Unfortunately this is the last issue of Cult of Mac Magazine.
We launched Cult of Mac Magazine back in September 2013 and have published 411 weekly issues since then. Yes, 411 issues!
Highlights include a cover made especially for us by Susan Kare, the designer of the original Mac’s icons, and a string of great-looking magazine covers by Ste Smith, a former staffer.
But declining readership, competition from news apps and difficulty getting advertising has led us to retire the publication. It’s been a great run, but it’s time to shut up shop.
Cult of Mac Magazine was a weekly news magazine devoted to the world of Apple. Every Saturday, we published a digest of Cult of Mac stories in an iPad-friendly format. It included a mix of news, features, product reviews, app roundups and killer how-tos. We had a weekly “Ask a Genius” column, in which a genuine Apple Genius answered technical questions.
The Magazine was intended to take advantage of Apple’s Newsstand, a virtual newsstand app. But Newsstand never took off and Apple replaced it in iOS 9 with its News app, and we continued to publish as a stand-alone app.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen readership slowly decline, especially with apps like Apple’s News+ and Flipboard, which do a great job of aggregating content from lots of different publishers. And of course, there’s Facebook and Twitter as well. Ironically, as readership of the Magazine declined, we saw readership in the News+ app pick up.
It’s too bad, because I think the Magazine was the best way to read Cult of Mac. It was published using some beautiful software from TapJet, which includes great animations and page transitions. The app is easy to browse and navigate. The artwork looked great. The posts really popped.
But it never got the traction it deserved, so it’s time to close it down.
I’d like to thank everyone who read the Magazine. Thanks for your support over the years.
Sincerely, Leander.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
