Mavericks DP4 = Snow Leopard

[Krazy Bill]

Uh-boy. Here we go again. MS-DOS 6.0 was the best.

Mavrix = "Mountain Lion 2.0". They finally just got around to finishing it.

 

[Eithanius]

Once again I have to disagree, Tiger was the best version of OS X EVER in terms of stability and smooth operation. To me it felt very industrial strength. Mavericks looks to be the perfect successor to Tiger, IMO. Anyone is welcome to disagree but if they do I would say they never used Tiger.

I've used a Mac since Jaguar, are you gonna dispute me...?

If Tiger is the most superior, followed by Mavericks, so do you mean that Mavericks is superior to Snow Leopard...?

Funny thing is, I do agree Tiger is far more superior than Snow Leopard in terms of smoothness and stability (sans the Mac Mini G4), but to say that Mavericks is on par with Tiger, which effectively means it is far superior to Snow Leopard, then I'm afraid I have to disagree, no...? Which begs the question, have you really used Tiger before...?

Jaguar = buggy but it get things done
Panther = Expose fun, the beginning of stabilisation of OS X
Tiger = Epitome of OS X
Leopard = Suck big time, bloated due to PPC and Intel codes. Choppy GUI when CPU is strained.
Snow Leopard = Bertrand Serlet said it was build upon Leopard, improvement under the hood. By God he was right...!!! PPC codes removed, I guess that's why it was Lightweight.
Lion = Vista version of OS X, bloated crap. Major GUI screwed-up started here and persisted in Mavericks.
Mountain Lion = Rushed update to fix Lion, but still failed.
Mavericks = More stable and refined, but still well below Tiger and fall short of "Leo-to-SL" under-the-hood improvement of ML as claimed by the Ferengi guy.

 

[GermanyChris]

I like Tiger a bunch, I like Snow Leopard a bunch. 10.9 is an evolution of 10.8 and I'm not a fan.

 

[jarroyo1031]

Well said... Another word to describe Snow Leopard in comparison (especially on an SSD) is Lightweight... Any OS X versions after SL are basically bloatware - overall sluggish response coming from the same hardware with the same SSD. Mavericks DP4 is nowhere near SL. Even though Apple boasted smooth scrolling, overall GUI responses are still slow.

Switching Spaces (a feature which I relied heavily on) is nowhere as fast as SL. GPU utilisation sucks, either with some memory leaks somewhere OR L/ML/Mv GUI taking considerable amount of VRAM for those unnecessary kiddy-like window animation. Disabling window animation gave a slight improvement but not much.

Dashboard calculator on SL, I can always use Esc button to clear any previous calculations without exiting Dashboard itself. On Lion onwards, Esc will exit Dashboard altogether. The function was replaced by the "Clear" key which can only be found on a full-sized keyboard (I'm on an MBP), so I have to resort to hitting "Delete" key repeatedly. Mavericks up until DP4 got it even worst, the text cursors are all everywhere on all widgets that when I start using Calculator, I might have keyed my numbers on Stickies, or on Dictionary etc, there's no way to tell which widget is active because they are ALL active.

I've always thought Lion is akin to Leopard where they introduced tonnes of new features the overall performance will bog down. Snow Leopard was made to improve performance under the hood. Mountain Lion did not improve on Lion, and Apple has touted Mavericks as a somewhat similar under-the-hood upgrade to Mountain Lion. Unfortunately it doesn't seem that way. I guess it's the departure of Bertrand Serlet that everything on OS X goes haywire.

Just hit "c" on your keyboard to clear the calculator. Hope that helps
I agree with pretty much everything else you said.

 

[chrono1081]

Remember how in the last OS's there was a site that had whether an application worked or not yet...is that site still around?

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

 

[Eithanius]

Remember how in the last OS's there was a site that had whether an application worked or not yet...is that site still around?

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

This...?

RoaringApps

 

[chrono1081]

This...?

RoaringApps

Yes! Thank you

EDIT: No Mavericks yet but I assume once it gets launched we will see it.

 

[major7]

SL until i die! As i carry a laptop i find that having a battery that lasts for hours to be very usefull...

If i consider buying a new mac soon will i able to upgrade(yeah) from maverick/ML to SL?

 

[throAU]

I whined about 10.7 performance back in mid 2011 when my Mac was only a year old... And that makes it stone age computing... yeah right...!

