I wanted to throw this out there after a rather passionate discussion this morning with my office "cube neighbor" who is also a long-time Mac user. The topic of the discussion was around the Media supporting the Mac Culture. Not the On-Line media, but the print media. MacWorld, Mac|Life and others.
Dare I say those media sources where you have that full tactile experience of fresh paper sticking between finger and thumb as you flip through the pages. Yes, yes, being green and saving paper and all that aside, I was feeling a bit jipped this past week which is what sparked the conversation in the first place.
You see I commute from New Jersey into Manhattan every day of the week. In my efforts to being a bit more "Green" I decided that public transportation was much better all around to driving in and out of the city. The thing is, that with my focus not needed for driving I have found that I can digest more material into my brain on a weekly basis. I don't want crap, I want substance. So I got a subscription to TIME. I must say that this is the perfect "Weekly" to get. It takes me a full week of commuiting to chug through consuming every page of information. By the time Friday rolls around and I have set the current edition in the recycle pile another is on my desk ready for Monday morning's commute.
This week on Monday, I was pleased to arrive home and find my new edition of Mac|Life (Formerly Mac Addict). This week was going to be a little different as I had something to read I was going to enjoy. Tuesday morning I left the TIME in the bag and grabbed the Mac|Life on the bus. Wednesday morning I was back to TIME. Why? Well I had finished Mac|Life in what amounts to a total of 1 hour of commute time! WTF?!?! I have to wait another month for the next one.
Why is this I pondered, why is it that of these two magazines of comparitive size physically I can get through one in a day and the other in a week? I wanted my week's worth of Mac information. After all they have a damn month to put this together, not a week like TIME. Sure, scale, a pool of journlistic contributions to pull from yada yada yada..... but there has to be more to it. It has to be something lacking in the content.
That is when it hit me. Content. Mac|Life has content, but I now know that it is not the content that I want. It is geared more to the newer Mac Owner who is excited by large pictures and lots of colorful eye candy surrounding the articles, reviews, help colums and user feedback areas. Then there is the 10's of pages of Advertisements from Mac retailers. Look, if that is your thing, fine. I want more content. MacWorld attempts this to some degree, but there is a large chunk of their pages filled with reviews of products, which honestly I think should be left on-line for research and not in a physical magazine format.
There is one Mac Magazine that comes close to giving me what I want, however, it is more about keeping it as a reference source for everything you use on the Mac. That is iCreate; a British publication that is damn expensive and physically larger than it's U.S. counterparts. They do a very good job of breaking the Magazine into sections that focus on the "newbie" and the iLife suite before diving deeper into the Mid/Heavy production user by focusing on thier "Pro" Apps (Aperture, FCP/FCE etc).
Right now, iCreate is my favorite Mac Magazine, hands down, but at US$ 16.00 (with tax) per issue, it is damn expensive. No matter what, I will still get this magazine as the tips and how-to's alone are worth the $$. The only thing I wish they would give you as well is a small widget or something that would allow you to do a key-word search and provide you with the edition that a specific artile was in that addressed that topic. Like "show me all articles that contained 'Command + Unix + Terminal" and have it list out the editions that these keywords were present in.
Anyhow, I have decided that what is missing is a Mac magazine that gives me content, that I can read through, digest and maybe even spark some interesting thoughts around. Give me case studies on businesses and individuals who are using Macs in ways that I may not be thinking of. Tell me about the 12 year old aspiring film maker in Idaho who found that by setting up X-Grid on his families various Mac's he was able to render his Final Cut Express movies in 1/2 the time with better quality. Give me real-life, real substantial "Switch" stories of how a small Law Firm replaced all of their PeeCee's and stand alone Microsoft 2003 Server with an X-Serve/Raid package. Show me how they may see a return on investment based on Support Cost savings, Outage/Failure statistics, Remote Compute capabilities/Solutions. Show me Content....
So the question is.... What is your favorite Mac Magazine (Non-Online based)? And why? If there are failings in your current source, what would you want to see in a Mac Magazine? Am I alone in this thinking?
