At the October 22 Apple event a lot of people, myself included, were pleasantly surprised when Craig Federighi announced that OS X Mavericks would be free (for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users and above). I think a lot of bloggers and reviewers where hoping it would be free but honestly I thought that was wishful thinking. I was almost going to predict it would just be the usual $19.99 price tag but I am happy to be wrong on this. While the old price model was not steep by any means, free is always better and makes the decision to upgrade a no brainer.

 

If you own one of the older compatible Macs mentioned (2007 Mac Pro and MacBook Pro) and running Lion (10.5) then you will have to upgrade to Snow Leopard (10.6) first. The update to Mavericks requires OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard installed in order to make the upgrade. I upgraded from Mountain Lion to Mavericks on my 2013 MacBook Air 13.3" on release day to out the new OS. I ran into a few problems with the Mail application being in a permanent frozen mode. I tried quitting it and restarted many times to no avail. Finally I just removed the Yahoo account that it was defaulting to and added it again (it was totally frozen but the menu bar still worked). That seems to have fixed the problem. I also had some oddly fast battery drain but seems to be improving with each recharge (maybe the battery meter needs to be calibrated to the new OS). The open and minimize transitions seem a lot faster. The colors on my air seem more vibrant which I found odd (it must make some adjustments there).

 

Overall it's a good upgrade from Mountain Lion in a lot of areas and you can't argue with free. With their next release, which I assume is OS XI aka 11, I'd really like to see Apple modernize their UI and make it more efficient. Going from Windows to OS X always seems like a productivity decline. In a way both Windows and OS X are making sacrifices in the name of making the OS more like their mobile versions. There's a reason desktop based operating systems didn't work on touch based tablets. Each OS is designed for the type of input devices it uses. At least Apple hasn't made their desktop OS and tablet OS identical like Microsoft, but at the same time it doesn't seem like they've really gone anywhere significant in a long time to innovate their desktop OS. Many areas of the OS looked quite dated and need a redesign to be more efficient. Till then we have Mavericks which should make most users happy with its extra features and bug fixes.