PCWorld Magazine Is No More 164
harrymcc writes "After slightly more than 30 years, PCWorld — one of the most successful computer magazines of all time — is discontinuing print publication. It was the last general-interest magazine for PC users, so it really is the end of an era. Over at TIME, I paused to reflect upon the end of the once-booming category, in part as a former editor at PCWorld, but mostly as a guy who really, really loved to read computer magazines."
PC World - More Ads then the Internet! (Score:4, Informative)
Good riddance to it I say!
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Agreed, even if it wasn't full of ads, printing a paper magazine to discuss multimedia machines that could better display the content is insane.
Paper computer magazines haven't made any sense for quite a while now.
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Agreed, even if it wasn't full of ads, printing a paper magazine to discuss multimedia machines that could better display the content is insane.
Paper computer magazines haven't made any sense for quite a while now.
Well, when Linux Journal went paperless, I dropped my subscription. I own an eReader and there's a lot of stuff I'd rather read that way, but technical magazines are an exception.
PCWeek's website has always been pretty useless to me, however. I haven't actually laid hands on the print edition for a long while, but it used to be a lot better compared to its online edition.
Re:PC World - More Ads then the Internet! (Score:5, Interesting)
Good riddance to it I say!
Ah, but in the early days, the ads were the best part. I rarely even bothered to read the articles. When each issue arrived, I would open it up to the cheap yellow "tombstone" ads near the back. You could run an ad there for $100/month. There was always some fascinating new gizmo that some guy was making in his garage and advertising there. After a month or two, most of the products disappeared, but some of them grew into successful startups. Reading those ads was like watching the history of technology unfold.
Re:PC World - More Ads then the Internet! (Score:5, Interesting)
Completely agree - I fondly remember picking up Computer Shopper to see what the best deals were for buying cheap memory, hard drives, etc. Zines like Byte and PCWorld were ok for general purpose reading, but Dr Dobbs was one of my favs for programming. Along with 2600 and Phrack for stuff on the fringes.
Thanks for the memories - I hate to say it, but today's tech is nowhere as exciting as those wild-west days were. I feel privileged to have been part of that.
Now get off my lawn!
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Yup, I would read PC Magazine for the reviews of software/hardware I was considering buying, although often I wouldn't purchase the Editor's Choice for one reason or another. Computer Shopper is where I would actually look to buy it. Dr. Dobbs I read for the technical articles, and kept forever because I would often want to use some algorithm I had read a year or two prior (or more).
All that stuff I use the web for today, and of the bunch, I miss Dr. Dobbs the most, but I find most of what I'm looking for
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Anyone for Compute! 8 bits should be enough for everyone.
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Re:PC World - More Ads then the Internet! (Score:4, Insightful)
I loved it for the game demo cds that came with it.
Re:PC World - More Ads then the Internet! (Score:5, Interesting)
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They died off because all the kind of user who would have read that mag is the kind of user who would replace a PC with a locked-down toy tablet.
Re:PC World - More Ads then the Internet! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:PC World - More Ads then the Internet! (Score:5, Informative)
around here it was just not being outdated that killed them. some local magazines were first to go online and being up to date. like this one magazine I used to subscribe to.
what killed them(for me and majority of subscribers) was that when computers went really mainstream in late '90s they went totally mainstream with their articles - this ended up in them having just shit for content. all they have now are some fluff reviews, nothing about how to do cool stuff and full page images. the same magazine that had 10 years earlier articles about c64 coding, assembly, basic, interfacing hw to computers, really soulful honest game reviews, detoriated to a magazine that had yearly printer reviews, yearly monitor reviews - and the text for those pieces could have been the same from year to year. somewhere along the line they even dipped the bottom of the barrel and started doing "full" game reviews based on fucking screenshots, in order to "compete" while in reality I or other readers wouldn't have cared shit if the games they reviewed were 6 months or even a year old as long as they reviewed them properly. they should have kept writing for the computer hobbyists, since the computer non-hobbyists aren't going to read their fucking magazine - offline OR online. the fuckers even changed the paper to some glossy variant that doesn't flame up easily so couldn't even light up the stove for the sauna with it if the issue was just bullshit...
but non-hobbyists so called casual computer users are a bigger market so they tried to steer the magazine toward them... failing miserably along the way. and now that same fucking magazine wants me to pay 1 euro - I'm not kidding - for reading a single article online. FUCK EM.
