What are some good tech magazines?

My current subscription list includes;

Wired -- has slipped a bit, I worry they have lost the will to cover cutting edge.

Smithsonian -- a wide variety of topics, some tech, some archeologh etc.

Smithsonian Air & Space -- (now quarterly :-() which has good space technology as well as interesting stories of both military and civilian aircraft.

Science News -- which culls from a lot of journals and finds interesting papers to highlight (I will often follow up on an article by writing to the researchers for copies of their papers)

Popular Science, Popular Mechanics -- These have become remarkably similar in their content focus, that said they keep me up to date on a lot of commercial gizmos that I might otherwise miss in the noise.

QST (part of the ARRL membership) -- Which is all about Amateur Radio and so it hits a lot of interesting topics as I continue to explore software defined radios both in theory and in practice.

I use Scansnap scanner and paper guillotine to save articles that I find either particularly interesting, or I am curious if they will go anywhere. There are many interesting "over night" revolutions that appear years earlier as some sort of "wouldn't it be cool if ..." article. Indexing them is a pain, my indexing foo is weak :-).

IEEE Spectrum[1] is really wonderful in the both the breadth and depth of content. It's free with an IEEE membership or $75/yr on it's own.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/

https://2600.com still has thought provoking articles, and Emmanuel Goldstein (Eric Corley) has done a lot to advance the hacker community. The HOPE that went online in 2020 was amazing, and was really pushed through by him. The magazine is a bargain, and you can still purchase lifetime subscriptions which will give you every back issue.

I liked Stripe's magazine (RIP), though I never bought the dead tree edition: https://store.increment.com/

From a pop science perspective, I've always enjoyed The Economist; they have a technology quarterly as well as a section in every issue.

Popular Mechanics (and Science in 2nd place) were the best and most impactful tech magazines ever. Every issue answered your already existing questions about how a, b, or c works. It inspired and drove me to learn anything and everything I could about engineering, science, computers, logic, physics, etc. Not all of which I use on a daily basis, but it taught me to understand that tools, widgets and inventions are really the secret to making big and valuable things happen. It taught me to live and believe perhaps to a fault the Einstein quote "Strive not to be a success, rather strive to be of value." The feelings of receiving the latest PM magazine (and saving it until a Saturday morning to read and absorb from cover to cover, then again, and again to happy exhaustion) is an excitement and enthusiasm I doubt I'll ever experience again. Understanding how the rear differential worked originally, and then the limited slip differential upgrade, not only makes My Cousin Vinny one of the best movies of all time one of the best movies of all time, it makes you understand how awesome it is to understand. How is a torque converter different from a clutch? What is the difference bt super-charged and turbo? Why is super-charged better than turbo? Why is cool air better than warmer air in an internal combustion engine in the first place? What is lift? What are the three axes of rotation in flight? What happens to airflow and the airfoil surfaces when the speed of sound is achieved? If you aren't curious and need to know these things, you will probably never be an expert in your chosen sphere. Everything has an analogy, relationships, life, death, business, family. It all starts by understanding how things and people work.

Anyway, Pop Mec was the best ever. Miss it more than I can say.

Wired: https://www.wired.com/

2600: https://www.2600.com/

Maximum PC is decent, although for some reason they don't have a website. You can preview it and subscribe here: https://www.magazinesdirect.com

If you speak Polish, "Programista" is a pretty good programming magazine: https://programistamag.pl

I currently subscribe to MIT Technology Review and IEEE Spectrum. Used to subscribe to 2600 and Wired but haven't renewed my subscriptions as I felt like the quality of the content has just been getting lower and lower. And I miss CPU (Computer Power User).

I’m sure, this wasn’t your intended arena, however, I write for Beanz, a kids coding magazine for the 8-12 year old age group [0]. It’s the best I’ve found for learning the basics of computing.

I was a subscriber before I wrote for them, and it’s articles are far and away more information dense than almost all other kids magazines.

[0] - https://beanzmag.com/

I don't know of good tech magazines in English. There used to be some, e.g. Dr. Dobb's Journal (.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Dobb%27s_Journal ), but perhaps that market has imploded.

Wired and other leftovers aren't technical, but there's occasionally good material about computing & society in it (not enough in an average issue to buy it, IMHO). The magazines listed in the other comments that are okay are generally more hardware project focused rather than software technology focused.

If you read other languages, in German there is c't and iX, which are still okay (but were also better in the past, things seem to get dumbed down more and more in general).

https://increment.com/

https://logicmag.io/

Make magazine

https://makezine.com/

Offscreen is a lovely print magazine for technology, design and society:

https://www.offscreenmag.com/

Low Tech Magazine: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com

https://circuitcellar.com/

DIYODE Magazine is good - variety of projects with full details:

https://diyodemag.com/

Some magazines I've really liked:

Quanta Magazine has excellent content for the math/science inclined : https://www.quantamagazine.org/

Same with nature.com

ScientificAmerican or Science

Makezine for those who like building

For print-only, I would recommend books like:

* Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire which is Quanta's book

* Best American Science Writing

All of these can probably be found for free at your local library

https://www.nutsvolts.com

Hmm, there were only a few editions, but

https://pagedout.institute/

>Paged Out! is a free experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics.

