tow.com

I have a list of Apple-centric websites that I pull up in Feedly or in my browser every day. The list has been fairly static over the past many years, and I am seeing a number of them going dark and ceasing publication. The latest is iMore, which posted last week that it was shutting down for good. Its forum, which I rarely, if ever, browsed, will be closed on November 1, 2024.

• 9to5Mac
• AppleInsider
• MacWorld
• iMore (closed, September, 2024)
• Daring Fireball
• Loop Insight (Dalrymple retired in 2022, and the site is mostly links to his podcast)
• Six Colors
• Cult of Mac
• Macintouch
• iLounge (a shell of its former self)
• MacStories
• Mac Performance Guide
• O’Grady’s PowerPage
• The Sweet Setup Interviews (nothing new since 2022)

As a kid, I had a subscription to MacWeek. I eagerly lapped up the contents every time it appeared in our mailbox. MacUser and MacWorld were also magazines that I picked up from the local bookstore. I think I still have the issue reviewing the Newton somewhere in my childhood home.

Unlike a hard copy of a magazine, websites come with no expectation of permanence. Sites could shut down like iMore, or they could get redesigned such that it’s impossible to find the old articles. One of the things that I’m still proud of was keeping the article archives for AllThingsD active when Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher left The Wall Street Journal for Recode. While the main site continues to redirect to WSJ’s tech home page, the articles themselves remain accessible at their original permalinks. You can still read Walt and Katie Boehret’s 2007 review of the iPhone, which they called a breakthrough handheld computer.

The publishers of iMore say that the site “will stay online so readers can continue to access articles from the archive,” but how long will that last? The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is still useful, but I find its ability to archive the web has seen better days. This very website, tow.com, has been around since 1995. I can go back to 1996 and see, more or less, how it looked like when I was developing software for the Newton. I remember being super proud of the 3-D rendered Newton stylus that adorned the top of the website back then!

Blogs as a whole have been losing traction and eyeballs over the past decade. They have lost ground to podcasts, short-form posts like tweets and toots, and videos. I’ve taken to making videos of my more recent blog posts, because I know I may reach more people via the YouTube algorithm than people typing in tow.com in their browser or seeing my articles in their RSS reader.

Last year, WordPress.com introduced its 100-year domain and hosting plan for the tidy sum of $38K. If you break it down into annual payments, that’s $380 a year for 100 years. Did anyone take them up on that offer?

How much longer will I continue posting, and what will happen to the site when I’m gone? Will my ancestors take over and make it their own? Will the domain registration lapse and someone else will snap up this three letter domain name? Will domains even be a thing in 25 to 50 to 100 years from now? For the first question, I plan to continue to post here for as long as I’m able. As for the others, only time will tell!

Turning our focus to the here and now. Are there any must-read Apple-centric websites that I’m missing out on? Leave your suggestion in the comments section below!