I mean, that magazine had the guts to do a game review this short back in the day: "shi**y clone of commando". on print - and apparently that was enough to say about the game and I believed the review, it seemed honest. now later they didn't dare to criticize any game that harshly, everything is at least "ok" and they spend paragraphs justifying how someone casual might like the game or just outright praising the game without seeing it play nor playing it.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:PC World - More Ads then the Internet! (Score:4, Insightful)
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New? New? Mags have been doing that since at least the late '80s and probably before that.
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Yep, just like he's talking about, just not with the old computer mags. I saw that a lot when I did some project in fifth grade (1989-1990) that involved cutting pictures out of old magazines my teacher had saved. Can't remember which, but probably women's magazines of some type.
No worries (Score:5, Funny)
PCWorld can just rename itself MobileWorld or CloudWorld or SocialWorld and it will be thriving again!
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It's strange, for some reason, Pen Computing Magazine has always been a niche publication: http://www.pencomputing.com/ [pencomputing.com] --- guess they missed out when they picked the wrong part of the device for their name --- wonder how theyd've faired if they'd named themselves ``Tablet Computing Magazine''.
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TabletCloud Magazine. There's a winner right there!
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Another nail in the PC coffin. Wake me when it's time to spread the ashes.
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Guess you've never been to a cremation. At least not one in the western world.
Re:No worries (Score:4, Funny)
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I'll go with SocialWorld, seems like most have gone that way, including DrDobbs. Now that I think about it, even the Embedded magazine went to child like hell as well and is no more. Even EETimes, is just globalist social fluff.
Re:No worries (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No worries (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but even so - everyone will expect it to be free.
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If only Linux format would get a US distributor or hire some US staff to do a US region version, I might actually subscribe! That's the closest thing to LinuxDesktopWorld.
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For the last few years it HAS been essentially Mobile World. There's more articles about "apps" than desktop software. Of course, that's because the mass market people actually buy apps but tend to not actually purchase software.
For a while there they were Blackberry World and seemed aimed at wannabe entrepreneurs/SOHO users.
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Yeah, because look how well that strategy worked for PC/Computing Magazine!
Oh wait...
Figures (Score:5, Insightful)
Sad, but no great loss... (Score:5, Insightful)
For at least 15 of those 30 years, it read more like Computer Shopper, anyway. I mourned it a long time ago.
Re:Sad, but no great loss... (Score:4, Informative)
For sure, but what did it for me was their reviews and how good competitive products never made it in to the group being reviewed and things that were highly rated took a beating on end user reviews.
Re:Sad, but no great loss... (Score:5, Informative)
For sure, but what did it for me was their reviews and how good competitive products never made it in to the group being reviewed and things that were highly rated took a beating on end user reviews.
To be included in the comparison, and even to get high ratings, you had to buy ads in the magazine. I worked for a company that ran ads in PCWorld in the 1980s and 1990s. The ad salespeople would come right out and say that if you increased your ad budget, they would make sure you were "taken care of" in the reviews. So we increased our ad spending. We were more interested in being rich than ethical.
Re:Sad, but no great loss... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Sad, but no great loss... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes, but ComputerShopper at articles too...now if NewEgg had some staff doing howto's and informative articles....
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Yes, but ComputerShopper at articles too...
Riiiight .... I read Computer Shopper for the articles. Yeah, that's the ticket, the articles.
I used to buy quite a bit from NewEgg. Before they charged me a $350 restocking fee for an unopened extra switch that had been ordered for a project. Amazon Prime gets it here faster anyway.
Re:Sad, but no great loss... (Score:5, Funny)
I loved computer shopper. Not the souless glossy pamphlet that it became. The real computer shopper was 300+ pages of nothing but ads all printed on cheap pulp paper, heavy enough to make phone books jealous and mailmen cry.
It was a cheap source of paper and weight when in need, like when you are sitting on the toilet and notice your short of a vital component. Got a computer shopper, your covered. Need something to hold your ass down when a hurricane winds a blowing, your covered. Got a body to sink and got no cement, your covered.
Damn I miss that book, but I'm sure glad my ex wife missed when she threw one at me.
Not to be confused with Personal Computer World (Score:2)
Not to be confused with Personal Computer World, or PCW. The earliest and best UK computer magazine, that already died in 2009.
Re:Not to be confused with Personal Computer World (Score:5, Informative)
I ended my subscription to that back in the 90s when they chose to ignore anything non-Windows.
It used to have great reviews as well as technical articles and many pages of program listings in a wide variety of languages for many different platforms. There were tutorials on things like the maths behind 3D graphics and fractals, CPU architectures (there was once a superb one on the Motorola 68000 family), ARM assembly language (when the Archimedes was kicking the PeeCee's butt), you name it.
