Well, i Spent 3 days initially with the set-up. The download took over 5 hours and the installation about 1 1/2 hours. I had to do it three times and I have relatively fast broadband (about 6MBS) most of the time. Apple support have spent hours on the phone, mainly at my own cost to try and resolve problems caused by Mavericks and they have given me a 90 day suport package so, I believe that they take Mavericks problems seriousy. I ended up 5 times with a white screen and could not re-boot, open in safe mode or reload the basic system from a disk, even whilst on the phone to senior techies.
I was told by several departments that I needed a new hard drive and was asked to book it in at a Genius bar. It's a 140 mile round trip to one near me and they would not let me drop it off on the way to somewhere I had to go and then pick it up on the following Sunday when I would be going near that area again, even though I offered to just leave my credit card details to pay for a new drive. So, I perservered and got it all up and running myself but it was a lot of work. Even after two clean installs of Mavericks after wiping my hard drive and doing a basic system intall from 10.4.3 and then updating to 10.6.8 it was still full of problems. Apple have not managed to resolve some problems and their techies are for a large part less knowledeabkle than myself on the issue that I have encountered and it only when you get bumped up to the freephone number in Cork in Ireland that you start talking to people who appreciate the difficuluties and acknowledge them. Most of the problems that I have encountered are built into Mavericks.
What happens with any large outfit whether it's computers, health service or anything else is that you are dealing with procedure instead of the actaul problem. Procedure is the new buzz-word that keeps us alll busy without dealing with specifics necessarilly. I feel that mavericks has some great improvements, however, the email Mail App and Safari are way behind the existing reality of where 10.6.8 was operating well already. One thing I would ask anyone to try if they have Firefox as well as Safariri is to copy the link that comes emails from Apple Support Forum 'View full discussion' into your firefox browser and see how quickly it shows you the discussion and then do it in Safari and see if there is a difference?
