MacShrine

To tell you the truth, we’re just not that interested in Apple anymore. Sure we still love all their products and go crazy when they come out, but our poor little minds have clicked and don’t seem to register these stories off new Intel chips as “rumors”.

We’ll hopefully come back properly at WWDC this year where we seriously expect to be WOW-ed. Thanks for your continued readership. If you have any ideas how we can cater to your Mac needs (that no doubt other sites have no taken from us) do let us know. We’re not going anywhere, we’ve been here 5 years and plan to stay at least another 5, we just need some kinda restart.

Okay this is rather embarrassing, we forgot our own birthday! MacShrine was started on 1st November 2003 and so celebrates its 4th birthday erm, a week or two ago. Just wanted to thank all of our readers over the years and we promise to kick the site into gear sometime, it is a bit boring nowadays. So again, thank you thank you!

Just letting you know we’re still here. Just nothing to post really. Expect limited news over the next 2 weeks because we’re busy working on something new and big for the site.

We’ve used too many exclamation marks. It’s banned for the next week! But wasn’t it great to go through an Apple Event and not hear anything about the iPod!

Hope you all had a good two weeks, we definitely did! We shall be back to reporting from tomorrow and we told you nothing major would happen!

We’re taking a break for around 2 weeks from NOW. There will be limited (if any) news and rumor posting during this time. We don’t expect much to happen whilst we’re away anyway - August will be the month to look out for. Take care!

Update: We’re back! Sorry it was a few days more than 2 weeks. We needed a few more days to top up our tans. Did any of you go away anywhere exciting?

We finally got round to fixing up our forums and now MacShrine is pleased to announce the official relaunch of them! So sign up and start posting. There’s already nearly 10,000 posts and close to 1,000 members to keep you company. MacShrine Forums!

We got hacked and the site was turned into a bank phishing scam. Fear not, we’re back! This is the 5th time we’ve been hacked, our password is now 64 characters long! Why us, oh, why us.

Hello everyone, welcome back! We trust you had an enjoyable Easter. We just did some small changes to the site, it’s been the same for practically a year! There is a new slogan, new option on the side called “Random News Story” which does as it says - takes you to a random story, a new category on the side called “Advertising” - because we need the money; and another new category called “Random Stuff” at the bottom which has random MacShrine related stuff which can be quite interesting.

Today the MacShrine team are taking their Easter breaks. No new news will be posted until the 20th April when we return. Hope you all have a happy Easter and we’ll await your return in 2 weeks!

Update: We’re back to normal now!

Then you can still use the old one: feed://www.macshrine.com/feed/. The FeedBurner one just made it easier for us to track statistics.

After numerous requests over the past few months we’ve put the Forums back up. We closed it down back in September so the content isn’t the newest… but once it gets started again it’ll be good as new. All of you who are members already will be receiving en email soon reminding you of your username and details on how to reset your password. We hope to see you all there! There will be even more changes coming in the next few weeks to bring MacShrine back to its former glory.

Could all of you who are subscribed to MacShrine RSS please make sure it’s to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MacShrine. If it’s not then please change it ASAP. It’s just easier for us to track statistics… thanks again!

Update: The redirect should be automatic now to anything who hasn’t changed it manually. Thanks to Stephen for the hint.

In the past week, we’ve received 2657 comments which are spam - that’s nearly 380 a day! Just thought you might be interested… It’s pretty incredible. Just imagine how much spam an even more popular site must get. Apparently 95% of all comments are spam.

Sorry for the lack of update, there hasn’t exactly been much in the way of news and rumors recently…

Yikes, guess someone is a bit jealous of us or something as this is the third time we’ve been hacked. Goodness knows how long it took them to discover our 54 character password (with numbers, upper and lowercase letters, punctuation…). Should we be saying well done or something? No, I thought not…

Update: Site has been fixed as of Tuesday 30th January, 8.54pm.

MacShrine had it’s best ever year in 2006. We received 426,336 unique visitors, 893,266 total visits, 3,158,524 page views and 8,688,278 hits in roughly 362 days (because of downtime and Apple taking our site down). Not bad at all! Once again thank you to everyone who visits and it’s you guys who makes it all worthwhile for us to do this. Here’s to 2007!

MacShrine would like to wish everyone a happy and successful 2007! Just 9 days to go until Macworld which is set to be the best yet. Thanks to all of you for visiting us over the past year, we really do appreciate it. We’ve lots of exciting changes coming early next year so stay tuned!

