Mavericks 10.9.2 Review

There comes a time in everyone's life when they must update their operating system to the latest and greatest. So a mere two patches later and Mac OS Mavericks seemed usable. With great trepidation, a Time Machine and a (fully bootable) SuperDuper! backup, I set out to ride this wave.

I came from Lion not Mountain Lion but the first thing I noticed and liked, is that it really isn't that different. There are a lot of features Apple has listed to wow you but most of these are really only for a minority of people. Enhanced Dictation is a bit of fun but it only has limited appeal and gets half of what you say wrong anyway. It is great that iBooks is finally on Mac but at the same time I don't really see myself reading that many books on it anyway. The power saving features are probably the biggest boost to most users with LAPTOP reporting a 41 minute gain in battery life during their testing. The main features I like, are the iCloud features introduced in Mountain Lion but now I get all that for free. I think this is the update Apple had to have. Firstly it's free, secondly as much as they want you to think it, it isn't that exciting of an upgrade. Instead it focuses on getting the core things right and although it took them two iterations, in my testing at least, it is finally stable.

Oh look, Apple Maps how great! I can't wait to delete that. Oh, you can't, what a surprise.

It gives you features that nobody wants like Apple Maps and a harder to read yet still kinda ugly calendar. The notification centre is a combination of cool and annoying. I find it most useful for iTunes and extremely annoying for text messages, as it means I get one notification on my Mac and then a spilt second later on my phone. Yes I know you can turn it all off but there isn't even a simple way to default it to all notifications off. Instead you either have to do each app manually, or set "do not disturb" mode up, which will still leave a 1 minute gap where you could receive notifications.

Now onto performance. First I'll start with my 7 year old MacBook Pro 3,1. Now I have to say it does not have a functioning battery right now, so it is underclocking itself as a result. Both of these tests were performed without a battery though so they are even. As you can see in the NovaBench scores below, Lion performs better, though Mavericks' graphics performance is much higher.

Lion

Mavericks

Now onto my 2011 iMac 12,2 testing in Xbench. This time Mavericks outperforms Lion hands down.

Lion

Mavericks

It isn't particularly surprising that Mavericks only improves the newest machine but I would like to do some more testing on the MacBook Pro as soon as I can get a new battery for it. The most disappointing factor for my sad old MacBook, is that there aren't really any customisation options, out of the box, that increase the speed of Mavericks at all. Yes there are Terminal commands one could run and plugins to download but there isn't really any option to turn off the bells and whistles and just focus on the core tasks.

Overall I am pretty happy with Mavericks, it was easy to get everything up and running, even things like Logic Pro and Ableton were easy to get going again. I didn't have any issue with getting both of those programs talking with my MOTU 828mkII, so I was back recording again in no time. I also really like Safari 7.0.2, mainly because Safari 6.x can't handle browsing most websites these days. There are probably only one or two, major new features that most people will use in Mavericks, so there is little to be excited about but I think it is worth the update because of some of the more boring things going on under the hood. Whilst older computers aren't going to see an upgrade in speed you may want to upgrade them just to get around any compatibility issues you may have. For those who are Mac purists and aren't familiar with using iOS, I think Mavericks may be a little alienating, though it doesn't change a huge amount, it is a definite step in the direction of linking the two together. My official recommendation is to backup heavily then upgrade and I'll see you when 11.0.2 is out.