10.7 != 10.9

I've run both and it is night and day.


edit:
the only compatibility issues i've seen with Mavericks so far have been a few issues with accessibility option requirements with borderlands 2 (the options have changed in mavericks) and soundcloud's app doesn't work any more.

Even VMware Fusion is fine - which is what I really expected to break...

 

[HenryDJP]

I've used a Mac since Jaguar, are you gonna dispute me...?

If Tiger is the most superior, followed by Mavericks, so do you mean that Mavericks is superior to Snow Leopard...?

Funny thing is, I do agree Tiger is far more superior than Snow Leopard in terms of smoothness and stability (sans the Mac Mini G4), but to say that Mavericks is on par with Tiger, which effectively means it is far superior to Snow Leopard, then I'm afraid I have to disagree, no...? Which begs the question, have you really used Tiger before...?

Jaguar = buggy but it get things done
Panther = Expose fun, the beginning of stabilisation of OS X
Tiger = Epitome of OS X
Leopard = Suck big time, bloated due to PPC and Intel codes. Choppy GUI when CPU is strained.
Snow Leopard = Bertrand Serlet said it was build upon Leopard, improvement under the hood. By God he was right...!!! PPC codes removed, I guess that's why it was Lightweight.
Lion = Vista version of OS X, bloated crap. Major GUI screwed-up started here and persisted in Mavericks.
Mountain Lion = Rushed update to fix Lion, but still failed.
Mavericks = More stable and refined, but still well below Tiger and fall short of "Leo-to-SL" under-the-hood improvement of ML as claimed by the Ferengi guy.

To each his own but I will say I'm more qualified to judge the Mac OS differences in quality than you because not only have I USED Tiger before, I've also used Panther and Jaguar and 10.1 and 10.0 and Mac OS X Public Beta and OS 9 and my journey on the Mac began since Mac OS 8. Tiger was the most stable and feature rich version of OS X.
Snow Leopard was a great OS bar none but even with the DP4 of Mavericks along with it's feature set I can easily see this as the best version of OS X since Tiger. Please don't be one of those and pretends that Snow Leopard was perfect since 10.6.0 because it wasn't "great" until 10.6.3 so you should hold your judgement of Mavericks until at least 10.9.3 to be fair or if anything until it's officially released because so far I like what I see. It's very smooth, fluid and stable and I love the new features.

P.S. I was with you about Jaguar and Panther and Tiger. Leopard was promising but you're still right. Don't even try the Lion =Vista thing because that's just wrong on all accounts and Mountain Lion is a great OS so where you're getting this "failed" thing is beneath me. I never have problems with ML.

 

[benwiggy]

SL until i die! As i carry a laptop i find that having a battery that lasts for hours to be very usefull...

If i consider buying a new mac soon will i able to upgrade(yeah) from maverick/ML to SL?

No. Snow Leopard does not have drivers for hardware from the future.

You may find that Mavericks provides ...gasp... better battery performance than Snow Leopard. But Snow Leopard until you die, right?

 

[throAU]

No. Snow Leopard does not have drivers for hardware from the future.

You may find that Mavericks provides ...gasp... better battery performance than Snow Leopard. But Snow Leopard until you die, right?

And OpenGL performance, CPU scheduling performance, filesystem performance (especially when using a fusion drive), etc.

Yes, you need RAM. It's cheap.

 

[major7]

No. Snow Leopard does not have drivers for hardware from the future.

You may find that Mavericks provides ...gasp... better battery performance than Snow Leopard. But Snow Leopard until you die, right?

eheh...or until my 2010 mba dies...but i fear he may outlive me

I am so disappointed with the following OSX's...i have a keyboard! I dont want iOS in my mac until it becomes touch...just that!

But we all have to upgrade, even our minds, someday...sigh

 

[benwiggy]

I am so disappointed with the following OSX's...i have a keyboard! I dont want iOS in my mac until it becomes touch...just that!

The notion that OS X 10.7 and greater "have become iOS" is completely over-stated.
Yes, there are gestures, like on a touch screen. But also like on a trackpad. You have not lost any functionality: you can still use keyboards and mice.
Yes, there is LaunchPad.
Yes, there is iCloud.

All-in-all, what these things do is make is easier to move between the devices. If you know there's a gesture on an iPad, then try it on a Mac. If you know how iPhone displays its apps, then LaunchPad will be familiar.
If you need data on all your devices, then iCloud can help with that.

Have you lost anything? No. Has the UI been "dumbed down"? No. Have you gained stuff? Yes.

