The Marco.org Review of John Siracusa’s Review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

[JonLim]

> "In my testing, reading the 10.8 review took approximately 128 minutes. But I walked my dog briefly in the middle."

> "At medium brightness, my iPad (3rd-generation) battery fell from 73% to 56% while I read the review on it."

I... I think I love Marco Arment.

A great way to start my day, thanks for the chuckles, Marco.

[brusch]

Funny - I've stopped reading every article from the marco.org site. I can't stand his style and I really can't stand his blind Apple - cult thinking. But to everyone his own's.

[brianwillis]

>This is not a quick read, so it’s a good opportunity to try a read-later method such as Safari’s Reading List, which Apple invented completely on their own.

...was what did it for me.

[gwern]

I started laughing at the first graph of wordcounts, as I realized what he was doing.

[vl]

Yes, very pleasant surprise, completely unexpected humorous side of Marco. Wonderfully dry humor.

[lukeholder]

Marco has perfected the followup blog entry HN spam. Even if it is hilarious and witty.

He jumps on a hot topic and gets the page views.

[Argorak]

I would hate running a blog where every time I hit the "publish" button I have to think "someone might put this on Hacker News and some Hacker News guy will complain about me spamming". I don't think that this is "news"-worthy, but its the hacker news community that posted it here and upvoted it.

[wmeredith]

His site isn't ad supported–I don't think he's trolling for pageviews. Also, if you listen to his podcast, he's stated that he doesn't much care for hitting the front page of HN because we're such cynical dicks (paraphrased).

UPDATE: His site is ad-supported. It was just blending in a little too well.

[epaga]

Right...HN spam, even though he doesn't even have an HN account? http://www.twitter.com/marcoarment/status/228137545396019200

[pgrote]

How is it spam? A relevant developer writing something humorous and pretty insightful.

[fredley]

If it really bothers you that much filter it out. I enjoyed the article, I'm glad HN directed me to it.

[mcguire]

lukeholder has perfected the HN spam complaint spam. Someone makes a blog entry that gets posted to HN and he calls it spam and gets...something. No idea what. Sorry.

[michaelkscott]

A lot of reddit-style comments on this post, too.

[aprendo]

Not everything is about HN. It seems to me that he is just having fun.

[frou_dh]

It's just sad that the actual review, which is tremendously interesting and substantial, has noticeably fewer votes than this, the #1 link.

Is the oft-mentioned decline of HN a bunch of tiny cuts?

[drostie]

The actual review also is about half the minimum length of a novel[1], and as this review describes, takes two hours to read. In some ways I'll agree that it's appropriate because it "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" or so, but it strikes me that we should amortize across the time spent on the subject. If you compare this to, say, spending two hours watching lectures from online courses, I am not sure the review of Mountain Lion really holds up.

In that sense, the review-of-the-review indeed packs much more density-of-gratification than the review did. If the gratification density is to be reflected in the points value, then the points are justly apportioned.

[1] I am basing this purely on the word count and the fact that NaNoWriMo requires 50,000 words to classify something as a novel; I have not checked to see how actual novels fare against this goal.

[pflats]

Siracusa's review is expected, and I'm sure a lot of HN folks saw it coming. Despite the fact that it's new and comprehensive, it's not nearly as new and exciting as Marco's blog post.

Plus, comedy will almost always do better than a review.

[bitsoda]

Christ does the HN community give Marco a lot of grief. He's like the LeBron James of this place.

[keithpeter]

I thought it was a rather funny post, but that is because I know and appreciate the Siracusa reviews, and I understand the references.

Satire and parody are generally reactionary.

[masklinn]

Which does not stop the HN community from voting it to the top, this is currently sitting at #2 with 473 points and 89 comments where the actual Siracusa review thread is #4 with 327 points and 74 comments.

Make of this what you will.

[brusch]

If you are not really interested in Apple products - he's not a good source of information.

And this article (without reading it) sounds really like he jumped the shark.

[binaryorganic]

"which Apple invented completely on their own." priceless.

[scorpion032]

That one satirical expression was enough to get me a laugh and upvote it. I dont see how so many people here that are calling it, dont see it.

[aw3c2]

I am honest: I don't get it. Is the reviewed review focused on meaningless metrics or why is this funny? I skimmed through a couple of pages and did not see any of that, in fact it seemed comprehensive if a bit subjective and fanboyish.

[mdc]

If you listen to Marco's podcast, he'll occasionally say something like "I want to talk about this topic but Siracusa just talked about it on his podcast and did a great job so I'll be quick about it."

It think this review-review is Marco's way of saying that he knows he's expected to comment on the new OSX and everyone should just go read Siracusa's review. Plus it was funny.

edit: typo

[loire280]

It's also self-parody of Marco's exhaustively researched reviews - which are often focused on relatively mundane things like LED light bulbs, thermostats, and coffee gadgets.

[fredley]

I don't think it's parodying the use of metrics, it's parodying the extreme attention to detail.

[aprendo]

No, it's a quite serious (and quite good) review. Marco Arment is only teasing Siracusa.

[unreal37]

Love the graph comparing word lengths of previous OS X reviews.

[cwp]

Yes. But it kills me that he could present such a graph, and then fail to comment on the peak at 10.4. That'll have to be a big issue when the reviews of this piece come out.

[bjcy]

I love the text right below it.

> This is not a quick read, so it’s a good opportunity to try a read-later method such as Safari’s Reading List, which Apple invented completely on their own.

Oh so sweet.

[king_jester]

Has anyone reviewed this review review yet? I don't want to waste my time over here.

[StavrosK]

Yes: Content-free. Avoid.

[nathell]

"'"GOTO Considered Harmful" Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful?", anyone?

[Graham24]

meta-meta hey.

[Killswitch]

Best review of a review ever. A+++ would read again!

[icebraining]

Thanks for the review.

[motoford]

Has anyone noticed yet in the real Siracusa review that marco.org is the first link in a screenshot of Siracusa's reading list?

Page 8

[caycep]

whoa, this totally breaks the space-time continuum!

[mapgrep]

"There have been a few architectural changes to John Siracusa’s OS X reviews as well. Siracusa has detailed the process in his separate explanatory blog post, because the review wasn’t long enough and he had more to say." HA

[stephengillie]

It's highly legible!

[Cyranix]

As amusing as the parody is, it's tough to beat the original. Honestly, who cares about an update to Chess?

[shinratdr]

I do. Apple pulled Texas Hold 'Em from the iOS App Store some time back and that was their only iOS game. Likewise, Chess is their only Mac game. I expected it to be removed from the OS.

Finding out that it got Game Centre integration is actually pretty interesting. Providing developers an example of the API in a working program is also a nice gesture.

I bet you anything most OS X devs reading this review that plan on integrating Game Centre in their own Mac game fired up Chess to see it in action.

[seivan]

I love the fact that his review included code, just something small and trivial like that. Made my day more than slightly better. Can go to bed with a giant smile on my face.

[vide0star]

A review of a review?