Is Mavericks slow and unstable for anyone else?

[Radiating]

I really loved Lion, it made me switch from windows 7 due to it's stability and speed.

Ever since I updated to mavericks though things have been a nightmare. I have to do a hard reset every few days, things randomly lock up, things randomly freeze things randomly crash or stop functioning as they should. Buttons become unresponsive etc. None of this ever happened even once with Lion.

Am I the only one who has these problems is Mavericks basically Windows Vista for Apple?

 

[bigeasy_uk]

I've experienced nothing but good things with mavericks. What hardware are you running it on?

 

[Shrink]

No problems here, either. In fact, a couple of native apps with which I was having problems (e.g. Reminders) were fixed after downloading 10.9.

The only issues I have experienced have been problems on the sites themselves.

 

[PixelpusherBV]

Nope, Mavericks has been as slick as....a slick thing for me. I updated my 2007 iMac from Snow Leopard without a single issue and with significant performance improvements.

I'd suggest a clean install if you hadn't already.

 

[Jessica Lares]

Reinstall it. Back up, and then nuke your partition, and do a re-install.

No issues here either, and I work my machine very hard.

 

[Felasco]

Ever since I updated to mavericks though things have been a nightmare

The Apple support forum is swarming with folks reporting similar problems, asking how to uninstall Mavericks etc. You are not alone.

In another thread on this forum a programmer who works for Apple developing Mavericks apologized that Mavericks is full of known bugs, and he promised they would fix it all in time.

Meanwhile, the marketing department is busy merrily telling everybody to upgrade their Macs with Mavericks.

All new OS's from Apple or anybody else should be tested on a second hard drive first. This would uncover any issues BEFORE a user's current operating system is touched.

If Apple would just put a LEARN HOW TO SAFELY UPGRADE OSX link in the installer, and teach people how to upgrade safely, most of these problems could be avoided.

 

[r0k]

I really loved Lion, it made me switch from windows 7 due to it's stability and speed.

Ever since I updated to mavericks though things have been a nightmare. I have to do a hard reset every few days, things randomly lock up, things randomly freeze things randomly crash or stop functioning as they should. Buttons become unresponsive etc. None of this ever happened even once with Lion.

Am I the only one who has these problems is Mavericks basically Windows Vista for Apple?

I was having problems with Mavericks. Several in fact. One is mail.app. I don't like the way accounts have been pushed onto a System Preferences pane and I can no longer use one email account as an "aggregator" and reply as whoever the email is addressed to. This bothered me so much I went out and bought Airmail. Then Airmail started hanging and crashing all the time just as mail.app had been crashing all the time. I was starting to put ever increasing snarky remarks in the crash logs I sent to Apple. I would include stuff like "Can I go back to Snow Leopard, now?" Then I remembered that I had planned to archive email in my "aggregator" account so it didn't look like I had 160,000 emails in my inbox. I went and archived 140,000 of them and now both mail.app and airmail have stopped crashing.

Another problem I've been having with Mavericks is the whole Chrome is 32 bit but Java 7 is only available as 64 bit thing. This causes me to have to either use Safari or Firefox just so I can visit my bank and order checks. I don't know whether to blame Apple for marginalizing Java, Google for refusing to release a 64 bit Chrome or Oracle for refusing to provide a 32 bit Java for OSX. It's a 3 way pissing contest between Apple, Google and Oracle but I'm the loser when I run out of checks.

I've recently installed SSDs in both of the machines we have running 10.9.2 and they are both running a lot better. I'm sure some of that comes with a fresh install (followed by migration) but I've heard Mavericks really works well on SSD versus the 7200 and 5400 RPM spinning drives we were using as recently as last week.

Then there are a few things I absolutely love about Mavericks. One is the way it handles memory. I definitely noticed a speed boost with 20+ tabs open in Chrome going from Mountain Lion to Mavericks. Another thing I like is automatic app updates. I also like the separate notes app rather than opening notes in mail.app. (Or was that also in ML?) I like having multi display support back again after it was munged a few years back such that going full screen on one monitor put up a dumb texture on the second monitor.

