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OS X 10.9 Mavericks: The Ars Technica Review
- gmisra 13y agoIf you know of a shorter, more useful review, or are willing to tl;dr this for non-fanboys, please share.
- cwe 13y agoIn years past there have been reviews of this review, would that count?
- kristofferR 13y agotl;dr: It's great. Not much has changed in a major way, but there are improvements all around. The performance and battery life of the OS is much improved. It's free - and you should upgrade.
- laureny 13y ago> Not much has changed in a major way, but there are improvements all around. Seems to sum up Apple as a whole for these past couple of years, and probably for the foreseeable future as well.
- cake 13y agoYeah I'm stuck on os 10.6 because really nothing entices me in the next versions. I really wonder sometimes if Apple is not slowly dropping OS X in favor of iOS.
- dbecker 13y agotl;dr Mavericks isn't the name of a cat. This article would more appropriately be called a "rambling" than a "review"
- songgao 13y agooff topic: I would be more entertained by the name Sea Lion. Although Mavericks is a cool name too :-)
- rapind 13y agoMaverick's is dangerous.
- kennywinker 13y agoThe line between "rambling" and "detailed" is just how interesting you find the subject. If you're not interested in reading a 24 page review, you should probably not read a 24 page review.
- arrrg 13y agoI think you read only the first page? There are several, look at the bottom of the first one.
- username223 13y ago"willing to tl;dr this for non-fanboys" Herp, derp. Siracusa has been somewhere between critical and brutal toward the Finder (desktop slash file browser) since Mac OS X was born. He is also very well-known for being meticulous. Your comment reflects poorly on you.
- gmisra 13y agoMy implication was that sitting through and reading all 24 pages of this review did not seem like a reasonable use of time for a non-fanboy. Taking casual cheap shots at strangers from behind a meaningless alias reflects on you as well.
- smackfu 13y agoThe whole point of these reviews is to dig into the minor features, and to explain the technical side of the marketing buzzwords.
- maguay 13y agoI'm biased because I wrote it myself, but our Mac.AppStorm review is 1/3rd the length and mostly focuses on what's new in the OS: http://mac.appstorm.net/reviews/os-x-reviews/everything-you-need-to-know-about-os-x-mavericks/ http://mac.appstorm.net/reviews/os-x-reviews/everything-you-...
- k2enemy 13y agoEach release I'm as excited (or more) to read Siracusa's review as I am to actually try the new OS. Keep up the good work.
- randomhunt 13y agoYeah his reviews are very good. I do feel it would be nice to have a bit of a comparison section at the end though, to discuss some of the more technical details within the operating system landscape. For example timer coalescing/race to sleep is something I know Windows 8 has and I assume Linux, and the App Nap sounds like a more advanced version of the Metro tombstoning, and I think Linux can do memory compression but Sprite Kit sounds rather unrivalled by first parties. I would love to have his views on it all.
- Shivetya 13y agoEasy install on my ML 2011 iMac i5 6970GPU system. Initial impression, scrolling certainly feels better. Do wish they would leave my desktop background to what I had it set to. Other than that, being an OS upgrade where I don't notice anything odd is key to my satisfaction. 5+ gig download, took about forty minutes, somewhat less I think as I walked off, to install.
- hazz 13y agoThat's strange - my desktop background wasn't changed by the install. Perhaps you were using a ML-included desktop image that was removed in Mavericks? After downloading, it took roughly 20 mins to install.
- Zaheer 13y agoHow do you even read the whole review? 24 pages on a single OS update?? Seriously?
- scotth 13y agoEasy. You skim what you aren't interested in. It's a great review. If you care about your tools, do yourself the favor.
- nicholassmith 13y agoIt's that time again. I'm glad they do paid eBook versions now as I'm not an ars subscriber, but they definitely deserve some money for putting the OS X review together every release. I love reading Siracusa's minor gripes and grumbles, and when he feels something deserves genuine praise.
- jasonwilk 13y agoIS it just me or is anyone else disappointed that they didn't port over the flat design elements of iOS7 into the OSX Mavericks UI? I thought that would have looked awesome on my iMac!
- mitchty 13y agoScuttlebutt says next release might be your savior.
- crs 13y agoI've only been using 10.9 for a few hours but I have already noticed that some of the unnecessary decoration was removed. Notepad, the notification sidebar, launcher, widgets screen, etc have been toned down.
- kybernetyk 13y agoI'm glad as I never bought into the "Skeuomorphism is the devil" hyperbole and find iOS7 particularly unpleasant to look at.
