Glad he hasn't (yet) said this will be the last one. Was kind of worried about that sort of postscript when I clicked this link.

What if Apple switched to a new file system in OS X and John wasn't writing a review? (Agree with him that it does feel like Core Storage is headed in that direction.)

I dunno, this brief Twitter exchange suggests it may well be he last review https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/522889656476917760

How does it suggest that? It just says he doesn't want to turn his reviews into a book; I can think of lots of more plausible reasons than "because the most recent is the last one".

(The existence of this about-my-review page isn't reason to suspect he's quitting, either; I think he's been doing such pages for a while. I certainly remember there being one for his last OS X review.)

Note that the link loads a full conversation but scrolls to the end. If you scroll up, you'll see a pretty definitive statement that he's not continuing the reviews.

D'oh, so it does. My apologies for being blind and/or stupid. Thanks!

It's not very obvious unless you've seen a lot of similar links from Twitter, so I can't blame you for missing it. I just thought I'd point it out so you'd know what's up for the next time.

He's also mentioned it a few times on his podcast (Accidental Tech Podcast, which is actually quite good)

I loved the stats at the bottom of the post. You can tell, there's a very inspiring sense of commitment it takes to write reviews like this.

The most surprising thing to me about this post is that there's someone out there still using Yojimbo.

BBEdit, Yojimbo, and TextWrangler (all BareBones software) have some pretty dedicated followers esp. in the mac blogging world. I think BBEdit was my first text editor back when I got a demo with a copy of MacWorld years ago.

I used and loved it for years, but when MobileMe died and Yojimbo languished I moved on to Evernote, for better or worse.

I use it as a scratchpad for ideas I want to write up, as a stash of notes and to-dos, a bookmark organizer and other stuff.

One stat I noticed in his review was the adoption rates of iOS 7 and 8. It makes me wonder how many of the people who haven't upgraded are jailbreakers.

Daring Fireball touched on this - apparently one reason that people didn't upgrade is because they didn't have enough spare space on their device to complete the install.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4431

It's a major problem. iOS 8 demands something like 5GB of free space. The existing OS takes up maybe 4GB, so on your 16GB device, you can't upgrade if you're using more than 7GB or so. Not even half!

It's still possible to upgrade using a computer, but how many people even know you can do that anymore? The days of syncing with iTunes are long gone.

I know why they keep offering 16GB devices as the baseline (easy upsell), but it's got to be a lousy user experience for people who do buy them. Just installing iWork and GarageBand will eat up a huge chunk of that.

You'd think that by now the poor user experience would trump the extra profit. Apple's reputation is built on "it just works", and 16GB of storage is starting to fail that all by itself.

Can you use iTunes to load it onto your device if you don't have the extra space on your device (without deleting apps)? I know this is harder than just pressing update on the device itself. I remember before you had to update your device only using iTunes right?

Yes, this is the way to upgrade without clearing space on the device.

Most likely because iOS8 requires you to have heaps of storage space available for an OTA update; http://daringfireball.net/2014/10/ios_8_storage_space

I had to downgrade from 8 to 7 on my 4s due to to thing like safari freezing when typing on the keyboard.

But at the scale Apple works at, jailbreakers are probably %0.01 of the userbase. My guess is that people don't care enough to hit that upgrade button.

Honestly, that plus problems with the OTA update process makes the most sense to me.

I'm curious---how did you downgrade your 4S? I thought that things like Tiny Umbrella didn't work with the 4S and newer, even if one saves the SHSH (or whatever it's called).

Eh... downloaded the ios 7.x file from Apple's servers and updated through itunes through the dialog where you specify the file. IOS wasn't stable afterwards, and I had to do a complete wipe, but it's back to where it was before.

I think the disaster that was 8.0.1 prevented a lot of what would normally have been the second wave of upgrades. People heard "iOS update bricks your phone!" and didn't do what the little upgrade popup suggested, even after 8.0.2 resolved the issue.

There are also a lot of 4S phones out there, and quite a bit of press around the launch that advised people on 4S's not to upgrade.

I didn't upgrade my 4S, based solely upon Ars Technica's advice regarding the slowdown. Since then, I've weakened and bought an iPhone 6... so I guess I'll use 'Not upgraded to iOS 8' as a selling point when I flog the old phone on eBay :)

Is Jon's backup scheme slightly paranoid or is it just to have familiarity with different services?

He discusses this very topic in Hypercritical, the podcast: [1], [2].

[1]: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/2 [2]: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/3

No he's overly paranoid when it comes to backups (if you listen to the ATP podcast this is very aparant) but in this case it's probably justified since there are many things that can go wrong with backups.

Another option is to use Instapaper and read the entire thing on one page for free.

I bought the iBook anyway to be able to support John directly. I've found that I anticipate his review slightly more than the OS itself sometimes.

Off topic: The font rendering is very wonky for me, Any one else getting this, http://i.imgur.com/LkuHUYX.png (chromium on nixos)