TUAW

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

~ the goodbye ~

tuaw was for the mac crowd. i ran windows xp and then windows 7, did not own an iphone before maybe 2014, and the apple internet was a parallel universe i read maybe once a quarter when somebody linked a piece. the unofficial apple weblog launched inside weblogs inc in august 2004, the same network that birthed engadget and joystiq, and by 2008 it was a canonical apple-news beat next to macworld and ars technica.

aol bought weblogs inc for around 25 million in october 2005. tuaw came with the package. through the back half of the 2000s every iphone launch and every wwdc liveblog had a tuaw url next to the engadget and ars versions. the writing started out unpaid-fan-blog-style and steadily turned professional through the late 2000s as the apple beat became commercially serious.

on february 3, 2015 aol shut tuaw down with joystiq and massively in the same email. the staff scattered to macrumors, 9to5mac, cult of mac, the verge, and rene ritchie's then-imore. the apple-fan internet had reorganized around bloggers with personal podcasts and youtube channels, and the multi-blog cms model aol had built in 2004 stopped paying for itself.

verizon later folded what was left of aol into yahoo and then sold the whole thing to apollo. the tuaw domain stayed dark until 2024, when somebody bought it and started publishing ai-generated content under the old name. even the apple-fan blog graveyard is not quiet anymore.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

tuaw was unofficial in the title because apple never sanctioned anyone except the company press itself. the unofficial bit was the entire point. apple shipped a product, tuaw wrote the consumer-tier breakdown the day of, often before macworld's editorial cycle could land. that role mattered before twitter and youtube absorbed it.

~ what got buried with it ~

the daily-rhythm apple blog. five or six posts a day, most under 300 words, most just news with a paragraph of opinion. the format was alive between 2005 and 2012, then twitter took the news layer and youtube took the review layer, and there was nothing left for the blog format to hold.

~ the long tail ~

most of the staff still write about apple somewhere. the bylines moved to imore, 9to5mac, macrumors, and personal substacks. the cult of mac model is closer to what tuaw was trying to be, and the unofficial-fan-blog energy moved to youtube creators like marques brownlee and rene ritchie's solo channel. the multi-blog network model never came back.

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