MacLife and Maximum PC April issues will be their last physical versions:
Magazines are so retro: If you are anything like me, you probably remember the days when you subscribed to multiple computing magazines. I still have fond memories of typing out the computer programs in the back pages of some publications; I even submitted a few of my own.
When high-speed internet came along, many computing publications began producing digital versions of their magazines online. Those with subscriptions still got their physical copies, but the online component was a nice perk for when readers could not just pick up a magazine and start reading, like at work.
Before long, most computing magazines had online versions and, at some point, started ditching paper. It was easier and cheaper to publish one copy that all subscribers could access online rather than printing hundreds of thousands of physical versions.
[...] The demise of print media in the computing industry was inevitable. By the 2000s, many prominent magazines had shut down their printing arms and switched to digital only. Byte stopped printing in 1998. Windows Magazine crashed in 2002, and the succinctly titled PC Magazine (now PCMag) published its last issue in 2009. Computer Gaming World went entirely out of business with its November 2006 issue.
[...] Print advertising also played a big part in the decline of computer publications. Once advertisers realized replicating ads on web pages was cheap and easy, they gradually pulled out of print computer magazines. Many physical magazine branches shut down for that reason alone. If the pub didn't have the clout of names like PC Magazine, Maximum PC, or PC World, it had no chance of competing against the internet for ad space. Even the almanac-like Computer Shopper plunged from nearly 360,000 readers in 1996 to about 55,000 in 2014.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday April 23, @11:41PM (1 child)
I was looking for a counterexample, remembered Custom PC [wikipedia.org] because they partnered with Raspberry Pi a while back, but it was actually bought out by Raspberry Pi Trading and stopped print in February 2023.
Pretty soon this will be the only print "tech" magazine: https://egmnow.com/magazine/ [egmnow.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Monday April 24, @01:17AM
Raspberry Pi Ltd still publishes the magazine The MagPi [raspberrypi.com] which covers general purpose computing and some embedded work but in the context of the Raspberry Pi and Rasperrry Pi Pico. They also still run HackSpace [raspberrypi.com] which is a little more oriented towards "Making". Speaking of "Making", there are still print copies of Make: [makezine.com] being printed. Though only The MagPi is more or less fully dedicated to computing.
WireFrame was around until just this January, but is no longer in print form and seems to have changed name.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Sunday April 23, @11:43PM (5 children)
We should've been a lot more digital a lot sooner. While there is no doubt plenty of inertia and a dash of nostalgia (I would never ever have guessed that vinyl would make the huge comeback it has, and am still expecting it to vanish like a short-lived fad), and technological limitations, I think publishers have been the biggest impediments. Stupidly trying to keep alive the old ways instead of working out how to earn a living with copying now so incredibly easy and fast. Particularly disappointed with those in the Science Fiction genre. Ditto for tech and straight up science. If any groups should get it, it's those three.
Also, insofar as art is intended to convey a moral message, seems most artists possibly excepting some of the youngest ones, have blown it. They're happy to be praised for a Good Message well expressed, collect that Pulitzer Prize or Grammy or whatever, but the moment they become worried that piracy might be hurting them, too many have thrown principles to the wind.
I believe crowdfunding is the way forward.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24, @12:00AM
> worried that piracy might be hurting them
I think you're listening to the wrong bands, the Grateful Dead always allowed recording by anyone in the audience, and the various Dead spin off bands still do. I've heard at least one concert recording where one of the band members tells a taper that, "You're too close to the stage, the sound is better if you move back."
(Score: 5, Touché) by sonamchauhan on Monday April 24, @12:13AM
>We should've been a lot more digital a lot sooner
Digital is where print goes to die
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mykl on Monday April 24, @12:57AM (2 children)
It was certainly a lot easier to confirm readership numbers, ad impressions etc when you had a certain number of copies of a magazine that you printed and sold (even when needing to account for unsold returns). These days it's a bit too easy to game digital systems (e.g. bots designed to boost ad impressions) and customers have been trained for years to filter out increasingly annoying ad content online and only read the article itself. Getting paid to deliver content online is a tricky game.
Online subscription services would make the most sense in terms of generating revenue, but we're all too used to getting everything for free and letting the advertising assholes pay for it (which, of course, is why they have been waging an unending arms-race to force your eyeballs to their content). I have no problem in paying for content provided that said content is then supplied to me ad-free - don't hit me with both or I am walking.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday April 24, @12:15PM (1 child)
Its shocking, really, how targeted and relevant print ads are/were vs how generally awful online ads are.