- digitalsushi 13y agoThe singular improvement I have been waiting for is using an airplay device as a second monitor. I have a macbook pro and I hook in with my thunderbolt->DVI connector to get my big monitor. I can throw an appletv onto the monitor with an hdmi->DVI connection and finally go cordless! This is an improvement that means something real to me!
- specialist 13y agoYes. Add airplay to generic monitors and you've got a solution for enterprises. (Do you know of such a product?) All of our conference rooms have a wall mounted LCD with a shitty Windows box driving it. Best we can do now is screen sharing with Skype or join.me. Most of our Mac users just plug into the monitor directly. We'd LOVE to have an untethered solution.
- alphakappa 13y agoYou can hook up an AppleTV to a big screen TV (which is typically what conference rooms have)
- specialist 13y agoThanks. I'll pick one up, see what's what. (I don't have TV.)
- reznite 13y agoApple TV can do this for you.
- baudehlo 13y agoBut only at 720p. Enough for presentations but terrible as a second monitor.
- untog 13y agoWe have Mac Minis attached to our TVs. And infuriatingly, you can't use OS X as an AirPlay target, only as a source. I'd love to see that change, but don't see any mention of it in Mavericks.
- mjn 13y agoThe strategy of compressing RAM pages before resorting to swapping them out is a nice addition (discussed on p. 17 of the review). Something similar is in the works for Linux as well: http://lwn.net/Articles/545244/ http://lwn.net/Articles/545244/ The other main highlights from my perspective: "App Nap" energy-saving API (p. 13), generally better battery life, even on old hardware (p. 18), & support for offline speech-to-text (p. 23).
- gaius 13y agoVMware has done this for a few years now... I've been enjoying it on Linux already by running in a VM ;-)
- mwexler 13y agoThough I am reminded of the Ram Doublers from Connectix and others in the early 90s, and the buzz around magically doubling your memory... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix and http://www.ambrosiasw.com/ambrosia_times/january_96/3.1HowTo.html http://www.ambrosiasw.com/ambrosia_times/january_96/3.1HowTo...
- makomk 13y agoSooner or later, everything old is new again.
- vadivlkumar 13y agoMultiple display support is always I wanted. Finally it is there!
- justin66 13y agoI would love to know if John Siracusa is paid by the word.
- gaius 13y agoPaid by the page view, certainly.
- lostlogin 13y agoHe goes to some pain to make the page breaks logical and helpful rather than click whoring. He has discussed this on podcasts at length, most recently on ATP. I appreciate this may address a point you aren't making.
- Watabou 13y agoInterestingly, he doesn't type all that. He dictates everything. So essentially, he's talking for 24 pages! I always look forward to Siracusa's OS X reviews. It's fun to read his past OS X reviews, especially of Tiger, Leopard or even all the way back to Panther and Jaguar when OS X was still in its early days.
- Goopplesoft 13y agoIts interesting how Scott Forstall has become the goto name to sully in many of these articles. He pretty much pioneered iOS but one redesign later he's nothing in the shadow of Ive.
- kennywinker 13y agoThe only mention of Forstall in the review is on the first page. > But that was all before last year's ouster of Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iOS Software. By all accounts, Forstall was one of the driving forces behind the iOS aesthetic that Lion and Mountain Lion so enthusiastically embraced. Jony Ive's iOS 7 strikes off in a bold new direction based on a philosophy that Apple is eager to generalize to the company as a whole—leaving OS X holding the stitched-leather bag. Not exactly sullying his name. There has been a design shift, it's fairly striking, at least on the surface, and it seems to be tightly coupled with a changing of the guard. The story that will go down in history is Scott Forstall was the skeu guy, and he got the boot so Ive could flat-iron everything. We don't know if it's true, but unless Apple tells us otherwise, it fits the data we have better than most things.
- MaysonL 13y agoActually, Forstall will most likely go down as leaving because he was power-hungry and didn't play well with others. Skeu probably had little to do with it (imho).
- dclowd9901 13y agoWay way off topic, but: Can we cut the IMHO shit? Why do we have to qualify every opinionated statement as opinionated? If some mouth breather doesn't understand that what you wrote is your own opinion that's on them not you.
