Why should anyone upgrade to Mavericks when 30% of the user feedback on the download site describes horrific results and rates Mavericks 1 out of 5???

Google how many millions have downloaded Mavericks. Do you think that 219 people represent them? I have had no issues at all running Mavericks on all my Macs. Most of the people with issues either have incompatable third party software or hard ware issues. Others just complain about the change of a feature they may have used for years and are unwillig to change their workflow habits.

But no one has said you have to upgrade. Try reading some positive reviews on Maverick from around the Net. There are plenty of them. If you don't want it, simply don't download it.

Cheers

Pete

The 30% chance of disaster you mention is only the percentage of those who have actually taken the time to review their results on the download site. There have been only 735 reviews out of the many hundreds of thousands of downloads and you base your worries on 219 bad reviews. Obviously those who have had trouble will be more apt to review their upgrade. Most of us who are happily using Mavericks did not go to the trouble of posting our rave reviews. This is a user's forum, so you will not receive a reply from Apple here. I can assure you that I had no problems downloading or installing Mavericks and have had no problems while using it. That said, no one can guarantee that you will have a flawless installation or that you will be happy with the new system.

Agreed, although you will find that it has been downloaded many millions of times.

Cheers

Pete

I would not extrapolate the 30% "disaster rate" to a real world analysis of the Mavericks user base.

Apple does not provide feedback on this site. I've seen no evidence they even monitor it.

Most of the discussions here are related to folks who are experiencing problems with their devices. Those that are not experiencing problems have no reason to come here.

If you search through the questions and comments regarding Mavericks you will find that most issues are related to older systems that have third-party software installed that is out-of-date and does not run efficiently. Other problems are due to software such as anti-virus and "cleanup" applications that are unnecessary and likely to degrade the system.

If you search the Mavericks threads you will quickly see the types of problems encountered and how to fix and even prevent them. One option is to install Mavericks on an external drive which you can boot from and test your system and applications. If you encounter problems you can post a description here and someone will help you.

Here is the checklist:

• Back up your system.
• Uninstall any and all non-Apple "cleaners" or "optimizers" or "anti-virus" or "security" or similarly categorized garbage according to their respective instructions.
• Verify their complete eradication from your Mac.
• Verify that your essential software is compatible with Mavericks. "Essential" is defined to include none of the aforementioned junk. If its developer does not specifically indicate Mavericks compatibility, assume it is not.
• Read: Mavericks - are the bugs finally out?
• Work on improving your apparent statistical analysis ability.

Do all that and enjoy Mavericks' many new features and performance improvements all for the affordably low price of $0.

Yep, my figures were way off, but I knew it was more than a few hundred on which this poster was basing his 30% dasaster rate.

frazzm737 wrote:

Yep, my figures were way off, but I knew it was more than a few hundred on which this poster was basing his 30% dasaster rate.

During the June 2012 WWDC Apple disclosed an installed base of 66 million Mac users. For every quarter since then Apple sold an average of over four million Macs, but it's not reasonable to assume not a single Mac was removed from service during that time. Therefore I will assume one Mac was retired for every one of the 24 million additional Macs sold, and that 66 million Macs remain in active service, despite the fact the Mac user base is increasing even as the overall PC market is shrinking.

As of December Mavericks was installed on about 35% of them, so of all the Macs in existence over 23 million of them are running Mavericks. I will also make the absurd assumption that Apple sold zero brand new Mavericks-equipped Macs during the Christmas season.

There are 219 "horrific results" reported by the OP, a number I have not verified. It's not reasonable to assume that everyone is going to post a review, perhaps one person in 100 will bother to do so. Therefore let's assume 21900 "horrific" reviews would exist if every single one of those with a bad experience bothered to tick a star in the App Store.

21900 of 23 million Mavericks users is less than 0.1%.

Yep, I agree 30% is a bit off.

My recommendation is don't "upgrade" based on the fact that in my experience, Mavericks has SERIOUS problems, including a tendency to wipe out external HDs and glacial Finder and Mail listing/sorting performances. For verification -- consult the web. People are screaming.

In fact, I am now looking for way to return to ML.

The problems with its core OS suggest to me that there may be really deep-seated problems at Apple. Have too many of their top people moved to iOS, to Google, and other highly energized companies? Given that the OS is core to the company's ability to offer a well integrated tech package for work, the major failures of Mavericks have bode poorly for Apple, and have me asking myself if Apple is to be my future platform, or not. Maybe it is time for me to move again? IMO, the current problems with Mavericks are not tolerable in a professional work setting, i.e., given the loss of data and time. The last time I reached this level of frustration with an OS, I moved from Windows to OS9. I.e., the level of frustration is Apple has gotten very high.

If you go to Mavericks, do it with the assumption that you will have to reverse the process when you get fed up. Make sure that you have backups that include a facile means of returning to ML without data loss -- AND DO NOT CONNECT THOSE EXTERNAL HDs TO A MAVERICKS MACHINE -- they could get wiped out, like mine and those of many other people. Not all externals are affected (not sure why), but it is not limited to WD HDs, for sure.

I disagree with your analysis entirely.

And, what is a 'facile' means as far as a backup is concerned.

So no one should upgrade to Mavericks based soley on YOUR experience?

Compelling arguement.

Cheers

Pete

Thousands are using Mavericks without issue, including me. I think if I were you I would look at the cause of my issues, beyond Mavericks. Look at third party software, hardware, user processes, etc.

I would not advice people not to install Mavericks based on your limited and somewhat unique experience.

I still believe there is some OS issue with Mavericks. I have not changed my software (except normal updates) on my Mac in 5 years. It ran great with Snow Leopard, great with Lion and ML. Now with Mavericks I have 2 issues: non scrolling in mail (on & off) & external HDD not sleeping when Mac sleeps. So I cannot believe it is my system unless there has been some change in Mavericks that is not compatible with my programs. If that is the case why now?

You could do what I do, which is create a new partition and 'test drive' Mavericks. If you don't like it, remove the new partition.

I upgraded to mavericks from 10.6, my macbook pro has run incredibly slow and now its wiped my WD HD, external, even though i wasnt using the WD software. I've now lost everything and am back to 10.6, really wondering if i should upgrade at all

I feel I was led down the garden path. I upgraded to 10.9.2 from 10.6.8 (where everything was working fine), in order to take advantage of the iCloud calendar sync, which would not work in10.6.8. I rely heavily on my calendar for business and I want to have it synced with iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro and iCloud and share it with my partner. Once completed, I discovered that all my Appleworks files can't be read. And there's no conversion app around. And I had to buy an MS Office upgrade and after that it could not read my office files until after I did a convoluted procedure with Font Book that I'm not sure I did correctly. A new Quark will cost me $850. And the iCloud calendar would not sync. I followed another convoluted set of instructions to get iCloud to gather my Mac calendar data and it erased my calendar - years of client data and all my future job dates. Now the Mac is at a tech's to see if the calendar can be recovered. All that hype over the years about Macs being so much easie and trouble free. Bull.