MUG Spotlight: the MacGroup
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 5, 2005 at 12:51am
“MUG Spotlight” is our weekly series in which we’ll spotlight a Macintosh User Group (MUG). This week we’re looking at the MacGroup, which serves Metropolitan Detroit and southeastern Michigan.
The MUG was founded Aug. 24, 1985 (so they’ll be celebrating their 20th anniversary in August 2006), by Terry White, who is the current president. He says MacGroup has been on a slow but steady incline in membership numbers.
“We currently hover close to 400 members,” he says. “In the 1990’s we were always around 100-200 members. We’ve adapted to the changing times and continued to offer our members the kinds of services they need. Rather than fight the Internet, we embraced it early on.”
The group, which has a community focus, meets the third Sunday of every month from 3-5 p.m. with SIGs (special interest groups) meeting 2-3 p.m. on the same day. Membership is US$40 a year and includes a printed newsletter, a door prize ticket and access to the MacGroup iBBS
(forums).
“We stay on the cutting edge of technology and offer timely meetings on what’s new in the Mac world,” White says, in regards to what makes their group unique. “We are one of the only groups offering our meetings via Quicktime streaming. We’re proud that our group continues to thrive although most traditional user group services can now be gotten over the Internet.”
There are two Apple retail stores within 20-30 minutes of the MacGroup site. White says the MUG “has a great relationship with the stores that we started day one.”
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
