Mavericks slower than Mountain Lion, what is your experience?

Hi guys --

Mavericks is running really great on my MBP. I've been around here a long time, and usually when folks have a problem with a really slow new OS, it's almost always a forgotten Safari extension or plugin. Go to your Safari preferences, and check Extensions, and then turn them all off. Restart Safari and try again.

If still not running well, then look really carefully at your internet/security apps.

Get rid of any of those, restart and test Safari again.

If all apps are running slow, open up your Font Book application and check for corrupt / dupicate fonts.

I've had a Mac Mini since October 2012.

With Mountain Lion, I never saw the pinwheel. Not Once.

I see it all the time now. Also my machine used to be ready at the desktop ready to go in a total of 8 to 10 seconds from power on. With Mavericks, 30 seconds later and my desktop is there but it is busy. Before this, as soon as I saw the desktop, it was ready, completely loaded.

I was so happy with OS X Mountain Lion and I regret installing the free upgrade to Mavericks.

I supposed I would have had to eventually upgrade but this really ***** now. Everything I do results in me waiting on the pinwheel. I'm completely honest about not seeing it before Mavericks. I didn't even know it was there. This is my first Mac; I "switched" because of the Windows 8 fiasco. 7 is really great, but 8 really *****. So, I still use a Windows machine for work-related projects but I use my Mac for all personal stuff. It was great for a year, not it is not so great.

I have found a real solution. For some reason, Mavericks was having difficulty with something - I don't know what - in my old /Library folder. It was a lot of work but I've fixed it. I made 2 Time Machine backups of my internal hard disk on 2 external disks. Then I wiped my internal hard disk, installed Mavericks completely clean and finally restored *only* my Users folder from Time Machine. Now everything is fine.

This thread came up in my email so I thought I would take the time to update it.

I just bought a 27" 3.2GHz i5 iMac yesterday After updating to OSX 10.9.1 and backing it up I wanted to see the load times as compared to my old iMac.

Note this is out of the box and I haven't installed any non Apple Apps, add ons, or extensions.

Times on launching apps from Launchpad

Safari 7.0.1 - 2.78 seconds Safari runs very fast and smooth.

iTunes 11.1.3 (8) - 1.69seconds

Aperture 3.5.1 - 1.44seconds

iPhoto 9.5.1 - 1.63seconds

Pages 5.0.1 - 1.47seconds

iMovie 10.0 .1- 2.94seconds

Numbers 3.0.1 - 1.03

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Potsed in this thread 11/2/13

I have a late summer 2007 iMac running 6GB Ram - my update went from Snow Lepord to Mavericks.

I ran some times on launching apps:

Safari 7.0 - 1.93 seconds Safari runs very fast and smooth.

iTunes 11.1.2 - 2.96 seconds

Aperture 3.5 with dual monitors active - 5.65 seconds

iPhoto 9.5 - 3.47 seconds

Pages 5.0 - 6.05 seconds

iMovie 10.0 - 23.09 seconds

Aloha

The short of it is: After reading many of the threads and not understanding much of the computer-speak regarding the possible fixes for the degraded speed caused by Maverick, I took the short road. Replaced the 4gb of RAM with 16gb and now the computer screams, even coming out of 'sleep'!!

2011 MacBook Pro, 13". It is however using approx 7gb of memory as I usually have open Mail, Numbers, iTunes & Safari.

I have upgraded the memory in my iMac mid-2011 to 32 Gb and it is still slow. Painfully slow in iTunes 11.1.3 when restoring a new iPhone 5 from backup. It has NEVER taken this long. EVER. I received a replacement iPhone 5 from Apple to replace a faulty iPhone 5. I had to set it up as new because the iOS that it shipped with was not up to date and so I could not restore from my backup. The new iOS downloaded okay, and I started the restore from backup process over three hours ago (getting close to 4 hours now) and it is only half-finished. This is crazy. I do not have anything else running, and Activity Monitor shows that iTunes is taking up 800% to over 1000% of CPU, doing what??? All it has to do is transfer files from a backup to my iPhone 5 along a "Lightning" connection. Some lightening.

OSX Mavericks slowed down my brand new 15" macbook pro retina model so much. Opening apps took longer, internet browsing and other small tasks were noticably slower. I installed mountin lion everythings speedy again. Oh and I had to install Mavericks 2x fresh because it kept having errors and mail wasnt working, apps were freezing, etc. I don't know why apple thinks they need to push something out every year or 2. Making the software built like a tablet os is weird too, I dont need a tablet like interface on a desktop computer.

Glad and sad to hear others having experiences like this..I'm embarassed to say I've installed Mavericks about a dozen times. Never had to do that with any other release of OS X..

Even after doing as pristine an install as humanly possible, Mavericks is still very laggy and has a lot of problems that are just plain weird. I won't bore you with the deets; suffice it to say it's not appropriate for an OS at this stage of development to behave this way.

I'm this close to going back to Mountain Lion which worked great for me on both my macs..I don't say it lightly, because a re-install, getting things set up just so, etc..is not a small investment in time and energy..

