[dporter]

Your comment made me nostalgic so I went to John Siracusa's last macOS review from 2014 (10.10 Yosemite)[1]. Copied and pasted into Microsoft Word, it is 84 pages long, almost 27,000 words, and averages about one image per page. Quality and length are obviously not the same thing, but I can't imagine any online news outlet publishing something like that now.

1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/os-x-10-10/

[coldpie]

Here is their macOS 14 review[1] published one month ago. I don't know how many pages it is in Word, but on their website it's 21 pages long.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/macos-14-sonoma-the-...

[addicted]

Im pretty sure Siracusa’s review was not standard fare for Ars or really any publication whether formal or not.

His reviews were an exception and the fact that they don’t host his reviews anymore doesn’t say anything about how Ars has changed (especially because Siracusa himself doesn’t do the reviews probably because the new OS’s aren’t interesting enough).

But those reviews were awesome. Since I never upgraded my OSX until x.1 at least but usually only after x.2, the real reason I enjoyed OSX release day was because it meant a great evening spent reading John’s review.

[kccqzy]

Such quality work takes time and effort. Ultimately I think Siracusa gave up just because how much time it was taking away from other work. And Ars articles remain free to read.