Long before rumors on Weibo, there was the "MacWeek" journal, an indispensable and utterly beloved read in the '80s and '90s for everyone wondering if the Mac or even Apple itself was going to survive the week.
In the 1990s, US publisher Ziff Davis started up computer magazines in the UK and I was a features editor on one of them. Being part of that corporation meant we did regularly get company-wide emails saying we should all head down to Venice Beach for lunch.
But we also got MacWeek. It was a trade journal that ran from 1987 until — depending on how you count — about 1998.
If you're not already reminiscing about MacWeek, it's only because you didn't read it. And now you can: 183 editions are available in full on the Internet Archive, including the first.
Of course everything in it is now decades old, and rather than being a news source for today, it's a nostalgia engine. It's still absorbing, even if you have to imagine what a huge deal this journal was in its day.
Imagine not reading AppleInsider for week and then catching up with the 100 stories and 200,000 words we wrote in that period in a slow week. That was what MacWeek was like.
There were monthly magazines such as MacUser, which we also got shipped over to London to be devoured. But it was the weekly that was special. When I used to read it, each week would be about 140 pages and back then even the adverts were interesting.
Yet it was the news that kept you coming back. It was always staggering how much information this publication presented, and sometimes it was staggering how it found things out.
Much of the news would be product announcements by various companies, and some of it would be about what Apple had said was coming next. All of that was fine, all of that was even good, but none of that was what you read for.
You might have read it for the occasional article by people like Andy Hertzfeld, who were instrumental in creating the Mac. Hertzfeld wrote about what he called the values and creative magic at Apple, back in 1988.
But that's like saying you read certain magazines for the interviews. With MacWeek, you really read it for Mac The Knife.
MacLeaks
Mac The Knife was the byline for the articles that Apple most did not want written. Or perhaps that Apple management didn't want publicized, but employees did.
It was a gossip column, but a technical one that would detail programming shenanigans more than celebrity affairs and hairstyles. That's not to knock celebrity columns, but Mac the Knife broke stories that sometimes needed to be explained before you'd get them.
That's about 10% of the number of "MacWeek" issues you can now read for free on the Internet Archive.
Such as the unfortunately perhaps apocryphal story, attributed to Mac the Knife, about a secret image embedded in a Mac's ROM. The story goes that an engineer filled up some spare space with an image of himself standing next to posters of various singer/songwriters.
To see the image, you had to know how to use ResEdit — and once more, very long-time Mac users just had a dopamine rush at that name — and nobody was ever going to find. But reportedly, someone told Mac the Knife and it was published in MacWeek.
It's claimed that was in late 1996 or early 1997, and it is definitely the kind of thing that would be uncovered by what Apple referred to as "MacLeak." I'd finished at Ziff Davis UK by then and was over at the BBC which for some reason didn't invest in importing the journal for me.
Unfortunately, the Internet Archive's collection of MacWeek issues doesn't feature that story. It goes up to an edition published on November 11, 1996.
It was actually Ziff Davis that killed it off in the end, citing more rapid ways to get news online, like the then-nascent AppleInsider. It was briefly relaunched in 1998 under the name eMediaWeekly, which had no chance of ever commanding the same love that MacWeek had.
Then it became a mixed Mac and Windows title, so nobody cared about the content any more either.
At the time, it felt like an inevitable closure, it felt as if a certain era was gone and would never come back. That was not just because Apple was changing so much by the end, but the magazine business was, too.
MacWeek depended on advertising, like all printed magazines do. Although there was a subscription, you could easily be eligible for a free one.
Our Managing Editor Mike Wuerthele was officially a subscriber, for instance. He qualified for the free subscription.
He made the mistake of saying "yeah I know computers" on his submarine a few years prior. As a "reward," he got roped in to all kinds of extra duties which are now their own full-time jobs in the military.
Mike's receipt wasn't always timely, as it was to his FPO mailing address, as you might expect. It's hard to deliver mail to an underway submarine frequently.
Whereas sitting in our London offices, looking out over the Thames, it arrived on my desk every single week.
And now here it is again, or at least 183 editions of it, available in full on the Internet Archive. Some of the ads from companies and products past might be your best source of nostalgia.