- danneu 13y agoI think it's just used to mitigate the edge of an assertion. Or make it seem more like a declaration than some point you're willing to vehemently defend. In other words, imho I don't think it really means *beep* *boop* entering opinion mode
- anton_gogolev 13y agoJohn had had a lot of complaints regarding how his Kindle version of a previous review was not available for the iPad [1]. I wonder if this is still a case. [1]: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/85 http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/85
- benihana 13y agoIt's like the author didn't like all the gray words so he wanted to spruce up the copy with a splash orange everywhere.
- chc 13y agoThose are links. Providing lots of references is usually considered a good thing.
- scottbruin 13y agoYou know, you're right but until I saw parent's comment I didn't realize why I found it hard to scan through the first page of the review. I wonder if orange is harder to scan through than a blue link with black text. And sometimes it does seem there are links to excess.
- pavlov 13y agoMavericks GM hasn't been too good for my 2011 MacBook Pro. This machine has only 4 GB RAM, and it shows. It's swapping noticeably more than before, and overall everything feels less snappy than on Mountain Lion. On the other hand, the battery life is definitely better. It's not really worth the performance hit, though...
- Synaesthesia 13y agoInteresting, the RAM compression should actually increase performance. Well I would highly recommend an SSD for you, with 4gb RAM my Macbook Air flies, and it's all thanks to the SSD.
- prawks 13y agoWhat year Air? I'll likely be making the switch on my late '11 model with 4GB. Skipped Mountain Lion due to laziness and skepticism on performance.
- Synaesthesia 13y ago2011 Macbook Air
- ImprovedSilence 13y agoI'm in the exact same boat as you. Imma wait it out a few weeks, let the bugs get sorted out, and update. Maybe...
- dpsk 13y agoI have macbook 2010 pro with 8gb of memory ob board. My machine swaps a lot, it's really gets out of hand. I'm not sure if SSD can fix this problem.
- Synaesthesia 13y agoIt "fixes" the problem by making the swaps a lot faster, and silent - so you don't notice them!
- lnanek2 13y agoBoy that first page was completely worthless. Maybe there was one useful sentence in there, saying there are new features and bundled apps. Not sure I should bother reading page 2. Ars' latest iPad announcement coverage was awesome, though.
- untog 13y agoYou should know what to expect from an Ars review by now. It's 25 pages long for a reason.
- malandrew 13y agoAny incompatibilities people have run across yet. I want to figure out if there are any obvious dealbreaking changes before I spend time making a backup and upgrading.
- jawngee 13y agoAnything running QT 4.x
- cicloid 13y agoWhich appears to be an upstream issue. https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/21000 https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/21000 :S And has been failing since before the GM was seeded.
- philfreo 13y agoMacPorts isn't really ready yet.
- chm 13y agoI've just uninstalled every port I have on 10.6.8. I was going to upgrade but you're making me hesitate...
- topbanana 13y agoOT: is macports the best package manager for a developer? Considering buying my first Mac. (Macbook Pro 13 is perfect hardware for me)
- nicholassmith 13y agoHomebrew is the current choice for most of us, I've found it much more stable than MacPorts.
- topbanana 13y agoThanks
- dylandrop 13y agoIf you're going to give us a 24 page whitepaper on a free OS upgrade, at least give a brief intro about your findings... verbiage and metaphor excluded.
- nostromo 13y agoI am super excited to see Apple push Flash out of the browser. http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/safari-power-saver@2x.png http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/safari... http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/safari-plugin-ask@2x.png http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/safari... Flash has been in decline since the first iPhone, but is still used to track people with unkillable cookies and to make obnoxious ads. Hopefully those days are now over. I wish Google and Microsoft would follow suit. Google probably will resist the most due to the entrenched interests of DoubleClick and YouTube.
- tvon 13y agoWhile I like their opposition to Flash[1], IMO you will eventually just end up more advanced HTML ads that are harder to detect. [1] primarily because there are no viable competing implementations to what Adobe puts out
- roc 13y agoWhile many people like to block Flash for content reasons, Apple's motivation is more about security and performance. Or, more specifically, Adobe's lack of interest in addressing such issues in a timely manner; at least on OSX.
- Joeri 13y agoIn my opinion a flash animation still outperforms a CSS-based animation in many cases. The problem with flash was never that it was inherently slow, but that people abused it to do slow things. On the security front though, you are absolutely right.
- robmcm 13y agoThat's so true, and as more and more ads go HTML you will see crappy devs animating the dom resulting in poor performance on iOS devices and damaging battery life. So the cycle continues.
- dpham 13y ago"The 10th major release, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, is named after an awkwardly plural California surfing spot..." Can't tell if he's joking or not.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mikeash 13y agoI suppose looking it up is completely out of the question. (It's not a joke.)