Of course moving to SSD caused me to do fresh installs on machines that were originally upgraded using "Install OSX Mavericks.app" and both machines are running very well now so perhaps there's something to this whole clean install thing.

 

[chrfr]

...Mavericks is full of known bugs...

This is true of every major application and operating system, regardless of vendor.

 

[Graig]

Runs pretty well

Mavericks runs quite nicely with a few odd problems on my 4gb 2008 iMac.

 

[yjchua95]

I really loved Lion, it made me switch from windows 7 due to it's stability and speed.

Ever since I updated to mavericks though things have been a nightmare. I have to do a hard reset every few days, things randomly lock up, things randomly freeze things randomly crash or stop functioning as they should. Buttons become unresponsive etc. None of this ever happened even once with Lion.

Am I the only one who has these problems is Mavericks basically Windows Vista for Apple?

Are you using a HDD or an SSD?

I've been experiencing all these on a HDD since Lion. Mountain Lion reduced some of them, but it was really hell with Mavericks. By that time, I had reached my boiling point (even clean installs didn't mitigate it on two separate 7200rpm HDDs) and put a Samsung 840 Pro 512GB in it.

After that, it's been slick and quick, with 11-second boot times and instant app launching.

 

[dmccloud]

The Apple support forum is swarming with folks reporting similar problems, asking how to uninstall Mavericks etc. You are not alone.

In another thread on this forum a programmer who works for Apple developing Mavericks apologized that Mavericks is full of known bugs, and he promised they would fix it all in time.

Meanwhile, the marketing department is busy merrily telling everybody to upgrade their Macs with Mavericks.

All new OS's from Apple or anybody else should be tested on a second hard drive first. This would uncover any issues BEFORE a user's current operating system is touched.

If Apple would just put a LEARN HOW TO SAFELY UPGRADE OSX link in the installer, and teach people how to upgrade safely, most of these problems could be avoided.

Again, there is no need for that link in the installer. The installer already does the actual upgrade safely, what you're referring to are bugs caused more often than not by third-party software. Most of the bugs that developer referred to in late 2013 were resolved in 10.9.1 and 10.9.2 and now 10.9.3, so your call for such a link is even more irrelevant.

 

[old-wiz]

I have 4 Macs running mavericks, no slowdown and never a crash.

 

[Gochugogi]

My 2009 Mac Pro, 2013 Mini and 2014 iMac all are stable and fast under OS 10.92. The prior versions of Mavericks were fast and stable as well but all versions have problems with Firewire spin down during system sleep. USB drives are fine. OS 10.7x wasn't very stable for me and used to crash Aperture, PhotoShop and Premiere within a couple hours of use. 10.92 is good to go for many weeks without a restart or forced quit.

 

[groove-agent]

Yep, Mavericks is slow on my late 2013 cMBP. Feels quite sluggish and beach balls more than any other OSX. Maybe that's why it's called Mavericks? Isn't Mavericks a beach in California? I'll bet you find many beach balls there too.

IMO every second OS seems to be better:

Windows:

XP (good) -> Vista (crap) -> Win 7 (good) -> Win 8 (crap);

Mac:

Panther (ok) -> Tiger (good) -> Leopard (ok) -> Snow Leopard (good) -> Lion (ok) -> Mountain Lion (good) -> Mavericks (ok/crap)...

 

[barkmonster]

I really loved Lion, it made me switch from windows 7 due to it's stability and speed.

Ever since I updated to mavericks though things have been a nightmare. I have to do a hard reset every few days, things randomly lock up, things randomly freeze things randomly crash or stop functioning as they should. Buttons become unresponsive etc. None of this ever happened even once with Lion.

Am I the only one who has these problems is Mavericks basically Windows Vista for Apple?

It's garbage! I had to completely restore my system from a backup and run several unix commands to regain permissions on one of my internal drives because of it.

It took hours to get a working system again after attempting to reboot back into my original partition and while using Mavericks I notice the following problem I simply can't accept:

1) beach balls all the time/Finder lag.

