Q: Do you recommend Mavericks?

I can happily report around 20% increase in battery life (actual) on 2 different Air (one not mine) with Mavericks

, and additionally much faster boot times (from 22 seconds down to 7 seconds)

Cool! Well, I'm certainly looking forward to enjoying the battery and startup time improvements which come with this new OS.

I understand that there's a good chance that if I update today, everything could go smoothly as it has for a large percentage of people who don't have issues. Talking this over with you guys has really helped me figure out a way forward.

So, I'm going to spend the £12 for ML, test that on my Mac Pro, if that all goes smoothly (which I have no doubt it will as it's fully mature), then I'll update the MBP to ML too. Maybe when 10.9.3 comes out I'll have time and confidence enough to switch over to that – and then enjoy the fast startup and battery life improvements which are so much more valuable on a laptop. (I'm not so bothered about speed of startup on my studio machine, time to make coffee is good!)

Thanks to everyone who has constructively replied, either for or against Mav. I value your input.

I have installed 10.9 on an external hard drive, started it and played around a bit.  Pretty cool.  I got a scare when I shut down and powered up and my MBA 10.8.5 hung at the logo.  Had to power off and started recovery and then selected my internal HD to boot (should have used Startup Manager but only remembered Cmd+R).  The external drive had been removed so surprised it didn't boot the internal drive as usual.

My question: I copied the 10.9.1 update dmg to the external drive.  Can I safely update to 10.9.1 after booting Mavericks on that drive?  I don't want to mess up my 10.8.5 system.

Some will say  yes, and some will  say no. It's your funeral.

peter_watt wrote:

 

 

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

Use the Puffin browser for iPad, edit will then be available.

Snow Leoapard is great, but it's time is gone. No iCloud synch being the biggest shortcoming. Lion, the least memorable of the bunch, offers minimal iCloud support, and added ugly faux leather. Mountain Lion was what Lion should have been. Mavericks is the best of the bunch, no reason to keep Mountain Lion around anymore.

Csound1 wrote:

 

peter_watt wrote:

 

 

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

Use the Puffin browser for iPad, edit will then be available.

Many Thanks!

No, I don't, I having so much headaches on this upgrade, specially with my external drives, they're gone, I can't even connect to them any more, my FinalCut projects are gone, it doesn't recogonize my external drives. And labels they don't show they way we were used to, they're only circles now. To tell you the truth, I regret on doing the upgrade from Lion to Mavericks. The bad thing is I can't uninstall it, I can't go back to Lion

Sure you can, just restore your backup.

As Csound1 said you can restore from your backup...IF you backed up before you downgraded to Mavericks and don't use the time machine as they are not compatible. I had nothing but issues w/ Mavericks, and I gave it time, I reinstalled and nothing worked. Slow to start, slow to a crawl w/ PS or imovie or surfing the internet, looking at youtube videos or even flash w/ a lot of hi rez images. NOTHING in that os was worth a **** more than snow leopard except icloud support, which it didn't like to do very much w/ my comp. 3gig of ram is not enough IMO to run this os...run, run as fast as you can.

Lanny wrote:

 

Snow Leoapard is great, but it's time is gone.

I agree. (But still have a running copy on a separate drive).

No iCloud synch being the biggest shortcoming.

For you maybe.

Lion, the least memorable of the bunch, offers minimal iCloud support, and added ugly faux leather. Mountain Lion was what Lion should have been.

Agree again. 10.7 seems buggy to me also.

Mavericks is the best of the bunch, no reason to keep Mountain Lion around anymore.

On the whole yes but that's a terribly dismissive statement. 10.9 is still relatively new.

1. I'm sure there are plenty of apps that haven't been updated for it and don't run at all or properly.

2. Windows integration/sharing isn't perfect and as you can imagine this could be a huge issue for those in business.

Those two things alone are enough to keep an old OS around.

With the exception of one omission it ran very well for me but ultimately I went back to ML. In summary Do I recommend it? Yes, but check a few things first.

I am an old Mac user, first machine was the 128K Apple IIC in 1982.  I have always left each machine on the OS that it came with, and from reading about so many people having problems trying to upgrade their OS, I have come to the conclusion that Apple designs their machines ROM (Read Only Memory) to handle the OS that is originally installed.  You can't change ROM.  This policy has worked for me through the Performa era, into the Power PC G3 Lombard, Emac, G4 Powerbook, G4 and G5 towers, and now with the new Macbook Pro 15" Retina.  Mavericks is running great, is stable and lightning fast, and battery life is fantastic.  I must say that each investment has been an extreme improvement since the beginning, and I am so glad that I kept the original OS on each one.  I would have been very disappointed in the limited software offerings for the intel-based ones, but several of my machines still run OS 9 (classic) and I can run wonderful programs such as "The Dead Sea Scrolls" whenever I need or want.  So much has been sacrificed for speed alone.  I guess that's called progress.  I finally bought the new machine to upgrade from G4 Powerbook (Tiger) and I must say the G4 PB still works fine on the internet, has a modem for a hunting cabin nowhere near a cell tower and trees won't allow satellite.  It also has a BUILT-IN Superdrive!  Just my two cents.  I highly recommend the new Macbook Pro with Mavericks.

rockie2000 wrote:

 

As Csound1 said you can restore from your backup...IF you backed up before you downgraded to Mavericks and don't use the time machine as they are not compatible. I had nothing but issues w/ Mavericks, and I gave it time, I reinstalled and nothing worked.

Time Machine is one of the superb differentiators that makes Mac superior to any other OS. totally compatible with all recent OSX.  if we are talking recommendations then please never ever  do any upgrade without making a time machine backup first. then if your machine really is not suitable to run it, restore it immediately.

rockie2000 wrote:

 

As Csound1 said you can restore from your backup...IF you backed up before you downgraded to Mavericks and don't use the time machine as they are not compatible. I had nothing but issues w/ Mavericks, and I gave it time, I reinstalled and nothing worked. Slow to start, slow to a crawl w/ PS or imovie or surfing the internet, looking at youtube videos or even flash w/ a lot of hi rez images. NOTHING in that os was worth a **** more than snow leopard except icloud support, which it didn't like to do very much w/ my comp. 3gig of ram is not enough IMO to run this os...run, run as fast as you can.

Just to get this straight, Time Machine is a perfectly good method of backing up OS X (one of the best) and IMHO Mavericks is faster and more stable than Snow Leopard ever was.

I do not recommend it for the following reasons:

1. Final Cut Pro 7 not only doesn't work on Mavericks ( Even after trying to force-install Rosetta ), all files from Final Cut Pro 7 cannot be opened with the newer version. You can't even update Final Cut Pro 7, so you would have to pay another $1000 to buy back programs you already own.

2. Photoshop CS5 doesn't work on Mavericks ( Might be my MacBook Pro ), and would need you to pay $200 to upgrade.