If you know the site xlr8yourmac.com then this is a bad day. After close to three decades of Mac hardware reviews and support, the site appears to have shut down for good.

I've probably only cracked open one Mac in my life, maybe added a video card twice, and haven't touched external SCSI since using a Macintosh IIfx with the funky active terminator. Mike Wuerthele, my co-author on this piece, on the other hand has done things like "shove in more hard drives into a Mac Pro than was thermally and electrically wise" and is our Thunderbolt and external storage guy.

The site that helped us do this, the very hardware-focused xlr8yourmac.com has now gone offline, very recently. We reached out both to ask what has happened, and to express regret that such a long-standing and so very useful site is gone. And yesterday we found out that the email for the site is not taking emails either.

For me, it was actually its daily coverage of support issues that I'll miss. On my list of where to check for what's happening with Apple, I would always look through xlr8yourmac because it broke down every new update on Apple's labyrinthine support site.

Mike used it across the years to upgrade a PowerBook 540c to G3, boost a beige ZIF socket G3 motherboard cluster he constructed for a client to G4, deal with ATA66 issues on the Blue and White G3, and so much more.

We mourn TUAW, MacNN, and all the other Mac sites that have died, mostly slain by Google and Amazon initially giving to boost their own market share, then taking away when they got it. We hate that some of them are zombies now, powered solely by AI and plagiarism.

We lament xlr8yourmac being gone.

Hardware fans' heaven

The site was definitely for hardware tinkering fans — and made by one. For 28 years, Mike Breeden ran the site because he wanted to make it easier for people to get the right upgrades.

"My original goal was to provide more complete and honest reviews of CPU upgrades to help Mac owners make educated buying decisions," Mike wrote back in 1998 on the first anniversary of the site. "I knew first-hand the frustration at the limited amount of pre-sale information available and the time consuming and costly exercise of trial and error buying from my almost 20 years of computer hardware and software experience, dating back to the first 128K Mac in 1984."

"In the beginning I had no idea that the Mac community and manufacturers response would be so overwhelming," he continued.

Mike also said in that 1998 post that he was then working 20 hours a day on the site. Given that this is now nearly three decades ago and he mentioned having been in computing for 20 years, it's possible that he has just retired.

Perhaps it was never likely that a company would take over the site and try to make it commercially viable, given that it is effectively impossible for the above-average user to do anything notable to their Macs for internal upgrades. Surely there is no chance at all that anyone else would spend the time and expend the effort Mr. Breeden has for practically 30 years.

But if this is really the end for xlr8yourmac, it's a sad day. It deserves so much more of a big finish than a single line on its home page.

There is still the Internet Archive. While nothing can now be accessed on the site itself, the Way Back Machine gives us some access to its wealth of posts. It's worth shuffling through if only to see the depth and breadth of his work.

With any luck, if he's still paying even a fraction as much attention to Apple news, Mr. Breeden is reading this. He's reading everyone's outpouring of affection and regret for a site that just seemed to always be there for us. Reach out, we'd love to talk to you.

You don't know what you've got until it's gone. But Mike, thank you for all you did for us.