My company makes software with an about box that reports the Mac OS version number.
We are expecting it to say 13.0 like the about box of Mac OS, but it’s reporting 10.16. I think that the problem is that depending on how you ask the OS what version it is sometimes it answers with 13 and sometimes it can answer 10.16.
from our about box:
from about this Mac:
What do you think?
I think your company might have some outdated version detection.
10.16 was the version number used by Apple when macOS Big Sur was in beta 2 years ago. After a few weeks in beta, they switched to a full major version change, bumping from Catalina 10.15 to Big Sur 11.0.
That trend continued with Monterey being 12.0 and now Ventura being 13.0.
So 10.16 is just some 2 year old macOS version that existed for a few weeks.
This is very likely a Java 8 problem. Java 8 is really ancient. I found this StackOverflow post about it. If your company develops the software, definitely about time to start thinking of updating to the latest LTS version of Java (17).
I wrote a quick java program to report the current version and this is what it printed (with Java 17)
Interesting. Yes, it’s most likely a wrong version reported by Java internal code.
The correct version for Ventura is 13.0 and I don’t think there’s any way that macOS would report 10.16 nowadays.
Thank you all for the replies. That is a great help.