HackSpace

https://hackspace.raspberrypi.com/issues

Depending on where you live it'll have a different name, but I've been enjoying LinuxPro Magazine (outside of USA it's just called Linux Magazine). There's also Admin Magazine.

https://pocorgtfo.hacke.rs/

they also sell on Amazon.

ACM membership gives you access to all of oreilly catalog for free, plus access to ACM journals (although TBH I got it mostly because it’s cheaper than getting oreilly directly).

https://8bitnews.io/ is pretty cool, although they cover the retro side of tech.

Where’s Byte Magazine when you need it? Dr. Dobb’s Journal? C/C++ User’s Journal?

Code Magazine for .NET: https://codemag.com/Magazine

logic https://logicmag.io/

It’s been gone for many years but I feel obliged to give a shout-out to hacker news magazine. It was fantastic.

Someone collected the most interesting stories and printed it and shipped it out. I think in the end it wasn’t sustainable, sadly.

I don’t find much about it online but I still have many copies.

Really enjoying Low Tech Magazine (bought the hard copy which is basically a printout of the blog)

I've always enjoyed reading MIT Technology Review.

New scientist is great. I enjoy MIT technology review. But you have to ignore the naive and overhyped "this is gonna save the world" tone they tend to have also they have a lot of promoted articles that can be rather annoying.

I grab Nuts and Volts, Servo, or Circuit Cellar every once in a while at Micro Center.

I used to like Electronics World, and even subscribed for a while, but I haven't seen an issue for years and it doesn't look like they are really set up for US subscriptions any more. They used to do a nice job of straddling the line betweeen a high-end hobbyist magazine and a trade rag. Better technical content than Circuit Cellar.

For audio, the US-based audioXpress is similar. Hobby articles with a bit of a trade magazine slant to the ads and editorial content.

QEX is the best of the ham radio magazines still standing.

Elektor is fair, on par with Circuit Cellar and Nuts and Volts. Weren't they publishing in the US for a while?

Communications of the ACM

Off-topic as it's neither a paper magazine, nor particularly varied, but I recommend Carbon Brief [1]. This is how they define themselves: "Carbon Brief is a UK-based website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy".

The content is really of very high quality, on a subject that is often butchered in mainstream media.

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/

Is there anything like Naitilus or Quanta Magazine in print?

Mopar Action magazine. It's full of tech articles. I'm a happy subscriber. The advertisements alone are worth the subscription cost

People still pay $10-50 per month to buy physical magazines that still contain advertisements on more than 60% of the pages?

While it may not be directly related to the nuts and bolts content of HN, I think The New Atlantis is a great journal for anyone who enjoys thinking about science and technology and their cultural effects.

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/

Wireframe. Yeah, it is games focused. But worth the price of only for the regular cussing section to make classic games

You won't find new things there, but you'll learn a lot of history and perspective in the computer magazines sections of archive.org.

The Internet Archive is one of the most valuable resources in existence, and not only for tech magazines and websites.

For years Wired was the answer to this question. I don’t know how they are these days though.

MIT Tech Review - mainstream and great

Wired - same

2600 - hacky vibe

Low Tech Magazine - name tells everything

Social Studies of Science - STS academic journal

Somewhat related: What are y’all’s favorite tech sites/blogs with an RSS feed?

If you are in additive manufacturing, specifically metal additive, I highly recommend: https://www.metal-am.com/

I recently re-subscribed to the ACM and I'm now being delivered "Communications of ACM" and XRDS issues (albeit with one month average shipping delay). I must say:

About CACM:

I wasn't sure what I was expecting, however "Communcations of the ACM" is utterly disappointing as a magazines. A lot of opinions, outdated "news", litte to no technology at all.

It's also politically inconsistent: there still are statements about mr Ullman receiving some award despite having issued some discriminatory statements (about Iranin people IIRC) yet the ACM is very happy to publish a whopping FIFTY (!!!) pages marketing stunt about China (November 2021 issue) while staying absolutely silent about the uyghur genocide currently going on and the total lack of press freedom and LGBTQI+ rights.

About XRDS:

I only received one issue so far, and albeit very disconnected from technology at least had articles posing interesting questions ("has computing become a toxic endeavour?").

More science than tech, but I find Nautilus Magazine excellent!

New Scientist

Tribune Mag.

https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/

NewScientist is pretty good, I think! I subscribe.

MIT tech review

C&EN

Assuming you mean to include online 'magazines', the FreeBSD Journal seems consistently good. [0] Just be sure to view the PDFs rather than use their web viewer.

The Jan/Feb 2021 edition has an interesting article on Netflix's use of FreeBSD. [2]

(Not to be confused with the BSD Magazine which is paywalled. [1] I can't comment on its quality as I've not read any.)

[0] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-work/journal/browser-based...

[1] https://bsdmag.org/

[2] (PDF) Page 21 of https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/jan...

Admin Magazine if you are into devops.

as mentioned by 2 other people, Logic Magazine

It's quarterly i think? The format is "150 page book of essays around a theme"

https://logicmag.io/

Linux Format. Has a nice mix of informative and in-depth content.

Whole Earth Catalog

COMPUTE!

Computer Shopper

The Industry Standard

MSDN Magazine

Communications of the ACM.

R/science