2) Copy protection failed on some older software I don't have £100s to upgrade to newer versions yet they worked fine Snow Leopard/Mountain Lion.

3) Not content with breaking smart folder functionality in load/save dialogues in Mountain Lion, you can't even add them to the finder sidebar at all in Mavericks.

I know some delusional fanboy will shoot me down with presumptions but those are my experiences with it and they're hardly opinions that are subject to change and can be ignored.

 

[KoolAid-Drink]

While my experience on Mavericks so far hasn't been as terribly unstable as some others in this thread, I do have to say that Mavericks isn't exactly the most pleasant OS to use. I've used Leopard, SL, Lion, and ML - I'd have to say SL and ML were pretty darn stable and pleasant to use. Lion was buggy in some ways, but wasn't that horrible.

I notice some weird system lags/sluggishness that seems to come and go on a random basis in Mavericks, as well as some glitchy behavior that seems unusual for a published OS - scrolling weirdness, stuttering graphics/text, general lag. Finder sometimes acts weird, pausing for no reason, or leaving window "residue" behind. Time Machine in particular is especially bad - the 'starfield' UI is very laggy, sometimes skips a time/day, and just is very choppy. Console forgets its window position/size upon exit. Those types of alpha/beta-level bugs that should've been sorted out by GM. I've reported all those bugs via bugreport.apple.com, with fixes 'on the way' without avail.

I'm not sure what it is about Mavericks, but it just doesn't feel "buttoned up" - it feels like everything is grudgingly working, but under the surface, there's a lot of badly written code/bugs laying around, and sometimes the OS keeps 'chugging along' to catch up. It's hard to explain, but it's a feeling/sense I get. It's not horrible, but it's not the best OS, ever. On a daily basis, I can go about doing my normal routine without issue, but I can just sense something isn't exactly right, if that makes any sense.

I think a general rule of thumb is that the odd-numbered versions of OS X has generally been glitchy/buggy (Panther, Leopard, Lion, and now Mavericks), while the even-numbered versions of OS X has been more polished and stable. (Tiger, SL, ML, and hopefully 10.10). I read somewhere that the same team of developers work on every other OS release - for example, the same team of developers who worked on 10.7 also worked on 10.9, and so forth. If that's true, then that would explain the "every-other" pattern.

I seriously hope Apple will commit to making 10.10 stable and buttoned up, and re-focus on the small details. That seems to have been forgotten with Mavericks (and to a smaller extent, ML and Lion). I suspect 10.9.2 was rushed out to patch the SSL bug, so hopefully 10.9.3 will tie the OS a bit more neatly together.

 

[maflynn]

Mavericks has been great for me, so I'm sorry to hear that its been problematic for you

 

[iBug2]

So far Mavericks is the most stable and fastest running OS I've used since Leopard / SL.

 

[satcomer]

I really loved Lion, it made me switch from windows 7 due to it's stability and speed.

Ever since I updated to mavericks though things have been a nightmare. I have to do a hard reset every few days, things randomly lock up, things randomly freeze things randomly crash or stop functioning as they should. Buttons become unresponsive etc. None of this ever happened even once with Lion.

Am I the only one who has these problems is Mavericks basically Windows Vista for Apple?

It's because you are using old programs and not keeping up on updates to them. Plus old extensions are probably affecting you too.

 

[yjchua95]

It's because you are using old programs and not keeping up on updates to them. Plus old extensions are probably affecting you too.

Or maybe he's on a HDD. Mavericks is optimized for SSDs and not optimized for HDDs in the first place, probably because the engineers at Apple used SSD-only Macs to develop Mavericks.

But honestly, HDD is so yesterday. Anyone with a HDD should throw it into the trash can and get an SSD. If they can't afford a large SSD, at least get a small 120GB SSD. It's worth it.

 

[ssls6]

I have fixed 4 different machines (2 laptops, 2 iMacs) which were almost unusable after the Mavericks upgrade. All were fixed by doing a clean install which leads me to believe they had some problems before hand.

