TechLife

» see techlife.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

PC User came out of Sydney in 1990, monthly, from Australian Consolidated Press. It did the unglamorous job well for three decades: hardware reviews, software reviews, how-to pages, and a help section where the writers answered reader questions about machines that would not behave. By the second half of 2011 it was selling 31,062 copies a month and was reported as the best-selling computer magazine in the country.

Glenn Rees edited it for most of its good years, from 1992 to 1999 and then again from 2002 to 2012. He left in February 2012 when ACP restructured its technology titles and moved people out of both PC User and its stablemate APC. Four months later the magazine came back with a new name.

Ownership changed twice after that. Bauer Media bought ACP's magazine business, then sold TechLife and APC to Future in August 2013, which put an Australian computer title inside the same company that owned most of the British ones. Future announced the merger into APC on 30 May 2022 and the August 2022 issue closed the run.

~ the record ~

~ the disc on the cover ~

Every issue shipped with a DVD, and the disc was not a bonus. It carried full-version software, trial versions, game demos and video tutorials, usually tied to whatever the pages were teaching that month. Some of it was written by the magazine's own contributors, including two custom Linux builds the staff put together: UserOS Ultra, based on Xubuntu 7.10 and aimed at machines too old for anything newer, and PCUserOS Extreme on Ubuntu 8.04.

Building and distributing your own operating system on a newsagent disc is not something a magazine does because the market demands it. It happens because the people making the magazine can, and because posting a few hundred megabytes to readers was still a problem worth solving.

~ the rebrand ~

The TechLife name was announced on 21 March 2012 and launched that June. The publisher's own explanation was that there was a lack of innovation in the consumer technology publication space, which is a sentence that means PC User sounded like a magazine about PCs. The new title went wider, into fitness and entertainment, and came out in print and tablet editions at the same time. APC kept the professional and power-user readers, so the rename also drew a line between the two titles that had been competing with each other inside one building.

~ what got buried with it ~

PC User absorbed the NetGuide section in 2009, after Australian NetGuide stopped publishing, which is how magazine shelves consolidate: one title dies and its best-known section moves next door, leaving the shelf the same width. Thirteen years later TechLife went the same way itself, into APC. The techlife.net address now redirects to a TechRadar page announcing the merger.

I never saw a copy of this one. Australian magazines did not travel, and by the time TechLife existed I had been on broadband for six years and had no use for software on a disc. The decade before that is a different story. In the dial-up years a cover disc was simply how big files arrived at a house, and everything on mine got installed, useful or not, because the alternative was tying up the phone line all night for one download.

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