By Dan Moren

March 3, 2020 6:41 AM PT

Adios, MacSurfer

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

The venerable Apple news aggregation site MacSurfer has ceased operation:

Dear MHN Readers:

Not seeing a viable future with subscriptions, MacSurfer and TechNN will cease operations effective immediately. Please allow a few weeks to process forthcoming refunds. If need be, subscription inquiries can be addressed to the Publisher at the bottom of the Homepage.

Thanks kindly for your support, and thanks for the memories…

MacSurfer’s Headline News Team

I don’t remember how I started reading MacSurfer—I’m sure Jason or one of my other Macworld colleagues mentioned them to me as a place to check in my earliest days of blogging at MacUser.¹ For many years, they were an invaluable resource, a manageable way to quickly see what was going on in the Apple world without having to subscribe to hundreds of sites and spend literally all of your time trawling headlines.

But as social media and podcasting grew in popularity and RSS and “visiting actual websites” ebbed, MacSurfer struggled to adjust. They attempted a subscription plan, as the above note mentions, but it seemed like it never really caught on. I still loaded up MacSurfer once or twice a week, especially when digging for a topic for my weekly column, but the coverage had gotten much sparser.

Frankly, I’d argue news stories about Apple has become somewhat homogenized over the last decade and a half as well. While there are still plenty of sites devoted to covering Apple, us included, its status as one of the most valuable companies in the world is a far cry from the scrappy upstart it once was. Apple news is now mainstream business news, because as it moves, so moves much of the economy. It’s tougher than ever to find a news story that isn’t covered on a dozen other sites. (Moreover, the company controls its messaging very carefully.)

So another institution of yesteryear bites the dust. I’ll raise a cup of tea to the MacSurfer folks: thanks for all your hard work and good luck in future endeavors.²

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]

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