Then it turned into a Windows PeeCee shopping magazine with how-to-change-your-Windows-background-picture articles...
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You forget MacByter, sadly missed.
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Ain't that the truth. The glory days were certainly the early 80s, when all varied home computers were being released. I treasured the copies with the first reviews of the ZX80, ZX81 and the BBC Micro and so on. Very sad when I had to part with them.
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I suspect as their circulation was shrinking, the power of the advertisers became stronger, and it may even have been that the front page was paid for by the featured beige box manufacturer.
It is such as shame, as back in it's glory days, every front cover was a work of art, either illustrated, or artful photography.
Good riddance (Score:4, Insightful)
Over the last 30 years, its editors got in bed with whatever comapny was big at the time and therefore apid the most for ad space (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nokia, etc.)
So much for unbiased journalism. PC World, aong with PC Mag, epitomized an era where ad dollars literally bought favorable reviews.
What EA, Ubi, Activision and others did to printed gaming mags was peanuts in comparison.
Just Gotta Say It (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just Gotta Say It (Score:5, Funny)
Like that joke hasn't been made 2600 times before
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http://www.2600.com/ [2600.com]
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RUN away! RUN away!
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Yes, like getting the whole FAMILY involved with COMPUTING, or a FAMILY AND a HOME OFFICE involved with COMPUTING Think of the ANTIC's one could have.
B'bye (Score:5, Funny)
I can't say I'm sorry to see it go. It was like reading a car magazine that explains that cars have four tires in every article.
Re:B'bye (Score:5, Informative)
Many cars have 5 tires.
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A car with 5 tires also has four tires.
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John C. Dvorak was in PC Magazine, not PC World.
Upgrading? (Score:5, Informative)
Suddenly millions of people cried out at once when they realized they haven't used a PC expansion slot in over 5 years.
The "PC enthusiast" scene has been quietly dying for years.
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The "PC enthusiast" scene has been quietly dying for years.
As the technology matures, there's less and less to be enthusiastic about. It moves from technology frontier to everyday to mundane. Sure, there are PC enthusiasts just like there are car enthusiasts, but their numbers are nowadays tiny compared to the number of cars and PCs out there, respectively. Car enthusiasts, for some reason, are slightly higher in relative abundance, it'd seem, than PC enthusiasts. Perhaps understanding cars, especially old cars, takes a bit less brains?
Re:Upgrading? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Im not so sure that PC enthusiasts are down, I just think there is a larger audience of PC users today then when it was still a hobby and therefore it seems small. at one point we were the big fish in a small pond, now we are the small fish in a big pond
In terms of hardware I'm pretty sure it's down, there used to be a lot more to tinkering with your PC. Today you grab a motherboard, slap in a quad core, single high end gaming card, 16GB RAM and a SSD and call it pretty much done for a moderate enthusiast build. For every component in my PC there's s reasonably priced upgrade if I'd care enough to want it and I couldn't really be arsed to overclock it because if there's any instability it'll be the nagging doubt that it's because of my overclock. It is dim
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Yeah, just like you used to buy a 386 board, slap in a CPU, a multi-IO card, some manner of video card, as much RAM as you could afford or make use of, and the largest IDE hard drive that you could get your wallet around. If you liked games or maki
Re:Upgrading? (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, the good old days! The most insane overclock I ever saw back in 486 days was a friend of mine who dragged his 386 around to play a bit of Doom. We were all running 486DX33 / 486DX66 machines which powered through Doom and figured the 386 would be a pretty poor contender - right until he fired it up and loaded the game. It was screaming along as well as the 486s were, and that's when he told me he had overclocked it to something like 99mz. He reckons it took ages to find a chip he could do that to, but there were tons of them at his work no longer in use so he swapped them in and out till he found a really good one :D
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You are just a bit early for the PC enthusiasts to be equal to the car enthusiasts. Cars are over 100 years old now and PC's are just over 30.
PC's of today are where cars were back in the 1980's They have started to move away from things that we build and tinker with and into the buy what you need and take it to a specialist to fix. The real enthusiasts will still be building systems just as the real car enthusiasts are still building and working on cars. The next step is the true customization phase. Custo
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A Quibble (Score:4, Informative)
It is mischaracterized as "the last general-interest magazine", as at least when I last read it, over a decade ago now, it was quite MSWind centric. It didn't even cover Apple.