- cowsandmilk 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks_%28location%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks_%28location%29 ?
- roryokane 13y agoHe’s not joking. Later in the first page, Siracusa says ‘Mavericks is the first California-themed release of OS X, named after "places that inspire us here in California," according to Craig Federighi, who says this naming scheme is intended to last for at least the next 10 years.’ And the words “California surfing spot” in your quote link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks_(location) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks_(location), so that is the name of the place. I guess it’s just coincidence that “maverick” is also a word.
- sarreph 13y agoKudos to Siracusa for making such an extensively documented review.
- Kurtz79 13y agoIt has come to that I'm looking forward to John's reviews almost as much as the release itself. Great reading.
- snoshy 13y agoFor making such a big deal about resolving the multiple desktop and full-screen issues, Mavericks feels a little disappointing. Switching between full-screen windows is still accompanied by the painfully slow animation which still can't be disabled. Trackpad scroll speed on my 13" MBA is also noticeably slower without significant load on the machine. This seems deliberate, but it's a move in the wrong direction for people that already have the trackpad sensitivity maxed out.
- anologwintermut 13y agoI'd bet the animation hides the fact that the transition is actually that slow.
- snoshy 13y agoIf that were the case, it would be a matter of overly-aggressive optimization on Apple's part. Full-screening in the days of multiple monitor setups shouldn't necessarily mean that windowed apps get paged out (which is about the only reason I can see for causing a slower transition).
- aroman 13y agoIt isn't. The full transition happens before the animation starts. It's a simple crossfade.
- dzhiurgis 13y agoYou can't get one window to overlap over two screens anymore. Now imagine VNCing into two monitor setup, when you use vertical monitors...
- rafifyalda 13y ago"If you prefer the old behavior, uncheck the "Displays have separate Spaces" checkbox in the Mission Control preference pane. Doing so will also restore the ability to have windows that span more than one display." From the bottom of http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/11/#multiple-displays http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/11/#multiple-...
- rambojohnson 13y agothe opening 5 paragraphs into this article was infuriating -- from cats having 9 lives, to self-actualization, the after life -- get to the point already. it's an operating system. a new version is out. talk about it.
- billforsternz 13y agoAu contraire: The opening five paragraphs set the stage for everything that follows by providing context. This is eloquent and lively writing from a master practitioner.
- innino 13y agoThe author's been reviewing OS X like this since 10.0. Probably involved with Apple's OSes since even further back. It's clearly become something dearer to him than a child.
- rambojohnson 13y agohaha. I'll stop being snarky. :)
- npalli 13y agoSo, I updated to Mavericks. Ran python and it Segfaulted. I think this is the first time I have had python crash like that. Python 2.7.5 (v2.7.5:ab05e7dd2788, May 13 2013, 13:18:45) [GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> a = 1000 >>> a/1000 Segmentation fault: 11
- mythz 13y agoJust tried it on Mavericks, Works for me: Python 2.7.5 (default, Aug 25 2013, 00:04:04) [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 5.0 (clang-500.0.68)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> a = 1000 >>> a/1000 1 >>>
- npalli 13y agoYeah, I realized this after posting. Mavericks is installing its own version of python compiled with clang-5.0. My path was modified by the python installer (from mountain lion) to point under Library and was compiled using the older gcc 4.2. Looks like that program crashes for simple things (division, addition etc.).
- rattray 13y agothanks for sharing. What did you do to solve this?
- karanlyons 13y agoYou could swap your PATH back to the OS's python, or compile python yourself. Homebrew is great for the latter, and much more.
- celias 13y agoThere is a problem with the readline emulation of libedit that causes python 2.7 - 3.3 from python.org to crash under 10.9 http://bugs.python.org/issue18458 http://bugs.python.org/issue18458 I get Segmentation fault: 11 if I enter more than one line in python3.3 running interactively in Terminal, but ipython3 seems to work.
- dzhiurgis 13y agoAnyone had random logouts when using Expose? Not sure if it's USB DisplayLink adapter, or some weird bug in OS X. It's quite rare, perhaps twice or once a day. Haven't lost important data yet, but I feel it's coming.
- valleyer 13y agoLook in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports and /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports for crash logs happening around the same time; if you find any, file a bug report with Apple. <http://bugreport.apple.com/> http://bugreport.apple.com/>
- mustapha 13y agoI wonder if the NSA has root on iCloud.
