not on the apple news beat in the mid-2000s. by 2001 i was 17 in ankara on a 33.6k modem, running windows xp on a hand-built machine. macs were the thing you saw in movies and in the back of pc magazine ads, not the thing anyone in my orbit actually owned. macminute lived in a us-and-canada-only news vertical that had a pretty small overseas readership.

stan flack was a canadian businessman from prince edward island who had already built one apple news site. he founded maccentral in the mid-1990s and sold it to macworld on 1 june 1999 (which folded it into the macworld brand over the following years). he sat out for a while and then launched macminute on 9 may 2001 as a headline-focused feed with a small footprint. the pitch was in the name, minute-by-minute updates rather than long-form editorial.

the site ran clean through the whole ipod era. it covered the itunes music store launch and the intel transition, then the iphone reveal in january 2007. it had a reader forum called macminute reader café that pulled in a lot of the maccentral community after that site was folded away. by the peak of the mid-2000s apple-blog rush, macminute was one of the sites getting quoted in aggregation posts.

~ the record ~

~ the actual end ~

the site's last update went out on 11 june 2007. no announcement came with it. readers noticed the silence over the next couple of months. flack did not respond to email during that window. by late 2007 the site was still online but effectively dormant. it turned out flack had been dealing with a pre-existing health condition. he died at his home on prince edward island on 14 april 2008 of complications from that condition. on 22 may 2008 his family posted a short notice on the site announcing that macminute and its forums were closing.

~ the next chapter ~

the mid-2000s apple news blog category was a pretty specific slice of the web. sites like tuaw and macrumors competed with appleinsider and macminute on who could post a supplier leak or a beta build note first. that whole category later got consolidated into a much smaller set of survivors, macrumors and 9to5mac on one end, the verge and engadget covering it as one beat among many on the other.

back then. mactech offered to archive the macminute news history and host what was left of the reader café community. some of the archive survived on their servers for a few years after. the macminute domain itself went cold shortly after. flack was 52 when he died.

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