Admittedly, i didn't make a large sample at that time, but that was merely to confirm that it hadn't change. Byte and Dr. Dobbs were much more general interest (though Dr. Dobbs was a bit technical for that description).
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It didn't even cover Apple.
They had some articles on apple [magportal.com] and even linux [magportal.com].
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IIRC it'd been basically Windows-centric since several months after Windows 95's release. After that point I stopped seeing anything about MS-DOS or OS/2.
Advertising (Score:5, Funny)
Next up : TIME? (Score:5, Insightful)
Over at TIME, I paused to reflect upon the end of the once-booming category...
Tick-tock, TIME, tick-tock...
Scheduled print periodicals (Score:1)
There are very few topics which justify scheduled print at this point. It's important, for example, to have print newspapers so kidnappers can confirm in photograph that their hostage is alive today and not a fortnight ago.
end of second era (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know what you are talking about. I assembled a new computer just last year. It is far less challenging than it used to be since today most things are integrated on the motherboard. But at least I can still have my choice of graphics card, CPU, RAM, disk, etc.
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It's pretty easy to slap a mobo into a case and maybe some cards and call it building a PC.
In the day I can recall BYTE magazine running a series of articles that published the schematics to a computer you could actually assemble from parts at home. You needed to actually place all the resisters, ICs, and gubbins on the board, and solder it all together and hopefully get a working machine from that.
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I used to play with TTL chips and breadboards to make circuits out of gates. The thing is at the levels of integration used today you are not going to be able to build even the I/O chips by yourself. The best you can hope is to program an FPGA into doing what you want.
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By that definition, there never was an era of the PC because virtually nobody who wasn't a professional understood what the computer was actually doing once CPU's got more complex than the 4004. The same goes for memory and clock speed, whether hobbyists or early adopters, nobod
Not surprising (Score:2)
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Gordon Mah Ung, he's even more annoying than Dvorak!
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That's sad, they still do a Linux article now and then akin to "here's how to install ubuntu".
Does Computer Power User still have a Linux column?
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Something for the weekend, Sir ? (Score:2)
I'm a former subscriber (Score:3)
I had a subscription to PC World for a few years in the mid '90s. It was a pretty good mag back then, although even then I could detect a bias towards corporate purchasing types in at least some of the content. As time went on it had less content and more ads. My mother bought me a couple issues fiveish years ago and there wasn't much left of what I remembered. It'd gotten dumbed-down quite a bit, but that probably has something to do with the democratization of computing.
BYTE & Creative Computing Magazines (Score:3, Interesting)
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I still miss Creative Computing to this day. It was a fantastic magazine--one of a kind, really. You'll never find anything like that ever again, that's for sure! Program listings, discussion of algorithms, along with the "Standard" reviews and opinions. It was truly one for the ages.
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BYTE, Creative Computing and Dr. Dobbs were my crack back then, especially Dr. Dobbs since I am a programmer. I don't miss PC Mag. It was irrelvant even back then, and more so after the internet took off. Why do I want to read an article that is 3 months out of date on which printer I should buy (surprise, it was always one with a lot of advertising in that issue, often right next to the 'article') ? Don't even get me started on those idiots, Pournelle and Dvork.
Big Deal (Score:2)
Fond memories (Score:2)
I was always too poor to afford any of the things written about in PCWorld or PCMag, but I had subscriptions that became sort of like the big wish book of old, where I dreamed of one day owning a Coleco Adam or Ti994A.
At that time, I actually had no computer at all. One of my friends got a complete Gateway 486DX2-66 system with a laser printer back when that sort of kit cost $5000. She would print stuff off usenet and use reams of paper just because she could. That her parents could drop 5G on a comput
Sad To See Them Go (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to work for a competitor of theirs (Windows Magazine), but I'm sad to see them go. Not PC World in general, but the "computer magazine" market in particular seems to have slid downhill a lot. As for the PC World staff goes, I sympathize a lot. I actually went through 2 shut downs with Windows Magazine. The first when we were called in by marketing, told we had a "great product but they didn't know how to sell it" so they were shutting us down. We went web-only and I remained on to work on their website. The second when a last-minute company-wide phone conference was called (never a good sign) and we were told that they were moving away from making their own content and would just rebrand others' content.
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To install the security updates, I guess.
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I react to this news in much the same fashion I will presumably someday react to the passing of Abe Vigoda.
I'm fairly certain that Abe Vigota will never die, and is likely already several hundred years old.
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Finally! Official confirmation.