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Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

> the “iOS First” release once again speaks to Apple’s priorities, to its vision of its future

I actually disagree about the reasoning behind this strategy. iOS may be more important to Apple at the moment, in terms of market value, but there's a better reason to target it first. iOS is deployed to constrained systems, iPhone, iPad, appleTV... this is easier to test because there will be less variance to deal with than on macOS deployments. It makes a ton of sense to start there for technical reasons so that they can validate it in more consistent environments.

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I'd also like to mention that it is extremely impressive that Apple was able to transparently swap out the filesystem, with no data loss, on millions of devices. I've not heard of anyone who had serious issues with the update. It was an incredible technical achievement.

Yeah that's amazing.

More generally, Apple was providing working OS upgrades for years while the notion of upgrading Windows between major versions was basically laughable. Wasn't Windows 8 the first version of Windows that you could actually upgrade to and have the system boot successfully? Maybe Vista to 7 worked for people. I never bothered trying. But I remember upgrading from OS X 10.3 to 10.4 and being floored when everything just worked.

You might want to look at http://rasteri.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/chain-of-fools-upgradi... to see an upgrade of windows 1 through to windows 7 and see most things still working

That's a cool little project, but it runs counter to almost every Windows upgrade I've ever performed. The natural bit rot of long running windows installations has always made a fresh install a much stronger guarantee of success than an upgrade.

My guess is that it's the keeping around of third-party drivers made for the previous OS that causes the majority of upgrade "rot."

If older editions of Windows just forcibly purged all the drivers when you upgraded, and told you to reinstall them afresh from the installation CD/OEM site (where you'd then get a version that's maybe for your current OS instead), that could have saved everyone quite a few headaches.

Then again, with major peripherals (displays, keyboards/mice, Ethernet cards, USB controllers) being much less standard than today, ripping out the OEM's driver could wedge your computer.

Certainly. I honestly never even expected a Windows update to be guaranteed to succeed simply because the surface area for them to test is unimaginably large - the same was not true for Macs (at least once OS X got good), so when a Mac OS upgrade failed I was generally more surprised.

i'm really confused about this.

i have upgraded (or my dad had anyways) from win 3.11 to win 95 and win 95 to 98. i think i clean installed win xp when i got a new computer but eventually i upgraded that to win 7.

all of them ran fine. or was that just not the norm?

Windows 3.x, 95, 98 and ME all used the DOS FAT filesystem (or the extended FAT32 variant). Windows XP supported both FAT and NTFS so if you did a clean install you were probably using NTFS.

What iOS 10.3 did was basically the equivalent of having a Windows upgrade which converted FAT/FAT32 to NTFS in-place without the user having to manage the process.

Windows XP did actually include a built in FAT32 to NTFS upgrade tool. Of course, you did have to run it manually from a command line, but I never had a failure from it. Vista would convert automatically if it saw a FAT boot drive, and I think Windows 2000 would upgrade FAT16 to 32.

I wonder if Apple will take the same approach for macOS (convert manually if you want for now, or we'll use it if you reinstall). Seems like a far greater risk for Apple if upgrading the OS breaks something for a lot of people, when they want users to be completely comfortable about updates.

I was trying to remember if CONVERT was added in W2k or XP but if memory served you couldn't run it on the boot partition.

Seems it was 2000: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~simon/howto/win2kcommands.html

It definitely worked on the boot partition at least on XP, not sure about 2k. If it can’t lock the drive it schedules it to be done at boot time (similar to on-boot chkdsk).

If you, personally, were reasonably good about general computer hygiene, your odds of success in upgrading would go up considerably. The average computer user, however (sample size of the hundreds of people I interacted with during the years when I did IT consulting for individuals and small businesses) did not have the faintest idea what they were doing, and it was likely that an upgrade would fail for one reason or another.

I think my failure rate got to about 30% before I stopped even trying to run the upgrade and just did a fresh install after backing everything up.

I agree. I updated iOS and it was actually noticeably faster, too. Amazing!

Also, they _know_ that many of those devices are backed up regularly to iCloud (they may know which ones were recently sync’ed with Mac, too). That diminishes the risks even further.

I'm not so sure.. if you look at Apple's direction over the last ten years or so, you see a lot of convergence happening. Off the top of my head:

    * Siri on the desktop
    * Gatekeeper getting more restrictive
    * SIP
    * Neglect of pro users
    * New stuff showing up on iOS first

I was speaking specifically of this filesystem released to the wild, not about other new features outside of this context.

Yes, if anything because they know exactly what apps are installed, and where they come from. No custom configurations, scripts, or anything.

Possibility to help the user make a backup via iCloud (harder to do on Mac).

Also, you might argue that if you had to lose it, you'd rather lose data on your phone then your computer. I backup my computer every hour with Time Machine, but if I lost my phone I would care the slightest if I had to install again from a 10-day-old backup.

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