Apple news site MacNN is shutting down on July 1

MacNN, a website that has been devoted to coverage of all things Apple for more than 20 years, will be closing down on July 1.

MacNN (Macintosh News Network) editor Charles Martin today delivered the news in a post on the site entitled, “End of the road for MacNN: 21 years of changes for Apple, and for us.”

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“It’s kind of amazing we made it this far — only TidBITs and Macworld are older and still around — but we’ve been told we’re packing it in,” Martin wrote. “We’ve joked before that Apple becoming a huge mainstream company is the worst thing that ever happened to us, but it’s true: there’s less need for an Apple-specific news site when news about Apple is plastered everywhere, on every site, all the time.”

Martin doesn’t make clear the exact reasons for closure of the site, which opened in 1995 when there was just one development platform to cover — Mac OS. But it’s certainly true that these days, with Apple as big as it is, news about the company and its products can be found on plenty of other Apple news sites, as well as on more general technology news websites (like this one) and on traditional news outlets. It isn’t always easy to stand out.

Other Apple-oriented sites “have never been thought of as our competition, more a part of a larger family,” Martin wrote. Even so, Apple news isn’t a limited and precious commodity aimed at a small pool of users and followers, as it once was, and the audience for advertisements is not as distinctive.

In the age of Business Insider, BuzzFeed, and the Verge, some smaller technology media outlets have struggled to keep their doors open. Last year, Gigaom closed, and ReadWrite was acquired by Wearable World. IDG stopped publishing Macworld magazine in 2014, although Macworld’s website lives on.

San Francisco-based MacNN (owned by MNM Media LLC) began in late 1995, and it still has lively forums.

“We’ll be around through the end of the month, and we hope you’ll stay here until then — we plan to continue our coverage of major Apple news, though we’ll be ratcheting down our columns and such,” wrote Martin, a former Apple employee who has been editor of the site since 2010.