Apple has released OS X 10.9 Mavericks – for free – so it’s that time again: John Siracusa’s excellent OS X review.
According to Apple, Mavericks has a dual focus. Its first and most important goal is to extend battery life and improve responsiveness. Secondarily, Mavericks aims to add functionality that will appeal to “power users” (Apple’s words), a group that may be feeling neglected after enduring two releases of OS X playing iOS dress-up.
Is that enough for Mavericks to live up to its major-release version number and to kick off the next phase of OS X’s life? Let’s find out.
Doesn’t seem to have actually been released yet, despite the link being up on Apple’s own OS X page. Doesn’t show up in search, and if I use the URL it tells me it’s not available in the US app store. Hmm, not a smooth start to this release.
I love Siracusa’s reviews.
I’ve never even owned a Mac, either, unless you count the LCII I used to mess around with about 10 years ago.
EDIT: Oops. Wasn’t supposed to be a reply.
Edited 2013-10-22 19:27 UTC
Same here.
I love his reviews.
The first time I used Macs was at the university to do some Word related work in some LCs, pizza boxes.
At work we also do some iOS work, as such we have some Macs around.
Privately I never to convince myself to buy one, because I can get more CPU/GPU juice with less money. And I care more about what my graphics card delivers, then how the OS looks like.
I didn’t see the update, but did an app store search for Mavericks and it’s downloading now.
Something i have been wanting ever since the upgrade from MacOS 9 is now implemented in OSX.
Section 17 of the release notes reads:
“Desktop with menu bar and Dock
Each display connected to your Mac has a desktop with its own menu bar, so there^aEURTMs nothing to configure. The Dock is available when you move your cursor to the bottom of the screen, letting you easily access menus and apps from anywhere.”
FINALLY!
Didn’t classic Mac OS also have the menu bar on the main display?
You can’t be referring to the dock^aEUR|
Hmm perhaps i was using some third party solution then, but i distinctly remember both screens having the same bars including the bottom icon bar.
Wasn’t 9.2 as I remember it, IIRC that only had it on the main one…. not that I used it much with more than one screen.
The battery life improvements do seem impressive. 30% increase on a Haswell Macbook Air!!
Edited 2013-10-22 20:11 UTC
Wow. Time to update my old Mac mini (well if it’s supported). I have been wondering (with the recent upswing in the rate of improvements and usability of open source operating systems) how Microsoft and Apple were going to compete on the software front with powerful free alternatives. Going free for the OS is certainly a good first start.
Not in corporate it is not.
Microsoft tend to guarantee that a version will be supported for X number of years.
The previous comment stated that OSX isn’t good for enterprise, and that Microsoft promises support for X years.
This is old style “enterprise IT” thinking.
Enterprises should be architecting such that the OS on the device has zero or minimal dependency on anything else – apps, service, whatever.
Starting with the mentality that apps, services, operating systems .. must all be entangled in a great morass of dependencies and locking is not clever. Yet still common in “enterprise IT”.
Effective efficient enterprises allow a range of devices, with diverse operating systems (minimally managed) to access application and services (eg authentication, printing) … with no assumption of brand or version.
Well, if wishes and buts were clusters of nuts, we’d all have a bowl of granola.
Sadly, they don’t work that way… yet. But seeing the transition to BYOD, there certainly is more hope that that kind of device agnosticism will transfer over.
Except there are plenty of examples where small and tosome extent larger organisations are indeed doing just this.
There is too much “defeatist” mentality amongst enterprise IT people…
PCI compliance with BYOD isn’t feasible in most most organisations.
The two issues are separate.
You can still architect yoru enterprise to be minimally dependent on any particular brand or version – and retain agility to change.
And at the same time have PCI compliance, or compliance to whatever intelligent security or regulatory framework you need to.
No intelligent security/regulatory framework requires you to be locked into a specific brand or technology version and be entagled in a mess of dependencies limiting any kind of cost-effetivce agility.
I repeat – it is not the intention of security or other regaulation to tie your technology in knots.
I didn’t mention BYOD, no-one is advocating zero-management for enterprise.
This is the same kind of “lazy defeatist” mentality I see too often in “the enterpise industry”.