Clean install:

1) make a clone of drive
2) wipe it completely (including recovery by changing partition table)
3) install Mavericks
4) let user log in with cloud to populate key settings
5) manually copy ~/user items back
6) manually install their KEY programs, not their helper/cleaner/fixer/virus/crapola

All 4 were great successes

 

[fisherking]

i've been having a great experience (adding an SSD helped). mavericks is as good an OS for me as snow leopard was (that's saying a lot).

seems with EVERY OS (and, for that matter, every update), some people have good experiences, others have issues.

if you ARE having issues, troubleshoot. ask for help here. torture apple directly.
get it FIXED...!

 

[bwat47]

While my experience on Mavericks so far hasn't been as terribly unstable as some others in this thread, I do have to say that Mavericks isn't exactly the most pleasant OS to use. I've used Leopard, SL, Lion, and ML - I'd have to say SL and ML were pretty darn stable and pleasant to use. Lion was buggy in some ways, but wasn't that horrible.

I notice some weird system lags/sluggishness that seems to come and go on a random basis in Mavericks, as well as some glitchy behavior that seems unusual for a published OS - scrolling weirdness, stuttering graphics/text, general lag. Finder sometimes acts weird, pausing for no reason, or leaving window "residue" behind. Time Machine in particular is especially bad - the 'starfield' UI is very laggy, sometimes skips a time/day, and just is very choppy. Console forgets its window position/size upon exit. Those types of alpha/beta-level bugs that should've been sorted out by GM. I've reported all those bugs via bugreport.apple.com, with fixes 'on the way' without avail.

I'm not sure what it is about Mavericks, but it just doesn't feel "buttoned up" - it feels like everything is grudgingly working, but under the surface, there's a lot of badly written code/bugs laying around, and sometimes the OS keeps 'chugging along' to catch up. It's hard to explain, but it's a feeling/sense I get. It's not horrible, but it's not the best OS, ever. On a daily basis, I can go about doing my normal routine without issue, but I can just sense something isn't exactly right, if that makes any sense.

I think a general rule of thumb is that the odd-numbered versions of OS X has generally been glitchy/buggy (Panther, Leopard, Lion, and now Mavericks), while the even-numbered versions of OS X has been more polished and stable. (Tiger, SL, ML, and hopefully 10.10). I read somewhere that the same team of developers work on every other OS release - for example, the same team of developers who worked on 10.7 also worked on 10.9, and so forth. If that's true, then that would explain the "every-other" pattern.

I seriously hope Apple will commit to making 10.10 stable and buttoned up, and re-focus on the small details. That seems to have been forgotten with Mavericks (and to a smaller extent, ML and Lion). I suspect 10.9.2 was rushed out to patch the SSL bug, so hopefully 10.9.3 will tie the OS a bit more neatly together.

I haven't seen almost any of these issues with osx 10.9 on my mba, only one I've seen is console not remember window position/size.

Performance wise mavericks has been very snappy here, and I've only got the entry level mba with 4gb ram.

 

[psik]

This is true of every major application and operating system, regardless of vendor.

Yaa I mean poverty exists everywhere dude! Wayyy to contribute to the discussion man. I am going to go skateboarding now

 

[tech4all]

It's garbage! I had to completely restore my system from a backup and run several unix commands to regain permissions on one of my internal drives because of it.

It took hours to get a working system again after attempting to reboot back into my original partition and while using Mavericks I notice the following problem I simply can't accept:

1) beach balls all the time/Finder lag.

2) Copy protection failed on some older software I don't have £100s to upgrade to newer versions yet they worked fine Snow Leopard/Mountain Lion.

3) Not content with breaking smart folder functionality in load/save dialogues in Mountain Lion, you can't even add them to the finder sidebar at all in Mavericks.

I know some delusional fanboy will shoot me down with presumptions but those are my experiences with it and they're hardly opinions that are subject to change and can be ignored.

Pretty harsh words there. I'm no Apple fanboy and Mavericks works great on my 2008 Mac Pro in response to your first point.