Dave,
Sorry to hear of your troubles, I'll try to add my two cents worth.
Feedback to Apple: http://www.apple.com/feedback
Of course, there is the old fashioned letter (physical paper) to the president or some other officer of the company. I'm sure someone will see it. I've found this works well, as it is so rare these days that it gets attention - usually.
Regarding SBB (Spinning Beach Balls) and RAM, I agree with you that 8GB RAM and probably an SSD of some sort are a good starting point or base for decent performance. I've noticed that is usually the set-up on display at the Apple retail stores. FYI: I never or very rarely ever reboot my MacBook and it works well enough. But it does seem slow at times (particularly at boot up and initial opening of applications), yet surprises me at other times with how fast it does some things - once they are opened initially and in RAM somewhere.
I have a MacBook Pro 13" Mid 2012 with 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, Intel Video, with OS 10.9.1 (Mavericks). It works well enough with Mavericks and Apple only software, but add Chrome and all bets are off. It will work, but is much slower as Chrome loads lots of stuff right up front. Once everthing is loaded it runs well enough though. I've come to believe that any software not native to the OS is suspect!
I have to add though that for the past month or so, I have moved over to a PC laptop for access to MS Word (touchscreen is okay too) and the MacBook is just sitting there collecting dust. I'm not suggesting you do that - I was just curious and have been a long time user of multiple platforms.
In reading your post, it seems your MBP (MacBook Pro) ran fine for 3 days then suddenly had problems. What happened or was installed in that 3 day period? How did you restore your data? I ask because once I restored from a Time Machine backup to a MBP and had all sorts of problems including bad performance, and sleep issues. The only answer that I came up with was to manually transfer all data and just data (files) into the new OS (after a fresh install). Data was transferred manually using an external HDD. Just a thought.
Of course, your post also mentions that you had SBBs on your first upgrade to 10.8 before Mavericks and in-fact that was the reason for upgrading to Mavericks. I would guess whatever problems you had with 10.8 were just incorporated into Mavericks and magnified. A clean install of whatever OS (not an update) and using only native OS apps at first then slowly adding one at a time non-OS-native apps as needed while keeping an eye on resources via Activity Monitor can be of great help and lots of times identifies many problems - perhaps even with an OS native-app.
How are you doing your install of Mavericks - off the internet, locally? My internet is so slow that I ended up creating a boot/recovery USB 3.0 fast flash drive and that helps tons with the whole process. Here is a one link of many of that process: http://www.macworld.com/article/2056561/how-to-make-a-bootable-mavericks-install -drive.html.
Another issue that slowed down one of my Macs was found in a conflict between iWorks '09 and the new Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. I updated to the newer versions with the older versions still installed and it caused lots of problems including decreased performance. I think the older iWorks included indexing in Spotlight while the newer one did something different, so the HDD was forever indexing and killing the system (unusable!). I really don't know what the actual technical problem was, but I ended up removing the older iWorks and using the newer exclusively. The problem cleared up. I did end up re-installing iWork '09 later but it is not the default program, and I have to specifically request that a Pages document open with it.
You had also mentioned memory leakage in passing. Activity Monitor on your Mac will monitor memory and processes and is a handy tool for checking into that. Watch for non-native OS applications in my opinion. It seems like this might be a real possibility given that you posted how a reboot fixes the problems albeit temporarily.
Have you checked you HDD to ensure that it is clean (e.g. verify permissions, and repair disk). I usually like to run this using Disk Utility from a recovery disk (e.g. USB flash drive) or outside of the OS. I guess you could also run it off the internal partition. Hold Option then press power to boot to boot manager then select recovery partition. - Command + R brings up the same thing but off the internet and can be slow depending on you ISP speed (your laptop may need the firmware update seen below in a hyperlink to do this). I just wanted to make sure the HDD is sound and without corruption.
Here are some more keyboard combos that are handy.
- Cmd + Ctrl + power button = force restart
- Cmd + Option + P + R (hold all then press Power Button) = clears your PRAM or NVRAM (a good place to start).
Clearing PRAM alone has fixed issues for me in the past.
Firmware: done?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4904 is a firmware update for MacBooks circa 2011 and earlier guessing this has been done or is not necessary.
Hope something in here touches a chord or kicks off a spark to help find your MacBook's problem(s).
Good luck.
