It's sad but it doesn't surprise me. The magazine market is in collapse, especially tech magazines whose readers are the most likely to have migrated to web based sources of news & info. They went from twice monthly to monthly a while back and there's a definite sense they were struggling to sell advertising space in the last few months.

I still find some of the stuff in it useful but I don't think it disappearing will cause me any trouble, which says everything I think.

I used to subscribe but over time I got rather disgrunttled with the whole thing and stopped years ago.
The main bit that p!ssed me off, and not just with MU, was that some issues it seemed almost entirely about iPhones and that wasn't what I was buying it for.

However, MU will forever be remebered as the conduite through which I ended up here so it wasn't all bad. I also attended several MUMU's which were excellent fun.

Edit:
Just had a look at the MU website and, just under the headline and image (a dead Mac startup icon) there's an add encoruaging people to subscribe to MU and 3 issues for £1.
Doh!

I'm a subscriber via the iPad edition. Interested to see what they'll do with refunds for subs in that circumstance.

Jon

That's a shame. As I've said before the magazine has improved a lot since it went monthly and I'll be sad to see it go.

And Dennis seem to be very poor at getting their web act together.

I read it a few times, but I was a PC user and read Shopper and PC Pro until I left the UK.

The magazine market in Germany seems to be more robust, at least at the moment. And heise, the publisher for c't, which is the main magazine I read, has the complete current issue online, you just need to log in using your subscription number and you can read or download any article - although the PDFs protected (you can't copy text out) and the footer has your name on it, which is fine by me. They also have tthe complete back issues online and their website news section is a leader on breaking stories fast.

They also cover all platforms - Mac, Linux, Windows and tablets / smartphones get about equal coverage. I also like their in-depth articles. Reviews of new hardware technologies will be in-depth, written by experts on the subject; so a new Intel processor will be about 10 - 12,000 words with a look at how the different parts of the chip work, what new instructions are available, what they bring, how much power it uses, efficiency, which parts of the chip get hottest etc. The reviews make Tom's Hardware look like amateur hour.

Likewise they have 5 or 6 page spreads on building Rasberry Pi projects or learning new JavaScript libraries, configuring a Linux media server, setting up your own OwnCloud servers etc.

It certainly is worth the money as a twice monthly.

I thínk that is what is going to make a difference in the long term. If you are still going to be able to charge money for a publication, then it needs to bring quality and information that you aren't getting on the free web and that is something that I just can't say about Dennis publications. They seem to be offering a round-up of what is on the web, slower than the rest of the web. Whereas portals like heise, Golem, ZDNet and the like have breaking stories all the time, the Dennis publications seem to have a 10th of the stories, usually slower and with less detail than the others and the number of "breaking" stories or exclusives they have come up with in the last year can be counted on the toes of one hand.

The final copy has dropped through the letter box. No mention anywhere that it is that I can find.

Magazines have like a three month lead time don't they? They probably didn't have any idea when they were producing it.

Editorial about Charlie Hebdo.

Roughly 4 weeks from writing the first page of a monthly magazine it will be on the shelves, the last page can be written only a couple of days before its out. The seeming delay is because the current magazine usually pretends to be next month's, or even two months ahead, to increase shelf life.

For example the magazine about stuff happening in October will be out in November and pretend to be a December edition.

Letter from their subs people today - any outstanding subs are being passed on to MacFormat.

Well that's a complete pile. I'd bet the vast majority of MacUser subbers are also MacFormat subbers already. If they aren't, they probably aren't by choice. Refund or GTFO.

Jon

Today, the MacUser website looks like this:

Still haven't had any word from them about getting a refund on my digital sub.

It's now redirecting to the expert reviews website,