I took the plunge on the new Mavericks version of the Mac operating system, OS X Version 10.9. Like others, I was slightly cautious about jumping straight onto it, but I've generally found the new Mac environments to be pretty stable. First up was the iMac27 which is, I think the phrase goes, "fully loaded".
It took a while to download the 5.4Gb update from Apple, but then only an alleged 34 minutes to install. No device driver queries or weirdness, it just worked. It hardly changed anything overt, except the desktop wallpaper which became a maverick tube of Santa Cruz water. It told me about an older program which wouldn't work, but aside from that was all pretty event-free. There's plenty of new things lurking in the revision, but the surface remains fairly clean.
Next was my MacBook Air, which meant another lengthy download. I resisted the temptation to do them in parallel, and just left the install to run overnight. Yes, by the morning it was all done although I didn't have a chance to check it before I headed to a meeting.
I was on a train when I read about another less positive experience and made me wonder if I'd return to something amiss.
Fortunately, it also works fine. The iMac27 performance for regular activities didn't seem any different (but it does have 32Gb memory and one of those fusion drives). The MacBook Air seems slightly snappier. It's a more modest configuration with maybe 4Gb of memory (I'm not using it right now and I can't remember) but it certainly works fine.
By comparison, I've still not updated my Windows 8 machine to Windows 8.1 because I'm wondering what the revised start menu will do and whether it will be worse than the utility update that I did myself to bring back "start". And my official work PC is still running Windows 7.
I think I'll call it riding the wave of technology adoption.
3 comments:
Glad your experience was better than mine.
After failing to get Keynote working (and needing it in so many of my lessons, it's not at all funny that it was broken), I had to try the Mavericks install again, so I could download the '13 versions.
Seems to be working now. I'm not happy with the way iWork now looks and functions. And I'm very not happy that the screenplay template has gone. I use that a lot in class.
In a way, I'm glad to have an almost-empty hard drive again, and I'll copy files back that I need and leave the rest. One huge problem for me now is missing fonts, because my old system was heavily customised., and they were all embedded in Keynotes.
RFM I think most of those 'default to cloud' things in iWork can be switched off. It's getting tricky now as more software tries to save to the cloud and in different places...Dropbox, iCloud, Sugarsync, Creative Cloud...The list goes on.
Re fonts, there's a handy free Mac guide by extensis about managing fonts:
http://doc.extensis.com/Font-Management-in-OSX-Best-Practices-Guide.pdf
They do also flog Suitcase Fusion (font manager), but the guide is handy in its own right.
Lady Banana Yes, mostly 'it just works'.
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