- mustapha 13y agoDoes anyone know if the password manager / iCloud Keychain / Safari auto-suggest can import passwords from a .pif?
- smackfu 13y agoA blog post from the author, about the review: http://hypercritical.co/2013/10/22/mavericks http://hypercritical.co/2013/10/22/mavericks
- alxndr 13y agoInteresting: > "Some people think Ars Technica forces me to break my article up into many tiny pages. That’s not the case. I choose how to paginate the article. I like to break it up on logical section boundaries, which means that the “pages” vary widely in length. I do try to keep any single “page” from being too short, however."
- pstuart 13y agoToo bad they didn't bother to upgrade bash. Bash 4 is nice to have on tap.
- dijit 13y agoGNU bash, version 4.2.45(2)-release (i386-apple-darwin13.0.0) I think I used home-brew to get it. but, if you want it, it's trivial to get installed nicely > # brew install bash
- krallja 13y agoThey can't, because Bash 4 is GPLv3. Apple's lawyers will not allow any GPLv3 code out the door.
- hdevalence 13y agoThey certainly can. They choose not to.
- PeterWhittaker 13y agoI don't use iTunes or iBooks or any other Apple media apps. I've only had my Air for a few months, and I do love it so, but.... If Mavericks is free, why does the App Store need a credit card in order for me to download it? I do not plan on purchasing anything through iTunes. Never say never, sure, but I don't. Ever. Guess I can't have Mavericks. Even though it's free. Kudos, Apple, you've given me my first reason to feel less than happy about a hardware purchase I reveled in.
- jmelloy 13y agoWhy don't you just get a preloaded visa with $5 on it?
- PeterWhittaker 13y agoCf other comments: Because that's just another kludgey workaround, extra steps I have to take because my use case isn't quite mainstream.
- bluedino 13y agoIt's possible to make an iTunes store account without a credit card: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2534?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2534?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...
- PeterWhittaker 13y agoOK, thanks, I'll try the "free app" approach. (But, man, do I hate such kludgey workarounds.) EDIT: Seems to have worked fine - download in progress, and I didn't actually complete installation of the free app (AFAIK; I did have to enter tombstone info, but I can live with that).
- PilateDeGuerre 13y agoHave you heard of BitTorrent?
- 13y ago
- chm 13y ago" Frankly, this entire window is a user-interface disaster. And we haven't even mentioned the checkbox to the right of each label. Can you guess what those do? (No, there's no tooltip when you hover over one.) I'll spoil the surprise. When that box is checked, it means the Tag appears in the Finder sidebar; unchecked means it doesn't." I think he overlooked the text right on top of the menu, which says "Show these tags in the sidebar:". Pretty obvious to me.
- exo_duz 13y agoThe 2nd monitor upgrades and fixes really help out a lot. I think as a developer who works mostly with 2 monitors now working in full screen mode both monitors can be properly used. Really looking forward to upgrading.
- milhous 13y agoKnow it's too early, but can anyone comment on Screen Sharing improvements in Mavericks? I regularly access a headless mini and have had to occasionally kill screensharingd for hanging sessions, and/or lose connectivity on occasion for whatever reason. Screen Sharing's been improved with every OS X release, but it's not spectacular.
- kunai 13y agoThis part: > In the years that have passed since then, the Mac has > indeed been on a steady march toward the functional ideal > embodied by the iPad, a product that is arguably the > culmination of Jobs' original vision of personal computing concerns me quite a bit. We all know Jobs' original vision of personal computing was a tightly locked-down walled garden, and I can't help but think that inching towards this destination is inevitably a change for the worse. Think about it. With the drop of the non-Retina display MacBook Pros today, no Macs are now officially user-upgradeable. What was the reason given? 2mm in thickness. Two. Fucking. Millimeters, so you can stare at the edge of your laptop with a hard-on. Oh, and that absurdly high resolution display that you'll need a goddamned loupe to appreciate. All kernel extensions now must be signed in Mavericks. OS features brought about in Lion still bug me, like the absolutely back-asswards autosave system that uses duplication, and the lack of direct manipulation while scrolling. Also, Gatekeeper is a huge uh-oh. It's the reason why my MacBook is now sitting in a closet, and why I'm using a 2005 Toshiba Tecra with Debian on it. Amazing how Linux news has gotten so rare these days... but stick an Apple sticker on something and it shoots to the top of the front page. Sad.
- Techobucket 13y agobut its not good to upgrade right now because this is not 100% bugs free