MacShrine will be experiencing delays in new story updates from today to the 28th December due to staff shortages over the Holiday period. However, we will do our best to stay in the loop and keep you updated!

Update: Hope you all had a great Christmas and holiday, MacShrine is back to normal posting as of today. Seems we didn’t miss anything major in the past week anyway. Only around a week and a bit until Macworld!

Yay! Won’t say much, just thank you to all our visitors over the past 3 years. Special thanks also to the staff and all our online friends and other Mac sites, you keep us going! Here’s to another 3 years

We have to take a short break out of our publishing schedule. This should be our last break, so you can expect daily postings until Christmas from when we get back! See you Saturday.

Just let us correct our little credibility issue then we can all start anew. Here are some of the things we’ve reported right in the past 2 years:

Mac OS X 10.4 exclusive images.
Apple studio display price drops.
Xserve & Xsan updates.
More Tiger exclusive tiger images.
iPod price drops and axing of “gold” iPod mini.
iPod photo specs.
Motorola iPhone in iTunes.
Mac OS X 10.4.4 update tomorrow.

Also in November last year we posted a huge list of rumors and updates, most of you laughed - but seems most of it was right now, aren’t you all so quick to forget! Here’s a quick breakdown of what we said:

Upcoming Powerbook G5.
iTunes 5, and some features.
The new iBook specs (in new colored casings)
Special editions black laptops
Mac OS X 10.6 “Lion”
Work on a 3D Mac OS 11
iWork ‘06
Upcoming 5th generation iPods
The camera iPod? “iPal”
iPhone
New bluetooth keyboard and mouse.

Let’s now see what’s happened from that list of ours! First, the new iBook (now MacBook) sizes and colours. Second, I guess we misunderstood the “black promotion” but we got the gist of it, the black MacBook is rather “special edition”… iWork ‘06 was pretty much a given - but still. Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, tick tick. Fourth, the 5th gen iPods. Well they’re being developed just not release yet! Also part of what we said transpired to the iPod video (40GB+ capacities). The iPhone not out yet so wait on that one. iPal is abit confusing - it WAS in development, but got cancelled. The team on it got split and half fired. Some of the ideas moved onto the proper iPod video project - including the camera but we’ve recieved no news on it since. The camera was accessed via the main menu (Main Menu - Camera) and displayed a PhotoBooth style interface to choose different filters with the touchwheel with photos saved onto the internal hard-drive and synced with iPhoto when connected to a Mac. iPod shuffle is due to be dropped from Apple’s lineup and was replaced by the nano, so again a tick there. With regards to Mac OS X 10.6, who knows what happened there - we were pretty dumb actually to even post that, but expect some of the features to appear in Leopard. Also Apple IS (and has been for the past few years) working on the next major series update - Mac OS 11. You didn’t honestly think that Apple could develop a major upgrade in 1-2 years, they’ve been working on this for ages and ages. Expect an all new file system and kernel, it’s going be awesome! The PowerBook G5 project got cancelled when Apple decided to swap to Intel, if the swap didn’t happen then you would have expected what we stated! So in conclusion, yes we have been wrong, but again we’ve been right more times and have reported many things before the “major” sites did - woohoo!

Anyway, enough about that. If you want to read the full report then this thread has all the details. No let’s leave this in the past and look forward to the future of Apple and MacShrine. Thanks to all those who have stuck by us these past years - it’s already our 3rd birthday in November!

I know we’ve had exclusives for the past 2 years on Mac OS X builds (check MacRumors.com if you don’t believe us… *sigh*), but this year we really can’t be bothered and also our source won’t be there this year. You may have also noticed we’ve posted no WWDC predictions this year either. I know some of you stick by us here at MacShrine (and we thank you!) but the rest still can’t get over the iPod video mess in April, which is a real shame because if they had got over it we might have been in a better mood to actually post some rumors! To clear up our credibility we will shortly be posting an item on everything we HAVE gotten right, and boy, it’s a lot. MacShrine wish to anew after WWDC - so please, just love us!

Shriners: We’re pleased to announce that we’re re-starting our publishing cycle tomorrow - Sunday 2nd July. Many apologies to those that thought we had closed down or were dead, due to personal reasons the editor and staff had to leave the site stranded for a month alone. The issue has now been fully resolved and MacShrine will be normal from tomorrow. We’ve some very exciting new features planned to make up for the past month of nothing! Stay tuned.

Download our new widget that countdowns to our 3rd birthday on 1st November 2006. It’ll be one party you won’t want to miss. Only 160 days to go! We’ll have our news widget up soon.