Mavericks

I’ve been running the GM of OS X 10.9 Mavericks for about a week now. I don’t expect much to change between now and the actual release, so I thought I’d write up a couple thoughts quickly. This is by no means a Siracusa review, so don’t expect double-digits of pages.

Mavericks is somewhere between a utility/background release (see Mountain Lion) and a feature release (Lion, though I wasn’t happy with the majority of these iOS-inspired features). There is a lot of things that are happening in the background that I’m happy to see - the Advanced Technologies page on Apple’s Site indicates that there is a great deal of under-the-surface changes that improve battery life across the board. However, things like iBooks and Maps are welcome additions from iOS, and Finder’s improvements are things that power users have been looking forward to for years. The most welcome of these feature additions is the new Calendar, which takes some needed visual cues from iOS and turns out looking like a proper (and powerful) desktop calendar should look like.

The full-screen changes are really great, and while I’m not sure how they compare to other full-screen implementations in Windows and Linux, it fits all my use-cases for full-screen apps and I imagine it’ll do the same for most other users. Apple has also done a great job in introducing the iCloud Keychain - password security is, for me, taking care of by 1Password. Apple has mimiced Agilebits’ software in classic Apple fashion, which is a pretty good move for the safety of most Mac users.

I’m in an admittedly rare position as this is one of the first times I’ve run a new Mac operating system on a up-to-date piece of hardware. I bought my first Mac halfway though Tiger’s lifespan, and my previous MacBook Pro was purchased a quarter-way through Snow Leopard’s. Mavericks is, then, built especially for my device, which has the nice benefit of improving battery life in a noticable fashion. While I certainly haven’t done any testing, it seems as though my battery has increased in average capacity by a solid forty-five minutes to an hour. The entire system also seems to be running faster, though this could be due to my fresh install and not to the operating system itself. This is a pretty inaccurate metric as it is almost entirely personal speculation, but I imagine I won’t be the only one noticing this on official release.

Apple hasn’t officially announced a release date for Mavericks, and I can’t even offer an educated guess as to when it will be, either. Historically, Mac OS X release dates have fallen in summer time, either at the end of July or August. The last fall release (10.5 Leopard) was late October, and Apple’s rumored Oct 22 event may be a perfect time to announce a relatively quick release date (easier given OS X’s online release via the MAS). I would guess late October, early November, given these facts and the GM’s rock-solid performance.

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied. I think that OS X has been ignored a little bit in favor of iOS, but I can understand why. Desktop OSes are familiar territory - there may be a “future OS” team at Apple, but the advent of multi-touch is fairly recent, and any of those advancements being baked into the OS is likely only coming to fruition as early as OS X 10.10.