Betalogue

A year ago, when the popular troubleshooting site MacFixIt went pro, I immediately subscribed, figuring that the help that the site had provided over the years was well worth it.

Recently, I have received a couple of reminders asking me to renew my subscription. I am afraid I will not renew it. It seems to me that the quality and value of the stuff that has been produced by MacFixIt in the past year or so has been declining. It might be because Ted Landau is no longer directly involved in the site. It might be the format changes. It might be a natural evolution, with Mac OS X becoming the main Mac OS and causing a shift in the very nature of Mac troubleshooting. I don’t know. But I don’t really see MacFixIt as a highly valuable site anymore. It’s still in my “daily bookmarks”, i.e. the sites that I CHECK at least once a day — but it usually takes me a minute or two to CHECK the new stuff, and I very rarely feel the need to explore anything further by reading the comments, etc.

I also almost never visit the site to search the archive of old articles, which is one of the main benefits of HAVING access to the Pro features. As well, some of the “exclusive” Pro stuff has been particularly poor. I specifically remember a “report” on troubleshooting a particular version of Mac OS X that consisted simply of various individual items cut and pasted together on a single page, with no real structure. It hardly qualified as a “report”. (I no longer have access to the reports, so I can’t provide a specific reference.)

I also really don’t like the fact that all the links to individual products provided by MacFixIt go through the VersionTracker web site, with its annoying ads and multiple pages of rather useless junk. When a link says “Download Now”, I expect the download to start now. I don’t want yet another page of ads before the download actually starts. By comparison, when MacInTouch announces a new product or update, they provide a direct link to the product vendor. That’s the way it should be done.

Anyway, the bottom-line is that I did not renew my subscription. The MacInTouch web site, on the other hand, continues to be highly valuable to me, and I gladly sent them a donation when they asked for support a couple of months ago. I hope that they’ll be able to continue without sacrificing either quality or quantity.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, September 8th, 2003 at 11:34 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.