Mac Book Pro 2013 (8GB). I tried almost everything suggested in this and other posts (Upgraded RAM, clean install at home, all kind of diagnosis and optimizations...). The ONLY real solution for me was a (1) hard drive wipe and a (2) clean install both at the apple store (I had my computer backup in order so I was not worried about the wiping of the HD). Then, I restored just backup files and downloaded purchased apps from the apple store.

My computer is working now as expected after months of frustrations.

I guess the clean install at the apple store is somehow more thorough than the one I did multiple times at home. I guess the problem is not Maveriks per se. It is getting Maveriks over tons of files and apps organized for the older iOS and over an not thoroughly wiped hard drive.

Go to the apple store ask for the in store update. Do not waste more time and nerves at home trying to fix it. I can assure you it works.

Yeah, I went to the apple store, too and let the "Geniuses" work their hoo-doo...after 2 trips and 6 hours, they made a dumb move which put me right back where I'd been if I'd never gone in.

For my money, any OS that requires this much effort just to get it to install and behave right is not an OS that I need, no matter how cool it may have looked on a cocktail napkin.

Mountain Lion works...it just works, and works well, so that's where I'm headed back soon's I can back up my stuff.

You sure went through the fire on this, too, Turingo...

I hated Macs with a passion, but when Win8 came out I just knew I had to move away from Microsoft. After basically 20 years of using Windows or Linux I had had enough. So I bought an old Macbook (the 2009 white model, I believe) with 2 GB RAM and OS X 10.7. I immediately went out and bought 8 GB RAM and a 1 TB HD, and upgraded to 10.8.

It was BLISS. I could run a Linux and a Win7 virtual machine side by side, and still use Mac OS X at full speed. I loved every second of using my computer. I was in love again! So much, that I actually asked for a MacBook Pro at the office (i5), which came with 10.8, too, and 4 GB - and it was GREAT! So I added 4 more GBs and knew I'd never go back to Windows, other than on a VM.

FF to Mavericks - I happily upgrade both my MacBooks. And that's when everything turns ugly. They take forever to boot. They are slower than before. They use RAM like crazy. I cannot even run a single VM with 1.5 GB RAM - - after 1 hour the VM turns unusable and the Mac too. Two VM are unthinkable now - while I could run them on my dual core Mac, now my i5 freezes with both. Every now and then I have to reboot them because somehow, the OS starts using up all memory and never frees it.

I've read online all the tips (Disable indexing, disable app napp for virtual machines, asign more / less memory to the VM's, delete X / Y / Z files). They are either dangerous, dumb or useless. If I wanted to endlessly tinker with my machine, I'd have stayed with Windows 7. Which, quite frankly, is far, far better than Mavericks - with 8 GB RAM I can do pretty much whatever I want it to - it was even better at that than Mountain Lion.

There are a couple of people at the office using Macs. Every one of them has gone back to 10.8 and wasted at least a full day reconfiguring their laptops, and they are happy to be back. So today I'm doing the same. Enough is enough... I hated mavericks from day one, and can't wait to be running Mountain Lion again; this time, with a BootCamp partition and Windows 7 running side by side.

I bought the cMBP just before it was discontinued - I7 2.6 Ghz 8MB RAM. Ran like a dream under ML but upgrading to Mavericks was slow and sluggish. I upgraded/ downgraded a couple times for comparison. It made my machine feel as slow as the 6 year old MBP it replaced. It takes a lot longer to log in - reminds me of Windows ... can't do anything until it's done. The OS runs and looks unfinished with marginal feature upgrades.

I hate how they force you to upgrade to Mavericks if you want to upgrade your iLike/iWork etc. I suspect it might have to do with compressed memory. Why we're using compressed memory in this age is beyond me. I haven't done that since DOS.

I haven't installed Mavericks yet. Sounds like I made a wise decision to stick with Mountain Lion. Or has the Mavericks experience improved yet?

Overall, I'd say go ahead and install Mavericks 10.9.3

It has been a strange ride for me, but I believe that 10.9.3 is the well-behaved OS we have come to expect over the past 15-ish years of OS X, which I find to be a resoundingly, mind-blowingly good experience with a few exceptions:

Leopard was good but weird; Snow Leopard fixed the weird things and made further improvements. Lion was weird; Mountain Lion fixed that weirdness, plus some extra improvements..

So the pattern I see should have Mavericks as weird and the next thing, I guess Yosemite, should be the "fixed" version. I can't get much back up for this theory but it's how I see it.

I greatly value Apple's emphasis on energy conservation. In fact, it is my #1 wish list item going forward..the computers are already way fast. I want better energy conservation and heat minimization.

Apple seems to be going there...hats off to them.

No DO NOT INSTALL yet. The system is still buggy and sluggish on many applications not Apple native. Just yesterday it froze my computer, which is something is used to do constantly on 10.9.2 but did it again now on 10.9.3. I think they're working on a new release let's wait for that one.