Well, after the serious decline in quality of articles lately, most notably the two articles in the past two days based on otherwise groundless emails that have been forwarded on to MacRumors (black MacBook Air, the "clean install" Steve Jobs email), not to mention the AppleCare post that is somehow designated "news" (heads up MR, people who bought an iPhone 4 a week after launch may be running out of time to buy AppleCare, better make a new post next week!), I'm officially done with this site.
I'm sorry that you feel this way. We aim to appeal to a wide variety of readers and have gotten excellent feedback from people who went out and purchased AppleCare after our post about it yesterday. If you don't like it, you are free to skip over it. It may not be BREAKING NEWS but it is something that folks who picked up an iPhone 4 last year might want to know. It's certainly more immediately useful than Apple TV-set rumors or something like that.
Regarding the "clean install" email and the black MBA, those are "rumors". We do our best to separate the wheat from the chaff, but that's what this site is about. We take scraps of information and try to put them together into something coherent. We had gotten several emails from people about the black MacBook Air and rather than ignoring them, we offered them (with a huge caveat) to the readers so they can make their own decision.
I followed that post up later in the day with some feedback from within Apple that I feel is very credible -- namely, that Apple tried and failed to make a MacBook Air, so the rumors were half true.
I've really enjoyed it in the past, and had a good time chatting with people on the forums for various topics, but I feel that the management is now more concerned with page clicks and number of articles posted a day than they are about the quality of those articles. I used to love this site because it filtered out the quality rumors from the groundless ones (or at least segregated the groundless ones). But now that everything gets front page treatment, it's just not worth trying to do the filtering myself. I'll let the big tech blogs do that for me.
The black MacBook Air post WAS segregated -- it was on the Mac blog. This isn't AOL. We don't have a big bureaucracy telling us what to write to please the advertisers. Sure, clicks drive advertising dollars and we all need to pay the mortgage, but that's not why we're doing this. Arn has been running MacRumors as a labor of love for 10 years. Eric has been around for a long time too. I'm the third full-time writer. That's it.
We don't do pay-per-post. Anyone who accuses us of that or claims "this post must be advertising" is barking up the wrong tree.
Individuals can differ about where posts should go, or even if they should be written -- we argue plenty about things behind the scenes. But, at the end of the day, we are trying damn hard to put out the best site we can.
As I mentioned earlier in this thread, MacRumors has become another TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog). And it will be joining that site in being deleted from my bookmarks and RSS feed. Which is honestly a shame because there was a time when I thought this was the best Apple site out there.
Sorry you feel that way. Good luck!
But this place clearly has a "Site and Forum Feedback" forum for a reason, and I wanted to provide my feedback as to how MR can avoid driving off readers like me in the future.
We always appreciate thoughtful and direct feedback.
, but I'm sure there are others like me who are feeling the same way.
