MacUser

» see macuser.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The closing statement gives the cause of birth before it gets around to the cause of death. Dennis Publishing wrote that the magazine was inspired by the late Felix Dennis buying an Apple Lisa in 1983, and that it "started life as a bi-monthly magazine but soon upped its frequency to fortnightly as readers and advertisers poured in". By the end it had settled back to a monthly, aimed at people who used a Mac to earn a living.

The readership was the design trade. Each issue ran reviews next to the Masterclass tutorials, which walked a reader through photo retouching or putting a movie together on a machine they already owned. That is a narrow brief, and it held for three decades, across the Mac's near-death in the middle nineties and its return.

The last issue the website ever advertised was January 2015, a winter buying special with a feature on WatchKit, the toolkit developers were using to build software for a watch Apple had not shipped yet. There is a review of the Late 2014 Mac mini in the same issue. Four months earlier the American Macworld had printed its final paper edition, so this one went out into a market that had just lost the other big English-language Apple monthly.

A magazine about which Mac to buy has a geography built into it. It assumes a reader inside reach of a dealer and a warranty, at a price that moves with the pound. Apple hardware was an import item in Turkey rather than a shelf you browsed, and the whole apparatus of mouse ratings and buying advice pointed at a shop that was not on any street I walked down.

~ the case file ~

~ the mouse ratings ~

The review scores were mice. Five of them was the top mark, and the symbol was distinctive enough that Dennis licensed it alongside the name in 1985, when Ziff-Davis took the rights for everywhere outside the United Kingdom. The license covered the symbol as well as the name, which mattered later.

When Ziff-Davis folded its Mac titles into the Mac Publishing joint venture with IDG in September 1997, the venture inherited the MacUser license. It kept the Macworld name and used the mouse ratings anyway, which is why Macworld in the United States could print mice and the British edition could not.

~ the american twin ~

The two magazines were never connected to each other. The American MacUser started in late 1985 as a four-color monthly at $3.50 a copy, Ziff-Davis bought it in 1986, and it ran a feature nobody else offered: roughly 250 capsule reviews in every issue. It was absorbed into Macworld in 1997 under a cover line reading "Macworld, incorporating MacUser", printed small on the contents page, and the Internet Archive's run of it stops at October 1997. The British original carried on for another eighteen years under the same name, separately owned and separately edited.

~ the sixteenth of january ~

Dennis announced the closure on Friday 16 January 2015. Ian Westwood, the group managing director, said the magazine "has helped make Dennis Publishing the business it is today and has contributed to establishing us as the largest technology publisher in the UK", and that "due to challenging market conditions, the closure was unavoidable". Adam Banks, editor in chief for the last four years, went freelance.

Immediately below the announcement on the magazine's own site sat the standing invitation to subscribe, three issues for five pounds, because nobody had taken the template down. Subscribers were told only that the company would be "contacting readers directly over the coming days regarding their subscriptions"; readers reported afterward that the balance was fulfilled with a rival title. The domain stopped resolving to itself on 5 February, three weeks after the last word was published on it, and macuser.co.uk today answers with 114 bytes of JavaScript that pushes a browser to a parking page. A title that spent thirty years telling people what to buy went out with its own order form still on the screen.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »