Macintouch in the twilight

I’ve read Macintouch for decades. It’s been a living fossil for 15 of those years; Ric passed on RSS and blogs and feeds and permalinks. For a year or two he tried to get permalinks working — which made Macintouch potentially tweetable. Recently those went away, so I wasn’t surprised by today’s announcement …

Thirty years is a long time. The Macintosh computer debuted more than three decades ago, and I've been involved with this revolutionary system and the community around it since 1984. A lot has changed in the meantime. 

… I’ve been constantly engaged, inspired and supported by the MacInTouch community for all these many years, but I think it's time to do something different. 

The revenue that used to sustain MacInTouch has dropped below a viable business minimum, while a plethora of other websites, operating under different business and security models, produces constant Apple news, reviews and commentary.  

The MacInTouch Discussions forum is unique, as far as I know, but it's also unsustainably labor-intensive, and there's no way around that in its current incarnation. 

At this point, my plan is to continue running MacInTouch Discussions and home/news pages at a reduced intensity for a little longer.  But, before long, it will be time for a change - a sabbatical, a new blog, research, development, or something else – I'm not quite sure what yet, but I expect macintouch.com to continue in some form. 

What I am sure of is that I'm enormously grateful for the support, contributions and engagement of this remarkable community over the past three decades, something words can't adequately express. Thank you for all that, for all you’ve contributed, and let's see where the journey goes from here. 

Ric Ford
Editor/Publisher
MacInTouch Inc

I hope he finds a new way to publish and write. Like me the Macintouch community is old and curmudgeonly; it’s been a place that speaks truth and never falls for modern Apple’s too frequent cons.