Q: Do you recommend Mavericks?

Tom in London wrote:

 

But then I found that as soon as you plug any external hard drive into a Mac with Mavericks installed on it, there's a chance that the external hard drive might be wiped clean.

Not exactly. What you describe is a potential result of installing Western Digital software on your Mac, and a fault that WD has acknowledged. All such utilities should be avoided, Seagate included.

Hard disk drives are generic. To use one with a Mac it should simply be formatted using Disk Utility, erasing whatever junk it may contain or offer to install. After you do that, download and install Mavericks specifying the external hard disk drive as its destination, so you can evaluate Mavericks and draw your own conclusions.

Use Startup Manager to select the volume containing the OS X version you wish to boot.

This method cannot affect your MBP in any way. You risk nothing.

John Galt wrote:

 

download and install Mavericks specifying the external hard disk drive as its destination,

That is not what I want to do. The only external drive I have available here is USB and very slow. Sure, I could boot the computer from it but the whole thing would be far too slow to test. Added to which I need to test Mavericks with all the applications and workflows I habitually use.

So I risk everything, not nothing.

hotmetal_UK wrote:

Er, thanks. Your "Doh!" just links back to the top of this thread. I don't know if you were trying to link to a discussion that indicated that security updates would indeed be withdrawn from older systems.

Doh! Doh!

Sorry about that. There is a bug in my RSS reader and I had to go over to Safari to paste the link and screwed it up. I'll send a nasty e-mail to the author of my RSS reader. Doh! I wrote it!

If that is the case (I read it somewhere), then I would think it's a good idea to update my system. However, I cannot risk downtime as it impacts directly on my ability to earn a living. Obviously I will be taking the usual precautions, TM backup, bootable clone etc, but I'm not a super-techy power user who can interpret crash logs and fix stuff easily, I'm just a designer that relies on the tools of the trade, and I'd really like to be wised up to the potential pitfalls first, before taking the plunge.

It is a good idea to be cautious if you are heavily invested in 3rd party software. You also don't want to be left hanging. You need to see where the future is going and make plans to change if you could be in a dead end. You don't have to "take the plunge". Install Mavericks on an external drive and try it out.

I do take your point about forums being for people with problems, and I know hospitals aren't necessarily the most dangerous places on earth just because they're full of sick people, but I still want to get a handle on the sort of problems that the (small number of?) people who *are* having problems are having. Just trying to gauge the risk-level.

Most of the risk is self-induced. I suggest starting your own thread, explaining what you do and what 3rd party software and/or hardware you use. People will be happy to enumerate all of the risks for you and give you suggestions. Lots of people just don't know what the options are. They don't even know to ask.

I went back from mavericks to mountain lion through a seagate backup via time machine, without problem.

My advice: upgrade to mountain lion, wait until mavericks is improved. Today it just gives too much trouble for prosumers or professional users.

I would stay far away from Mavericks until Apple sorts out this awful OS.

I have the latest Macbook Air and it is struggling under this OS.  Poor and very slow wifi.  Lots of issues with finder locally and on both my NAS servers... whilst my Surface Pro 2 works and works **** well. 

I'm rapidly losing my patience with it to be honest and may well go back to ML 10.8.5.

For business people, probably would not recommend. A major weakness seems to be Mail. They have improved some bugs with Gmail but Exchange Servers are having awful problems. My son had to buy Outlook 2011 to carry on working in a heavily email dependant business.  The more time that went by trying to get Mail working the harder a restore from TM became.

https://discussions.apple.com/message/24156820#24156820

Also if you have gotten used to  using USB to sync calendar and contacts (etc) between Apple devices or from Mac to Blackberry phones be aware sync services has finally been removed after years of warnings.

If you can test every app and workflow on day 1 then you might want to risk it. The benefits to business users are difficult to detect. High risk, low benefit, do the maths.

peter_watt wrote:

 

Exchange Servers are having awful problems.

Or not.

Why is it that a single instance of a problem equates to a problem for everyone? But when 99% of people have no problem, that is irrelevent?

I'm running Mavericks on an external drive as the issues get worked out.  I keep ML on my internal drive which works perfectly all the time.  Until I see no issues I will not switch over internally.

mastab12 wrote:

 

Do you recommend Mavericks?

Highly. Have five Macs running it without a glitch. Faster than Mountain Lion (and definately Lion) and the new memory handling is great for multitasking. Just backup your current system first. Some are having issues with third party apps not transferring over properly. Just make sure all is up to date and Mavericks compatable. Most trustworthy developers are up to date.

Enjoy

Pete

@petermac87 If you cannot rely on developers such as adobe, then who is there to trust? Mavericks is giving issues in plenty of fields, including -just to give an example- many MOV files. Definitely not to trust yet

miguel165 wrote:

 

@petermac87 If you cannot rely on developers such as adobe, then who is there to trust? Mavericks is giving issues in plenty of fields, including -just to give an example- many MOV files. Definitely not to trust yet

I have both CS4 and CS6 working fine for me. No updating needed from ML to Mavericks. So no, I have no issue with Adobe as a developer. Because a few people have  issues, which are generally self inflicted and mostly fixable, and many millions of other users seem to be having no problems, then I cannot see why the OP's update to Mavericks should not run smoothly as well, if they take the usual suggested precutions as with any upgrade or update.

Pete

As I said, I moved from adobe cs6 to adobe CC, and after effects will not install in the computer running mavericks. The adobe guys (pretty smart themselves) are trying to solve it for days, so far to no result. In the computer running mountain lion, everything works fine. It could be something of my computer, or something related to mavericks.

Unfortunately, there are many issues for which mavericks, rather than third-party apps, seems to be blamed. Check other threads like the one I mentioned before. My computer performs worse in many aspects now, and believe me, everything run smoothly before.

That is your issue and for you to address. I was replying to the person who asked the question. Open a new discussion if you wish to focus on those issues you have. I have seen the other threads, many of which are already solved as I hope yours will be.

Pete

Running a Late 2008 Macbook and performance has GREATLY improved.  Battery life is still not super great, but it's getting about 3 hours now, which was better than the 1.5 - 2 I was getting before!

Etresoft, not saying high percentage of successes is irrelevant. Good for them.

  My MBP runs like a rocket. My son is in business and cannot live with it. He has not noticed any benefits because he is too busy to play games or run memory hogging apps. He just wanted a great imac machine to continue to write documents and respond to email. Mavericks screwed it up is all. Ok only 18 pages of problems in that thread but not insignificant either. 

We were asked by OP would we recommend it. That includes me. I say no based on experiences of my family. I dont think anything I said warrants your aggressive response. Chill m8.

(Cant quote your post as I am using ipad and "edit" is not offered)