Do you still have a phenomenally powerful general purpose device, whose capabilities you are probably using only a fraction of? Yes.

 

[Eithanius]

The notion that OS X 10.7 and greater "have become iOS" is completely over-stated.

You might wanna watch again Apple Special Event October 2010 themed "Back To The Mac"...

Yes, there are gestures, like on a touch screen. But also like on a trackpad.
You have not lost any functionality: you can still use keyboards and mice.

This is the only one feature I appreciate post-SL. However BetterTouchTool can simulate these touch gestures on SL.

Yes, there is LaunchPad.

Piece of crap. I would love Apple to remove this feature if lesser processes and APIs related to LaunchPad could improve overall UI performance.

Yes, there is iCloud.

Half-baked service. I've got nightmares dealing with iCloud at an early stage that duplicated all of my data on my Mac and iPhone. Just recently I made a mistake of deleting all my Notes (mostly sermon notes) on my Mac sync to the iCloud, hence they all vanished on my iPhone as well. Thankfully I had a backup on my iTunes which I was able to restore about 80% of my notes.

This is the downside of syncing to iCloud as opposed to iTunes. If you happened to delete some stuff on your iDevice, the deletion process goes all the way to iCloud and the rest of your connected devices, there's no turning back. With iTunes, however, you can still restore from backup. Sadly on Mavericks, the Info tab on iTunes is missing, so there goes syncing non-media contents of your iDevices from your Mac.

It's a good thing Apple did not include iCloud on a supposedly 10.6.9 update, otherwise it would most probably be slow and buggy as Lion and beyond.

Have you lost anything?

Yes, iSync no longer works on Mavericks though they still work on Lion and Mountain Lion albeit hijacking a copy from SL. I still have an old Nokia E71 of which I sync my contacts onto.

CUDA is almost useless on Lion and Mountain Lion due to some VRAM leakage. Total lost on CUDA capabilities on Mavericks DP4.

No. Has the UI been "dumbed down"?

Yes, ever since Lion (with it's choppy GUI), and some things done with a single gesture is now twice as much to accomplish certain tasks. Take for instance I want to use iCloud on certain apps like Day One for OS X (and for some odd reason Mavericks had some bugs related to loading existing libraries especially on cloud-based services like DropBox that forces me to use iCloud), I have to switch on "Documents & Data" sync. For this, every app that is iCloud-enabled, say TextEdit and Pages, now I have to decide where to save a file even before I start my work on it.

So has it "dumbed down" the UI...? A very strong YES...!

Have you gained stuff?

1. AirDrop seems useful, but it's awfully slow, and I only have one Mac to deal with.
2. iMessage is pretty handy, but with the frequent service disruptions, it's slow and unreliable. From where I am, Whatsapp seems to reign, sadly they do not have an OS X version.

So in short, NO...

Do you still have a phenomenally powerful general purpose device, whose capabilities you are probably using only a fraction of? Yes.

The former, yes. The latter, I do much more than that. That's the reason why I do not have an iPad. A MBP + iPhone (with iTunes) will do fine in simplicity thank you.

 

[XoFu]

No joke this OSX is top end. thoughts?

Well done OP! see the thread develop with just a sentence!!

This is fun!

 

[HenryDJP]

You might wanna watch again Apple Special Event October 2010 themed "Back To The Mac"...



This is the only one feature I appreciate post-SL. However BetterTouchTool can simulate these touch gestures on SL.



Piece of crap. I would love Apple to remove this feature if lesser processes and APIs related to LaunchPad could improve overall UI performance.



Half-baked service. I've got nightmares dealing with iCloud at an early stage that duplicated all of my data on my Mac and iPhone. Just recently I made a mistake of deleting all my Notes (mostly sermon notes) on my Mac sync to the iCloud, hence they all vanished on my iPhone as well. Thankfully I had a backup on my iTunes which I was able to restore about 80% of my notes.

This is the downside of syncing to iCloud as opposed to iTunes. If you happened to delete some stuff on your iDevice, the deletion process goes all the way to iCloud and the rest of your connected devices, there's no turning back. With iTunes, however, you can still restore from backup. Sadly on Mavericks, the Info tab on iTunes is missing, so there goes syncing non-media contents of your iDevices from your Mac.

It's a good thing Apple did not include iCloud on a supposedly 10.6.9 update, otherwise it would most probably be slow and buggy as Lion and beyond.



Yes, iSync no longer works on Mavericks though they still work on Lion and Mountain Lion albeit hijacking a copy from SL. I still have an old Nokia E71 of which I sync my contacts onto.

