Update July 17, 2025: MacInTouch is back in a “limited form with a new Cloudflare firewall system for more protection against cyberattacks and abuses.”
Eight months ago, I wrote about the closure of the iMore website. Today, as I opened up my tabs of various Apple-related websites, I saw this post from Macintouch:
According to the Wikipedia entry for Macintouch, the business of running the site has been challenging for Ric Ford for a number of years now. In the post above, he cites rising costs as a result of bot attacks and content scrapers. There’s more discussion on what website operators have to deal with in 2025 on the TidBits forum.
Macintouch has been in operation more or less non-stop for the past 31 years. That’s just a bit longer than I’ve been running tow.com myself. When I started a few months later in 1995, I ran my own server, first with hand-coded HTML and SHTML files, later with a custom PHP backend that I had written. I even hosted my own WordPress installation for many years before deciding to migrate hosting responsibilities over to WordPress.com.
I remember the days when search was actually good, and how my blog posts were indexed quite high for certain search terms. Today, it’s a crapshoot. I find myself wondering if the site I’ve landed on is legitimate, a content farm reprinting another article, or some AI-generated slop that’s capitalizing on keywords. LLMs like ChatGPT can be better, but I’m constantly on guard against their hallucinations.
Reddit discussions are more lively and seem to be populated by real people, but I fear the time when it gets overrun by bots. It’s already happened, but was that a one-time occurrence or is it happening on a larger scale?
Happy retirement, Brent!
Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame recently posted that he’s retiring. He says he’ll continue to write software (free and open source) but that he’s no longer “working for money anymore.”
Back in 2009, I was working with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.com. Brent was building an iPhone application for us to grab headlines and post content from the website — which was the first WordPress VIP customer at the time.
When I left The Wall Street Journal in 2014, one of my last tasks was to ensure all the article links remained active, even as the front pages redirected to WSJ’s tech section. Eleven years later, many of those links still work. Some embedded videos are gone, but the core content has largely survived.
The same cannot be said (right now) of Macintouch. With its pause, past articles, such as this one, now return 404 Page Not Found errors. It’s yet another reminder of the impermanence of the internet. Beloved, long-running sites can vanish overnight, taking decades of knowledge with them.
If this is truly the end of Macintouch, it has been a good run. I hope that Ford has a pathway to gracefully retire the site and do something new. May we all be so fortunate to end our careers on our own terms like Brent… with plenty of time to enjoy the last quarter or last half of our lives.
One week to WWDC
We’re a little over one week away from WWDC 25. Rumor has it Apple will be upping the version number of all their operating systems to the number 26 to coincide with the next calendar year of general availability. So, instead of iOS 19 or macOS 16, we’ll be getting iOS 26 and macOS 26. It’ll be like car model years. Will Apple do the same with its product names? Instead of iPhone 17, will we get iPhone (2025), followed by iPhone (2026) and iPhone (2027)?
If you’ll be attending WWDC or are a member of the wider Apple developer community in the San Francisco Bay Area, note that I’m hosting a pre-WWDC 26 get together on Saturday, June 7, 2025, in San Pedro Square in San Jose. You can RSVP for the free event here. Whether you’re a first-time attendee or a seasoned Dub-Dub veteran, this gathering is the perfect opportunity to connect with the Apple development community in a relaxed setting before the main event kicks off.
Live near WWDC
Once again, I’ll be helping James and the Breakpoints out with their Live near WWDC concert. Tickets are now available for the show, which will be on Wednesday, June 11, 2025, at The Art Boutiki in downtown San Jose.
tow.com 
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