Question for those who just got theirs with mavericks. Is the box a picture with mountain lion or mavericks?
This may be unimportant to some, but I think it'll add to the resale value later down the road.
I ordered mine today with a delivery date of the 8-12.
Not to toot my own horn here, but I do a lot of buying and selling of used Macs, some times for me, but more frequently for others. The OS depicted on the box literally does nothing to the resale value. Anyone who cares what OS is on it also cares what OS the model ORIGINALLY RELEASED with; which, Mavericks in tow or not, is still Mountain Lion.
You do want Mavericks to be on the box though, but not so you can have a box to resell it with; most people trash their Mac boxes. Sad; ill-advised, but true. The reason why you do want Mavericks on the box is that this is the damn-near sure-fire indicator of which OS comes pre-installed; and while you can do a fresh re-installation of Mavericks either via a Thumb Drive made from the Mac App Store installer or via the 10.9 recovery partition, the version of Internet Recovery will remain the version of the OS that it shipped with. Even this is more or less unimportant, especially if a clean-install of Mavericks just works. Still though, I think having the Internet recovery boot to Mavericks is far more validating of the OS that came in tow than the picture on the box, though the two are correlated.
I had figured that with Apple making Mavericks free and declaring that future versions of Mac OS would also be free, they'd use that as an opportunity to standardize Internet recovery across all machines that have it in tow in their respective EFI firmware as any Mac with Internet Recovery is also compatible with and capable of installing Mavericks. But Apple appears to have not gone that route.
Does it matter? It's free to install and fairly painless, especially on a brand new machine with nothing yet installed on it.
I can understand the concern, but again, only in terms of what OS my Mac boots to via Internet Recovery when my hard drive takes a dump. Otherwise, downloading, making a bootable thumb drive of, and then wiping and installing Mavericks is an irritating waste of time versus just hitting the ground running with it and that IS made more annoying with a Fusion Drive than with just a hard drive or just an SSD. But aside from time and the potential fusion annoyance, when all is said and done, using the iMac will be the same.
Clean install Mavericks
http://justinseeley.com/tutorials/clean-install-mac-os-x-mavericks/
Although i'm not sure if it creates the recovery partition. Previous betas did not but not sure if it has been fixed with the current release
My box and so resale value is the old 10.8
Mavericks does make the 10.9 Recovery Partition. Similarly, if you install via a thumb drive made from the installer using Apple's new command line tool for making bootable Mavericks installer thumb drives, that will also make the 10.9 recovery partition. I'm pretty sure that all other non-standard installations (such as making a DVD that functions like the recovery partition) will not. There's a really great Macworld article online that goes into the reinstallation and making-a-bootable-install-drive options and how they differ from Lion/Mountain Lion.
My point is, old enough for 10.8 and it wasn't what I ordered. For some, this is a lot of money to spent and to not get what you paid for feels a little crappy when you've been putting away money every month for a few years and waiting it out until 10.9 came along
You didn't wait long enough! Had you asked, you could've found this out!
The only machines that will come pre-loaded with Mavericks on Day 1 are the machines that launched alongside it. This was the case in 2011 with Lion and the Mid 2011 Mac minis and MacBook Airs. For all other pre-existing models, it usually takes 1-2 months for Apple to modify whatever pre-installation techniques/tools they have for the new OS.
im planning on getting a 2013 refurb as soon as they become available (prob in about a month). do you think ill be getting one in a mavericks box?
Odds are it'll come with Mountain Lion preloaded. Refurbs tend to take longer to come with a newer OS if they ever do at all. As for the box, I'm seconding Bear's comment below". If you do not have the iWork apps in tow, there is an up-to-date program that you can sign up for that'll give you free codes for the new iWork apps on the Mac App Store.
It'll be in a plain white refurb box.
It's not really the problem of installing mavericks over mountain lion. I just don't want a box with ML on it.
Can anyone confirm having ML installed but still receiving a Mavericks box?
That's kind of silly. As your machine ages, no one who will try to buy your machine from you will care about which OS it came with; if anything, it coming with an earlier OS allows for greater flexibility as to what can be installed on it. Having a newer version of the OS for Internet Recovery is where having Mavericks preloaded (and thusly a Mavericks box) matters; but if it's just about how the box looks, there's nothing functional that you get from the newer box.
The box goes in a closet, does it really matter what's on the box?
Again, which version of Internet Recovery comes in tow matters; otherwise the only difference that matters is whether or not you have to clean install Mavericks.
It certainly can be a small deterrent for the resale value, given the age of ML.
Nope. Completely wrong here. If you have a Late 2013 iMac, that's all anyone will care about. The generation of the machine doesn't change just because the OS it is preloaded with does.
Once someone confirms they got it. I will call apple and make an argument to send me a mavericks box, whether they think I'm crazy or not.
I'd return the machine along with it as the box doesn't matter. But even then, if you don't care about which OS is initially in tow and which OS Internet Recovery boots to, then it REALLY doesn't matter.