Who said anything about security/regulatory frameworks being intelligent?
This assumes that you don’t have a technical debt or are dependant on a particular product.
I personally believe everything should fit together like lego blocks when it comes to development of applications and API and I build most of my services to be restful.
However we have software that requires certain things to exist and run on a particular platform which makes the business a lot of money … management don’t care about how technically wonderful it is as long as they are making cash money.
You might call it defeatist … I simply call it realistic.
Edited 2013-10-23 17:01 UTC
PCI is bean-counter security that has little to no real-world relevance. If I understand things correctly the same goes for most PCI consultants/experts who are probably more interesting in a fat paycheck than how PCI actually works. The same goes for SOX.
Still, if you’re forced to be “PCI compliant” across the board, well, you have my condolences. You must know exactly how Dante felt.
That said, I’m not so sure that BYOD can’t be used together with PCI but I’m no expert. Which probably mean I know about as much as a PCI expert
I agree with everything you say. But the gaming industry is heavily regulated and companies have to play by these rules.
Edited 2013-10-23 16:53 UTC
The enormous amounts of money spent on Java by the corporate world since 1999 appears not have had the expected effects.
Incidentally Java has also failed in Mobile, we have a forked version running in android, apples object C dominating the apps market.
“Enterprises should be architecting such that the OS on the device has zero or minimal dependency on anything else – apps, service, whatever. ”
Or hardware. That rules out Apple’s OS since it only runs on Apple’s hardware.
Yes, apple’s OS only runs on apple hardware. And BBOS runs on Blackberries, and Android runs on nexus etc
So the architectural decision is to grit your teeth and allow the OS and hardware to be bound – but make a clear delineation between (hardware+OS) and (applications, services).
This gives you most of the agility, independence and reduction in lockin and complexity you are aiming for.
How many people or organisations regularly want to change the OS on a piece of hardware anyway? But we do want to be able to have a diversity of them, and not be tied to specific brands or versions when we want to use applications and services.
Is enterprise IT really such a hard problem? Or is it full of chancers who played with Visual Studio Express once … an article for another day think on the relative quality between the various engineering professions…
2014 will be the year of the linux desktop.
2014 will be the year of Windows Server in the data center.
Funnily enought we are stopping the use of Windows Server in 2014. Nine months ago we were audited by the BSA and despite ordering the part numbers recommended by MS themsemves we were found to be using Server with the wrong licenses. We didn’t get fined because we had followed the advice from Microsoft.
The bosses said ‘Enough’ and we are agressively moving everything from Windows to RHEL. Thankfully the middleware product we use runs on both.
For us, 2014 will be the year of Linux in the Datacentre.
Recently I heard that using Mavericks it is not possible to sync contacts and calendars with iOS Devices via iTunes, but I will need to put my private data on iCloud. Even if Mavericks is free I would not use it if that is true!
My understanding is that that is just speculation from rumors started on official Apple forums. According to this link, all you will need is the latest version of iTunes, shipping with the OS and downloadable separately:
http://fairerplatform.com/2013/09/os-x-mavericks-dp-8/
Now you mention it I don’t see those options anymore here, not sure if they disappeared with an iTunes update or Mavericks.
apt-get install calendarserver on a Pi and you get a nice CardDAV server you could run on your home network to sync with.
I don’t think that you can’t sync contacts anymore, the option is available for me (though grayed out as i use iCloud).
You can also use Yahoo! or Google or another CardDAV Server including your own.
I just verified that iTunes 11.1.2 running on Mountain Lion allows to synchronize contacts and calendars, iTunes 11.1.2 on Mavericks does not.
First I think it is a bad idea to force users to put private data in the cloud, second it looks to me that this “free” update in reality is just meant to force users using iCloud.
Well, after getting it installed, I can say that the only way this release is going to indicate a phase in OS X’s life cycle is its slow death. This is from a clean install, so no upgrade oddities, on a 2011 Mac Mini Server.
Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin. If you think iOS 7 is quirky, you haven’t seen anything yet. The system runs far slower than it did with ml, and things just don’t work as they should anymore. E.g. Half way through the final stage of “completing setup,” it decided to randomly shut my Bluetooth down. Since my primary kbd and trackpad are both Bluetooth (I like to avoid cable tangle at my desk) I had to go pull out the old wired ones. Plugged them in, got Bluetooth back on but it had lost all my pairings. No problem I thought, click the bluetooth icon… whoops, no Bluetooth setup option anymore. Poke around in system preferences, found out that now you have to go to each device’s pref pain to pair a bluetooth peripheral. So if you want to pair a keyboard, you go to keyboard not bluetooth. Then it fails to detect my kbd or trackpad the first three times. On the fourth try it magically worked. There’s no excuse for this, and that’s just the first problem.
So, I get over that. Now I clear a bazillion notifications about the new features in Mavericks (I thought this was OS X, not Windows). Load up Safari… five second freeze and I don’t mean Safari slowed down. The entire damned system ground to a halt. Okay I thought, maybe something screwed up during the install… so, being the enthusiast that I am, I try it again. Reformat, clean installation just as before.
The second time around was an exact repeat of the first, only now it refuses to sign into my iMessage or FaceTime. It just hangs there indefinitely, though at least that doesn’t freeze the system. iMessage and FaceTime both work on my ml backup partition, and my iDevices.
Even now, as I type this comment, the system is jerky. It runs smooth for a bit, then jerks to a halt and catches up in a half second or so.
I’m glad I kept a bootable clone of my ml installation I can restore, because I’m sure as hell not going to put up with this and if this is the direction OS X is going you can count me out. First iOS, now OS X. Was Jobs the only quality control department there?
Ouch, unlucky. 4 machines updated here, 1 iMac, 2 rMBP, 1 MBP no problems at all.
I have it on a 2009 Mac mini with 8 GB RAM. No problems.
Probably Spotlight indexing?
I thought of that, but shutting down Spotlight’s indexer doesn’t help. Shouldn’t be enough on this clean install to cause the indexer to lag anyway, and if something like that can jerk the system to a halt in 2013 there really is a severe i/o concurrency problem.
Did you do a clean install or an upgrade?
Did you even bother to read the comment you replied to?
It might help if you had actually employed some white space as to make reading the original post a lot easier rather than the reader being confronted with a wall of words.
Btw, no need to be a complete and utter asshole – you’re not earning ‘geek cred’ by behaving like a petulant douchbag.
Edited 2013-10-23 13:34 UTC
I’d go for the Activity Monitor then and see if that comes up with something.
If the Mac was working fine before I doubt it’s hardware failure and as it’s a clean install it can’t be a third party app freaking on the new OS version.
Maybe another clean install goes better. Logic dictates it should yield the same result, but experience tells otherwise.
Works great here. Fast, smooth. No problems with bluetooth or otherwise.
Gotta be a driver issue of some kind with this specific model of system then. Doesn’t really help here, and it’s not like I can revert to generic, non-OEM drivers on OS X.
Hopefully a point release fixes that for you… Although I wonder what the issue could possibly be. Sounds more like some sort of failing disk maybe triggered at a coincidental time.
Upgraded an iMac, a Mac MIni with just 2 GB of RAM, a Macbook Air, and a Macbook Pro with mobile users and FileVault 2 enabled. No problems whatsoever.
Going to update our server this week. I don’t know how the server itself updates. Is it a new app or an upgrade?
2011 Mac Mini updated last night, no issues to report, bar the fact it took a reboot before the updates reported on start-up actually installed (one being the Thunderbolt firmware update.) It still had Lion on it (because, although I do have Mountain Lion, it didn’t seem like it was worth the hassle of the update.) The multiple monitor support and full screen app not killing the second screen sold it for me 100%. The performance seems a lot, lot better. All in all, very happy.
Good:
– opengl 4.1
– finally, setting color calibration per-monitor works correctly
– per-screen menu bar
– still works like a charm on my hackintosh, although couple of the driver kexts (like for some additional marvel sata controllers and USB3) popup a warning (at installation only) for “unknown developer” or something
Sad:
– i miss the “linen” texture background, gray is boring
Don’t care:
– finder file manager, although they added tabs it still sucks balls. Good thing there are tools like Pathfinder available.
Edited 2013-10-24 09:05 UTC