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What Apple news sites do you remember from days long gone?

S

Sill

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 14, 2014
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I used to have a pretty long list of news and rumors sites from the bad old days, when Steve was just working his way back into Apple, when MacAddict was just starting to fly off the shelf, and this whole internet thing looked like it might take off.

Some of the sites stuck around, like AppleInsider and Macbidouille, others disappeared or are just a husk of their former self. MacOSRumors is at the top of that list, and there was one called "Reality" which was a subdomain of another site, but it was pretty strong. I think they were under MacNN? They're gone now too.

I also hav a very vague recollection of a rumors site that went off the rails trying to reinvent themselves as some kind of social media called "Ghostwheel" or something like that. Anyone recall that one?

Anyways, I was hoping to start a discussion of the old sites and maybe share some stories about them if anyone has any.
 
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Not a news site, but when I bought my first Mac in '94, I ended up signing up for a catalog called Mac Mall. I'm not sure if the catalog is still around, but the site is. Don't see it mentioned much these days.
 
Zenithal said:
Not a news site, but when I bought my first Mac in '94, I ended up signing up for a catalog called Mac Mall. I'm not sure if the catalog is still around, but the site is. Don't see it mentioned much these days.
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We could probably do an entire separate thread about the retailers and VARs.

Smalldog
Shreve Systems
MacMall
MacZone
MacWarehouse
CDW
Programmer's Paradise

I have catalogs going back to about 1981 on that. TSE/Hardside and Computron (hardware), and Softsel (software) were some early sources. TSE and Computron both vanished, but Softsel went through a couple of mergers and became Merisel. I think they're gone now too.
 
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As the Apple Turns.....a very funny site parodying events in the world of Apple (I think it closed around the year 2001 or 2002 but I'm not sure). I used to read MacCentral and then it became Macworld. Macworld used to be good but it declined greatly (in my opinion) around 2005 so much so that I stopped reading their magazine and then their website completely. The last few times I stopped by their site, it might as well have been called "iPhone World" or "Computer Stories that have a slight connection to Apple World" (a little too wordy).

Mecha
 
MechaSpanky said:
As the Apple Turns.....a very funny site parodying events in the world of Apple (I think it closed around the year 2001 or 2002 but I'm not sure). I used to read MacCentral and then it became Macworld. Macworld used to be good but it declined greatly (in my opinion) around 2005 so much so that I stopped reading their magazine and then their website completely. The last few times I stopped by their site, it might as well have been called "iPhone World" or "Computer Stories that have a slight connection to Apple World" (a little too wordy).
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Oh man, ATAT! That site really had me laughing most days. The only thing remotely close to it is CARS, the Crazy Apple Rumors Site, but that hasn't been updated much if at all since late 2011.

MacCentral used to be an excellent site and probably my first stop every day, especially once Steve took the helm at Apple. In fact, I'm pretty sure I received news of the NeXT buyout and return of Steve via that site. They had a sister print pub called MacWEEK, which was a trade journal similar to Computer Reseller News. You could find stuff in MacWEEK long before it reached the regular print media, plus the ads throughout were great for sourcing stuff for my business.
 
Sill,

I'm just like you. In the late 90's I used to start everyday by reading MacCentral. It not only had Mac-centric news but it also had some good creative tips (how to do things in Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark Xpress, etc.) as well as some good advice on other Mac related topics (like system extension conflicts from the good old days and what not). Do you read Macworld today?

For me, now Macworld is just advertising for certain products instead of news and reviews (if you read some of their reviews many read more like advertising than reviews to me). I also used to read some comments on their forums and I was surprised at the tone of some of the contributors like Jason Snell. From the pieces he had written, he seemed like a decent guy but in the forums some of his comments were rather harsh and didn't seem to be very professional. Now I'm sure that he got and gets lots of crap from people and I'm sure it is tiring but as a professional he should have risen above their level. In fact, I made a post simply stating my opinion and I did so in such a way that wasn't negative nor attacking. He responded with a rather aggressive tone so much so that I felt like he was attacking me. He wasn't the only one, there were also other writers there that I felt didn't display professionalism in their interactions with readers. They often seemed condescending in their posts. I had a certain imagine of the writers based on the stories that they had written but after reading their interactions with readers on the forum I realized that they would be better off simply writing and not interacting with the public. One writer who I taught was good at interacting with readers was Glenn Fleishman. He never seemed combative, angry, or combative in his posts.

Mecha
 
I remember spymac and macnn.

While the latter is still around, their forums seem nearly devoid of any discussions
 
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maflynn said:
I remember spymac and macnn.

While the latter is still around, their forums seem nearly devoid of any discussions
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Spymac... I think that was the one that tried to play "social media" by turning into Ghostwheel or whatever. They were a decent rumors site before the transition. They never recovered.
 
A couple more:

9to5Mac
ThinkSecret

The first is still up, but it appears to be optimized for iPad viewing. I'm not a fan of scroll, scroll, scroll, expand, scroll, repeat ad infinitum. The second site has been gone since mid-2008. I don't remember much of their site.
 
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9to5 is ok
Ars Technica

I don't remember to many Apple news sites, coz i spent most of my time loving my Amiga...
 
It's not a news site per se, but MacInTouch has been an online resource that I've counted on for many years. I believe that it started soon after the WWW in the 90s. BTW, it's fun to go back in time and look at some of these sites via the Wayback Machine.
 
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A phenomenon that I've seen on Mac sites from time to time is when an interesting item pops up on one and rapidly propagates to all the others. Even if the original site is properly cited, the story soon carries more weight because "multiple sites are reporting." Of course, this is not at all limited to the tech world.
 
World of Apple

@ MacRumors staff, I see that https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1155287/ was closed, probably as a duplicate, but I can't find the duplicate. Any ideas?

I secretly enjoyed the matter-of-fact approach to reporting of confidential seed notes. Sill: can you recall, was any other public outlet as leaky?

Most memorable was this, in 2012: Reflecting on Change …

Sill said:
AppleInsider
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Yeah, lots of good stuff, some of which I bookmarked but never read. Today I stumbled into Five years of Apple: 2005 iPod to 2010 iPod touch, page two of which reminds me how and why I loved early versions of iTunes.

PS and Apple launches HTTP Live Streaming standard in iPhone 3.0 – seven years later, not an IETF standard. Does anyone know, is this the protocol that causes streams such as Apple's https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/701/ to be limited to the WWDC app and Safari?
 
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RootBeerMan said:
Macnn closed up shop a month or so ago, sadly. They were a daily read for me.
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I didn't know that - wow. The forums were a shell of their former self but that's still sad

Edit:
Looks like the main site is going dark the but the forums will remain
 
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