CUDA is almost useless on Lion and Mountain Lion due to some VRAM leakage. Total lost on CUDA capabilities on Mavericks DP4.



Yes, ever since Lion (with it's choppy GUI), and some things done with a single gesture is now twice as much to accomplish certain tasks. Take for instance I want to use iCloud on certain apps like Day One for OS X (and for some odd reason Mavericks had some bugs related to loading existing libraries especially on cloud-based services like DropBox that forces me to use iCloud), I have to switch on "Documents & Data" sync. For this, every app that is iCloud-enabled, say TextEdit and Pages, now I have to decide where to save a file even before I start my work on it.

So has it "dumbed down" the UI...? A very strong YES...!



1. AirDrop seems useful, but it's awfully slow, and I only have one Mac to deal with.
2. iMessage is pretty handy, but with the frequent service disruptions, it's slow and unreliable. From where I am, Whatsapp seems to reign, sadly they do not have an OS X version.

So in short, NO...



The former, yes. The latter, I do much more than that. That's the reason why I do not have an iPad. A MBP + iPhone (with iTunes) will do fine in simplicity thank you.

Whoa, looks like Apple's innovations in OS X have certainly made you downright miserable and it looks like OS X is no longer for you. Sounds like you're a better candidate for Windows 8.

 

[daneoni]

I never thought Snow Leopard was "all that". Tiger was the best version of OS X since Mavericks and Mountain Lion is pretty damn close, but Snow Leopard is too overrated here.

Seriously, you'd think the OS shipped with unicorns and pixie dust with the way people hype it on here.

 

[Eithanius]

Whoa, looks like Apple's innovations in OS X have certainly made you downright miserable and it looks like OS X is no longer for you. Sounds like you're a better candidate for Windows 8.

I would welcome suggestions just like jarroyo1031 did with my Dashboard predicament instead of recommending me a much inferior OS like Windows...

The point is, you can't even suggest anything better short of going backwards like Windows 8, is that Apple's innovation for you...?

 

[dsdevries]

I agree that at the time Tiger came out, it gave a greater feeling of appreciation than any other version of OS X since then. Mainly because up until now many versions shipped with lots of bugs and small glitches. But also because at that time they where on a two year release cycle and the changes they made where far more overwhelming.

But when you compare Tiger and Mavericks side-by-side, you'll have to admit that Tiger is a pre-historic operating system and Mavericks is far superior. I really like services like Time Machine, Notification Center, iCloud, iMessages and FaceTime, integration of Exchange and Social Networks. I basically took them for granted, but thinking back to the days of Tiger with POP e-mail, iSync, iTunes sync and USB Cables and manually setting up back-ups really makes me realise again how incredibly advanced Mavericks actually is. And the fact that they are able to make this so that it still seemlessly runs on the same hardware that Tiger shipped with (mid 2007 iMac) is a remarkable achievement.

Mavericks really is the most advanced operating system ever.

 

[peejack]

wait, wait, wait....So were are comparing a Developer (Beta) Build against a fully released and updated (over many months) OS?

How is that fair?

 

[roadbloc]

Gonna be honest, not seeing the similarities.

 

[Leek]

I have to say that I'm a little disappointed that this discussion turned to Tiger and confused as to why it did. Yes it was a good release but you can't run it anymore so what's the point? Snow Leopard on the other hand can still be loaded onto most new Macs, still supports a good deal of software, still gets security updates, and by most reports still accounts for over 30% of the Mac's install base. I think this discussion should be about the merits of running 10.6.8 vs the merits of running 10.9 for those of us who have pointedly stayed with 10.6.8 until now.

 

[HenryDJP]

I would welcome suggestions just like jarroyo1031 did with my Dashboard predicament instead of recommending me a much inferior OS like Windows...

The point is, you can't even suggest anything better short of going backwards like Windows 8, is that Apple's innovation for you...?

A sarcasm widget would help you greatly. . He had a laundry list of hatred for Apple's products and OS X to a point where it seemed virtually unusable for him. That's when I recommended Windows 8.

 

[Krazy Bill]

Snow Leopard on the other hand can still be loaded onto most new Macs,

Uh... no. It can't.

I think this discussion should be about the merits of running 10.6.8 vs the merits of running 10.9 for those of us who have pointedly stayed with 10.6.8 until now.

See comment above.


Dude. I love SL but honestly... when it won't run on the hardware I think it's time to just move on.