Laptop Mag Is Shutting Down

Laptop Mag, a tech publication that began in 1991 as a print magazine, is shutting down after nearly 35 years. The Verge reports: Laptop Mag has evolved many times over the years. It started as a print publication in 1991, when Bedford Communications launched the Laptop Buyers Guide and Handbook. Laptop Mag was later acquired by TechMedia Network (which is now called Purch) in 2011 and transitioned to digital-only content in 2013. Future PLC, the publisher that owns brands like PC Gamer, Tom's Guide, and TechRadar, acquired Purch -- and Laptop Mag along with it.

"We are incredibly grateful for your dedication, talent, and contributions to Laptop Mag, and we are committed to supporting you throughout this transition," [Faisal Alani, the global brand director at Laptop Mag owner Future PLC] said. Laptop Mag's shutdown follows the closure of long-running tech site AnandTech, which was also owned by Future PLC. It's not clear whether Laptop Mag's archives will be available following the shutdown.

Oh please!

[PPH]

Don't tell me that "A.I. Weekly" is going out of print. We just got a new puppy.

Surprised they lasted this long actually

[TWX]

A whole lot of print publications that later went hybrid and then online-only didn't make it even five years past the end of their print versions. It's surprising that they managed to go over a decade without closing up.

And to be frank about it, I'm surprised that the lights are still on at all here on Slashdot. Can't sign-up for new accounts anymore, they're clearly not trying to keep the site alive through new users, and it wouldn't surprise me if one day I go to pull up the URL and instead get a thanks-for-all-the-fish message.

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[rsilvergun]

I thought you could still register but you had to manually contact the admins. Not that I can imagine anyone bothering.

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[TWX]

If you have to contact the admins to justify yourself rather than even being as simple as pre-signing-up through a web form and then the admins reviewing signups to approve then that's only one step from not being able to sign up at all.

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[Baloo Uriza]

Ever since this site came off using open source Slashcode to whatever weirdness they're using now, things have been so fragile I'm just expecting Drew to get drunk and manage to delete Slashdot's YROtab.

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[DrXym]

The funny thing is this site receives a lot of traffic but minimal effort has gone into keeping it up to date. I only recall one UI revamp when it sort of went web 2.0, but not by a lot which is what we have now. It must be profitable, or aught to be profitable.

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[Baloo Uriza]

It'd probably do better if BeauHD wasn't so incompetent and there was, you know, actual moderation and handing out bans on the right-wing extremists, homophobes, racists and other assorted wastes of oxygen this site's managed to gather in its neglect.

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[drinkypoo]

Wait, they went from Slashcode to something else and somehow managed to not implement whitelisted Unicode text?

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[Baloo Uriza]

And still has the asinine limit on friend/foe count

Re: Surprised they lasted this long actually

[ArmoredDragon]

Future PLC is just another content mill. The "tech" sites they buy end up becoming consumer electronics review sites that follow the same basic formula: Have freelance journalists write up reviews for products they've in all likelihood never touched before, and rely on SEO, ads and affiliate links to drive revenue. The content may even be written by AI, with or without the publisher's knowledge, but it doesn't really matter who wrote it because it's still shit either way, and always was even before chatgpt.

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[kackle]

An old high school classmate recently died of colon cancer. I happened to see his obituary in the paper; a fellow nerd, he had the intestinal fortitude (pardon my perverse pun, Bob) to have it say "So long, and thanks for all the fish."

It's hard to draw an audience for laptop content

[ipX]

Back in the 90s and early 2000s especially with the advent of gaming laptops, there were plenty of opportunities. Post-covid, where laptops became ubiquitous tools, the enthusiasm for and novelty of laptop journalism content just isn't there anymore. With the lack of transparency around throttling and wattage on any given model and the days of custom BIOS mods and GPU ROMs being pretty much over, technically elite hardcore enthusiasts are few and far between. Without a sizeable community to tweak and push the boundaries of the hardware, consumerism and commoditization is all that's left. I've contributed to and run multiple laptop-oriented websites/forums and the pointy-haired corporate owned ones sank years ago due to rapid declines in traffic and advertising revenue. There's probably a bit of generative AI-caused deth knell in here too for laptopmag, as getting paid for web content just doesn't seem to be all that viable unless you have a rabid subscriber base.

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[TWX]

Stuff I've wanted to know hasn't been readily available for a long time anyway. I want to know things like:

• maximum brightness, if the screen is legible outdoors in full sun
• battery life at maximum brightness
• If the keyboard still has physical pgup/pgdn keys or not
• max effective speaker loudness
• how upgradable the RAM is
• how the rear corners are, in terms of trying to actually use it on a lap

Some of this stuff can be found out through vendor sources but a good chunk of it can be a PITA to find without getting h

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[ipX]

That's a reasonable point. I failed to mention that along with the mainstreaming/commodification of laptops and the resulting consumerist orientation, technically oriented reviews have essentially evaporated and so the quality of current laptop journalism is generally abysmal. That kind of deep technical info is exactly what I would try and enumerate on the sites that I ran myself, but compiling that info is tedious and while it leads to high quality content, the page goes stale in a year or two after the n

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[TWX]

It's not that reddit is completely useless, but I have found that since it doesn't generally take even the minimal effort of signing-up for a specific-purpose forum in order to start commenting, there's a lot of people suffering the low-knowledge stages of the Dunning-Kruger Effect weighing in with uninformed opinions on subjects that think they're contributing something meaningful. Because their account allows them access to virtually the whole site (as so few subforums are restricted and the nature of th

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[TWX]

If the voters are experiencing their own entry-level Dunning-Kruger Effect, then they are possibly voting because it simply sounds good, not that it's actually correct. They have been convinced, but whether that convincing is because the information is actually good is another matter.

If we could tell when people were actually worth listening to versus just being able to sound good, we wouldn't have the sorts of problem with how we choose leadership that we have either.

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[DrXym]

I'm sure it's not just laptops but a general malaise across most print media. I can't remember the last time I bought a magazine. I know I purchased stacks of them in the 90s, not just computer ones but other subjects. In the early 2000s I still bought a few but mostly for cover disks. I think the only other magazines I bought were some magazines when I commuted by train for a bit. Not just magazines but news papers. I used to buy the Sunday Times in the UK because it was literally an inch thick with so man

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[Bert64]

Exactly this... Nowadays everyone already has a portable device capable of reading up to date content anytime anyplace. Buying a paper magazine or newspaper from the few places that still sell them and then carrying it around is massively less convenient. The only people doing this are generally the elderly who dont know how to use the newer technology, and obviously those people become fewer every year.

laptop advertising? anyone?

[evanwolf]

Which laptop companies are going to sponsor laptop journalism for the English reading markets? Advertising doesn't cut it. Underwriting? Corporate subscriptions to newsletters?

"Laptop Mag Is Shutting Down"

[SeaFox]

Really? You had "folding" right there for the taking.

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[kackle]

"Shutting Down" does fit here, but yours is funnier.