OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Hands on Opinions

This past tuesday, Apple released the newest version of their Desktop / Laptop Operating system OS X 10.9 aka Mavericks, and right out of the launch pad (pun intended) they opened with a pleasent surprise.  Unlike OS x 10.8, which cost users $20 to upgrade, Mavericks was released for FREE!

With that welcome sigh of relief from the wallet, we moved on to Downloading (a process that took about 90 minutes, even with the large number of pings to Apples’s server, this really was not a bad time to download a 5.3 GB install file). Moving to  the install stage (Another 45 minutes process) was, as expected a smooth process.

So, we’re downloaded AND installed, now comes the important part. How does Mavericks run? Well first let Me say that I am not running the top of the line machine. Working with a Late 2009 Mac Mini and 2 GB’s of Ram, things have, so far, ran fairly smoothly. 

In fact as I’m writing this Blog, I also have an update to Garageband downloading/installing , 3 Tabs in Google Chrome, Have the Mail app open, running a couple messengers and watching an episode of Twit’s Tech News Today in iTunes (also updated, as iTunes, the iLife and iWorks suites have all been upgraded and for new Mac owners, or those that have used it in the past-though it seems this has to have been App Store purchased and not the disk versions, iLife and iWorks are now also Free).  The test will be when I fire up Photoshop, and get working with graphics work, but keep in mind so far this is all on a 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 Gigs of ram.

Apple has promoted that there is over 200 new features to Mavericks, including bringing Apple Maps and iBooks to the user’s screen.  Apple has also extended the hardware range that this new version can run, effectively making it able to be run on any Apple machine that has been released in the last 6 years.  

Initial impressions, I’m very pleased with this, with the exception of things for those who picked up iLife / iWork appearing to be excluded from the Free upgrades, at least on launch day, hopefully Apple will be able to catch up with this detail in the near future.