I mean, yeah, complimentary copy and news releases disguised as articles have always been an annoying thing, but you'd think in 2023 if you wanted to read... articles and advertisements you could obtain that experience online. Not so.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday April 26, @12:49AM
This is the amazing thing. If I buy a copy of a magazine, I generally see ads for things I might be interested in examining further. I think the important thing is that I can look at them when I want to, rather than have them pushed at me. How many awful practices have online advertisers used? Popups, pop overs, pop unders, loud video, etc. I've always ignored them or worked to find ways to block them. I remember using the SurfInPeace application, where you had to manually add ads to be blocked in IE (a couple clicks) before Firefox came out way back when with automatic popup blocking. The popups were so bad at times I remember my task bar showing nothing but lines because there were so many. Not to mention that clicking, even accidentally, on an ad would whisk you away from the site you were viewing and you couldn't get back to it without starting over. I suspect most internet "old timers" have a real deep seated hatred of ads as a result, and vigorously work to block those ads, even on sites we would like to support. I can't help but think that sites that had segregated areas for ads would actually have more visitors click on those ads with some interest rather than the crap they try to force upon us now. I suppose the ad business though is not based anymore on purchases, but solely on ad views, so any method, good or evil, that increases that number is used.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Monday April 24, @05:26AM (1 child)
For anyone who reads German, the magazine c't is very much like the old Byte magazine. It comes out every two weeks, print or online, your choice. Here's a link. [heise.de]
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday April 24, @10:43AM
c't has gone quite down the drain. Their good editors are all gone or retired. Andreas Stiller is retired, but I still celebrate when Carsten Meyer comes back for the occasional guest article. Their new Mac guy, Ben Schwan, writes at or below the level of one of these "me-too-mac-rumors" sites. Back then, on the heise website, they pioneered the slide-to-enable external reference buttons that wouldn't "phone home" to Facebook or whatever, now, even with external media disabled, Safari reports it caught no less than 14 personalized ad trackers.
I see and appreciate how it might be hard to get a publication running at all in these days, but in absolute terms, it still went down the drain.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday April 24, @06:11AM
I subscribe to Linux Format - a magazine published in the UK but which I get delivered by mail each month to Europe with no problems at all. They also quote rates for the USA and elsewhere. I have been a reader since the late 1990s
As its name suggests it is dedicated to Linux but the articles cover a very wide range of subjects and are pitched at various levels of experience and expertise. Computer languages, hardware, circuits to build, security, business .... etc. A quick search using your preferred search engine should find their site quite quickly.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ShovelOperator1 on Monday April 24, @07:52AM (1 child)
I was buying printed computer magazines since... since they were present. And here is the biggest problem: The relative quality of articles to the ads presented in.
In 1980s there was a lot of programming. There were articles like "Welcome to [programming language]" where reader could see how programming in specific language looks like, where is this language used and how typical constructs look like. There were also articles about hardware, reviews, tests and even do-it-yourself ideas. The advertisement section was there and was related to the topic. An ad for the new compiler for the language, for the accelerator board or computer.
In 1990s there were still interesting magazines. I learned about operation of JPEG from one of them. There was less of do-it-yourself, but more about specific software and "hacking" programs to needs. The ads were more focused on end user, but still computer or electronics related.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s programming articles declined, while there were generally more articles about software. Testing got its methodology and was performed in comparison articles. However, in the advertisements block something went wrong - it started to be off topic.
Later it was even worse. Tests and reviews became the ads, so the test methodology got removed. Software articles started to copy the documentation. And the hardware has declined totally. The number of useful articles vs ads disguised as articles became smaller. I stopped with these magazines around 2010, but I bought some of curiosity in early 2020s. It went the same way as the Internet - from sharing knowledge to sharing advertisements and shoving the narrative that this is knowledge.
Printed magazines were certainly useful. I still have many of them and sometimes use the articles, especially about electronics. Digital copies are more troublesome there, as you cannot easily access the cheat sheets when you are doing something on the bench and publishers introduce more problems so digital purchasing ends with searching the digital copy in torrent sites, e-disks and libgen-like sites. However, this is still from the time when these magazines had interesting contents. I think the problem started to appear when publishers found that when they will charge for publishing they will get more "articles", not looking at the quality, and the ad industry found that they may push everything there and get a publishing for smaller price.
