MacOsX Mavericks: free upgrade, no revolution ( part 1)

A few days ago the new MacOsX upgrade, MacOsX 10.9 (aka Mavericks), was released and at first I had some qualms installing it.

I own a late-2010 iMac, originally running Snow Leopard, and that one would have been the third upgrade after Lion and Mountain Lion.

I was a little concerned about how the upgrade would affect its performance, because the operating system originally installed on it was a 32-bit one and the upgrade would imply a transition to a 64-bit OS for the second time in a row.

The first transition hadn't been very satisfying with Mountain Lion; my iMac was slowing down more and more and it was getting occasionally stuck without any evident reason.

So I've decided to go for it and here's a first nice surprise: it's totally free.

The setup wizard is definitely intuitive and the installation process lasts just about 35 minutes.

The new MacOsX Mavericks default desktop background

First impressions 



MacOsX 10.9 (aka Mavericks) graphic interface doesn't introduce major differences from Mountain Lion, apart the new acquamarine desktop (see image below), so several reviewers have considered it as a minor upgrade.

I partially agree; the OS has better performance and stability than before the upgrade.

The main purpose of this upgrade is keeping Apple desktop OS up with the new features introduced in iOs7 for iPhone and iPad.

The RAM memory management has been dramatically optimized. With Mountain Lion I occasionally had to use a cleaner script in order to prevent the infamous "spinning beach ball of death" from appearing.

None of this is no longer needed with Mavericks. I'm inclined to keep a big number of apps open at the same time and often mess with Photoshop while viewing online tutorials, but so far I've almost never noticed a shortage of RAM.


Stick around for a more detailed analysis in the coming posts.


Go to part 2 of the review