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Comment by not_your_vase | Hacker News Reader

Do you remember the time when Ars Technica didn't only publish reposts from the Verge, Logitech press-releases, and covid articles but actually posted hands-on technical and sysadmin tutorials (like the original of this switch from many years ago), and did hands-on reviews instead of generating it with a template?

Pepperidge farm remembers (but only very vaguely, it was a long time ago).

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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/

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.

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-...

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.

I could be crazy, but isn't the linked article exactly that? They also did a long series about how Ars itself is hosted[1] just a couple months ago.

[1] Part 1 of 4 here https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/ars-o...

I remember, I was quite surprised to see that on the front page. But I stopped reading it back then, because the first paragraph had something along the lines of "we love to run our own infra, so when the opportunity came to switch to cloud, we couldn't be more excited". I stared at the screen for about 2 minutes, and then closed the tab.

And yes, the linked article is exactly that, you are not crazy. One small thing: it's from 7 years ago.

> One small thing: it's from 7 years ago.

What article are you talking about? The one linked from this discussion thread is from last Friday. The one I linked in my comment is from 3 months ago.

Oh, sorry then. In this case I take back the `you are not crazy` part :D

The main linked article is most definitely not a hands-on nor technical article, at least by my definition (which may or may not worth crap). Just an eulogy for a dead switch, because the writer ran out of topics, and the Verge writers were sleeping. I was referring to the article that was linked inside the Ars article, a detailed hands on article about home networking, something which I was missing since Ars found out about Covid, and let the tech writers go.

Ah fair enough :) I guess to me the linked article ("RIP to my...") is not a "repost from the Verge, Logitech press-release, [or] covid article" and is a "hands-on technical [article]", if a little on the fluffy side. So I thought you might've enjoyed the article. But, I guess not.

I am also not a fan of Ars's health writer, but I enjoy most of the rest of their content.

I remember when Ars Technica was a forum with a token website attached.

A spin off of dr damage’s tech report

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