Are you ready for 13.3 or 9.1? (2001) | Hacker News Reader

Are you ready for 13.3 or 9.1? (2001)

eclecticlight.co

46 pointsrcarmo16 comments

For anyone else who's confused because of how it's presented, this is a 2001 article about upgrading to Mac OS 9.1, with a short intro above the first "What it does" subhead.

This is a 2023 article walking through the process for installing Mac OS 9.1, as a point of comparison to modern day macOS updates.

At the end:

> Reformatted from the original, first published in MacUser volume 17 issue 10, 2001.

Everything but the intro looks like it came directly from the original.

> In the next day or three, Apple is expected to release the update to bring macOS Ventura to version 13.3.

Is there a new update process expected for 13.3 ?

No, it’s just a regular minor release.

I don’t understand what this article is trying to say at all. Why did it bring Ventura into it?

I thought it was a reminder of how far we’ve come. That long, highly technical upgrade process has now been more or less consolidated to a single mouse click.

Has it though? Most of the steps in the article are about making sure no previously installed cruft remains, and confirming support for your old third party hardware hasn’t been dropped.

No. The point of the article, as I understand it, is to show how much easier upgrading OS versions has become. OS upgrades used to be rare and slow, because you needed to buy the CD. You used to need to make sure everything was backed up, or in this case, have multiple drives or partitions, because the processes often went wrong.

Now it seems like these upgrades just happen when we sleep and people want them on day 1. And they’re much easier.

I have to admit, when I first read the article I was really hoping it was going to be one of those "so, I started with 9.1 and upgraded to every version in order" type experiences. Then again, having written that out, I bet the macOS hardware locks would stop that game in its tracks pretty early (err, hackintoshing aside)

I’m a little confused. The article seems to walk through reinstalling Mac OS 9.1, or performing an erase and install. And this sounds like upgrading as opposed to updating.

Upgrading is going from one major version to the next. There is a higher risk of failure when doing so.

Updating is increasing the minor version, including bug fixes and small patches.

I am sure I was one of those people who upgraded their machine from 9.0.3 or 9.0.4 to 9.1, and I do not remember batting an eye doing so. By this time, updates were readily available via the Internet — this should have been a fairly straightforward process, without the need for CDs or multiple hard drives.

> Upgrading is going from one major version to the next.

> Updating is increasing the minor version, including bug fixes and small patches.

I dont agree with this at all. You could swap the two words and still have a cogent paragraph. what reference do you have for these terms?

Somebody let the apt maintainers know they've got it wrong

Right because the English language is maintained by the apt maintainers

I was agreeing with your sentiment. Upgrade doesn't mean what the guy thinks it should, per apt, one of the most widely-used package managers on the planet.

That said, I do disagree with you now. The language used to describe...uhh..."increasing" minor vs major versions is exactly the kind of thing package-manager-maintainers would get to decide on. What do you think, we're going to have a congress of linguists to determine command line flag names?

the point is, those two words are essentially fungible. regardless of who says they mean what, they are not right, unless their definition is that they are basically synonymous.

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