The decline of printed computer-related press seems to be logical when we see that currently there is literally no difference of quality between the "article" and the ad.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday April 24, @02:28PM
I read Maximum PC as a teenager just after the turn of the century. I would say the content is similar to Linux Tech Tips today: written to be entertaining and easily digestible, typically not getting too deep technically (very little programming) but occasionally a gem of an article does a deep dive on a new technology (like search engine spiders). Lots of pretty pictures and "top ten" lists or "fastest gaming PC ever" type articles kept teenage Richard interested - the industry had transitioned from from beige cases to more interesting colors in the 90s, but water cooling, cold cathode tubes, and cable origami was moving more mainstream.
The subscription was canceled once I went to university - my parents rural DirectTV internet service was no longer relevant to me and online articles were much more robust. Looking back I do miss the tactile feel of a paper magazine and reading cover to cover - it did expose me to topics I normally wouldn't search for. But when I did try reading Maximum PC as an adult (probably around 2013 when I had a real job), the advertisements had become overbearing and I valued my freetime more than during my teenage years.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday April 24, @12:00PM (1 child)
Good riddance. At least I can filter the ads from the online edition, and it doesn't clog up my paper bin.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday April 24, @02:33PM
Coincidentally, yes really, I happen to be re-reading old BYTE magazines. I just finished the 1977 December issue with "The Computers of Star Trek" and am now in the early 1978 issues. I skimmed through these about five or so years ago and am doing it again because it is interesting. It is like taking a trip back in time to the days of my youth. About this time 1977-78 is where the early microcomputer explosion began to get really interesting.
Of particular interest are the ads. Maybe the ads are even the best part now. The ads, better than the articles, illustrate how shockingly primitive the technology was. Top of the line was Z80 at 4 MHz and 64 KB memory. True happiness was DUAL floppy drives. Only the seriously rich could afford a $6000 hard drive (which was in 1970s dollars) and would probably require you to take out a 2nd mortgage.
In retrospect I see how BASIC more than anything caused Dunning-Kruger of a whole generation including myself because it gave the sense you could do anything, -- until you discovered higher level languages that allowed you to express complex ideas, data structures and algorithms quite easily. Of course, these typically required development systems with hard drives and more than 64 K, which became common only a few years later in the early 80s.
Today magazines could be on the intarweb tubes. I'm sure you could get discount rates to email them in large quantities.
Download old BYTE magazines from here: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Byte_Magazine.htm [americanradiohistory.com]
Or higher quality scans here: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine [archive.org]
Or Popular Electronics: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Popular-Electronics-Guide.htm [americanradiohistory.com]
Creative Computing: https://archive.org/details/creativecomputing [archive.org]
Vintage BYTE Magazine Library
https://vintageapple.org/byte/ [vintageapple.org]
Vintage Macworld Magazine Library
https://vintageapple.org/macworld/ [vintageapple.org]
Vintage Macuser Magazine Library
https://vintageapple.org/macuser/ [vintageapple.org]
Notes from years ago when I skimmed through BYTE.
BYTE 1978-July, pg 42
Conversation overheard in local computer store:
Customer: What's the difference between static and dynamic memory?
Salesman: Static memory works, and dynamic memory doesn't.
I LAUGH at your big round Cray-1 super computer that can do up to 60 MFlops at 80 MHz for $8.86 Million (in 1976 dollars, about $31 mil today).
(BYTE 1978-July, pg 94, and Wikipedia Cray-1)
A modern desktop main processor can do over 100 GFlops.
If you use the GPU, then over 5 TFlops.
(using specs for a typical 2011 PC)
And most laptops aren't far behind that level of performance.
But hey, the Cray-1 had seat cushions covered in genuine imitation leather. (aka vinyl)
And that machine was really quite an achievement, at the time.
BYTE magazine, April 1980, page 115.
NEW HIGH-SPEED COMMUNICATIONS BUS: Xerox Corporation recently made a public announcement of a new concept of processor-to-processor communications intended for an office environment. This novel concept is called "Ethernet", and is a result of some of the work being done in their research labs. In this concept, a single coaxial cable is used as a high-speed communications bus between all processors; communication protocol is handled through software or software supplemented by special-purpose hardware. Rumor has it that an Ethernet processor is now being developed by some form of joint arrangement between Xerox and Intel.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...