Memory lane.
So I was throwing out a big stack of Macworld and MacUser magazines from about 1993 onto 2002, when I stopped buying Mac rags because they were getting into just completely misleading technical explanations. The tale they tell of Apple is pretty interesting.
It's fascinating to go through this stack in chronological order; Macworld in particular goes from a 300-page monster magazine on the LC III and other fantastic machines (tagline: "Make sure you don't buy an obsolete Mac!") through the lean years into the Steve years -- and all throughout it's getting thinner and thinner. I think the last Macworld I had on my shelf was introducing the G5 with about 89 pages, four of which were dedicated to pictures of the inside of the case. We get it, it's pretty. My personal favourite was the issue introducing PowerPC Performas and asking "what's next after the PowerPC?" I somehow suspect my lean little Macbook Pro would cause their heads to explode had I a time machine.
MacUser died while I was reading MacAddict -- you can watch the page count drop faster than Macworld's until they finally die. I think the last issue I have of theirs was introducing the Apple Pippin ("The $600 Mac?"). A shame, I really liked that magazine.
Both of them have experiments with the Apple clone machines until Jobs kills them off and replaces them with the iMac. Neither seemed really taken with the Newton or HyperCard, I recall -- two of Apple's goddamn most awesome inventions ever and they missed it because they were fretting about DTP, colour correction, video games and OpenDoc! MacWorld also completely missed the ball on the iPod when it came out.
MacAddict has actually been pretty consistent throughout the years. Unfortunately, I stopped reading them when I switched to Linux around 2001, and sometime during that period they lost all semblance of humour (snarky product reviews, Max, the hilarious letters) as well as the high-quality paper and supremely excellent page layout. Ah well... I guess every rebellion has to grow up and conform sometime. They're apparently still publishing; maybe one day I'll live up to my life's goal of having a game shipped on The Disc. The last issue of MacAddict I have implores me to make the switch from OS 9 to OS X. I think I did.
If it ever comes time for computer anthropologists to check magazines for information on the 199x era of Macs, I'm afraid my magazines are no longer sufficient. I did not, however, discard any issues of MacAddict, so at least you can see the spirit us cantankerous bastards had during that time to survive it.
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