Goodbye to Cult of Mac Magazine

By

Cult of Mac magazine last issue cover
Sadly, it's time to say 'bye' to Cult of Mac magazine.
Photo: Cult of Mac

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.

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