I have an '11 MacBook Air that came with 10.6.8, 4GB RAM and 1.6GHz processor.
Two months ago I tried the free Mavericks download. I ran checkdisk and also repair permissions, whatever that means, as I had read on this forum that that would improve the performance.
Mavericks slowed the machine. Startup went from 16s to 19s, starting iTunes from 4s to 5s. Minor tasks were worse. Clicking on the Applications shortcut, or opening a Finder window, would bring up a window full of blank icons, which would then slowly appear one by one. Creating an Alias would take several seconds, while copying a shortcut to the desktop would give the Apple multicolour wheel for several seconds.
The only proper bugs I found were in iCal, which would arbitrarily refuse to display certain calendars, and launching Applications, where every so often after clicking an icon nothing would happen, and I would have to click a number of times before an application would open. Due to the new slowness, often there would be a pause of several seconds before any application would launch anyway, making the failure to launch at all particularly frustrating, as I would have to wait several seconds to see whether anything was going to happen.
I could see how Mavericks has a kind of "faux" performance improvement. The animations around scrolling and launching make it look as though the system is really whizzing along. It's kind of the computer equivalent of a car having an oversensitive throttle to make it appear more sporty, when in reality it has less power.
Most of all, I didn't see the point of Mavericks. The new features, such as the notifications, were annoying and unnecessary (my phone is on my desk next to me and the notifications all pop up there anyway), and I didn't like some of the design changes (all of the nice icons that I had in Finder would not display in the sidebar which became permanently monochrome).
I decided to revert to 10.6.8 That was really easy to do, taking about 20 minutes from inserting the 10.6.8 USB to the install finishing, then about another 20 minutes for all the latest software updates to download, plus 20 minutes to copy the files I wanted from Time Machine.
With a fresh install, the computer is faster - bootup now takes 14s and iTunes launches in 3s. Most importantly, everything has a really snappy and responsive feel - no pauses, no multicolour pinwheel and nothing not working. It's the little things like copying items to the desktop where you really feel the performance difference, as unlike bootup those are the things that you do a lot of when working. Those are the things that felt almost broken with Mavericks and that now work invisibly well with 10.6.8 Once again, my three years old computer feels brand new.
Lots of disc space has been freed up. With all my data restored from Time Machine, there is an extra 20GB free on my SSD Some of that is due to applications that I had installed and then forgotten about on the old build, and some I think due to things such as iTunes doing that thing of making a fresh copy of a film every time you launch the file and then keeping that old copy in an obscure folder even after you delete the film form iTunes.
No doubt if I were more technically proficient there would be myriad workarounds for all of the above issues with Mavericks. But the reason I bought a Mac is because I do not want to be technically proficient - my interests are writing, photography and music, not IT. For me, Mavericks was an annoying downgrade, and the way to freshen up my computer and make it feel new again was not to install the latest free OS from Apple, but just to make a fresh install of the OS it came with. And best of all is that this keeps me out of the loop of having the latest thing from Apple, which keeps me one step further away from buying a new iPhone which I neither can afford nor need
Two months ago I tried the free Mavericks download. I ran checkdisk and also repair permissions, whatever that means, as I had read on this forum that that would improve the performance.
Mavericks slowed the machine. Startup went from 16s to 19s, starting iTunes from 4s to 5s. Minor tasks were worse. Clicking on the Applications shortcut, or opening a Finder window, would bring up a window full of blank icons, which would then slowly appear one by one. Creating an Alias would take several seconds, while copying a shortcut to the desktop would give the Apple multicolour wheel for several seconds.
The only proper bugs I found were in iCal, which would arbitrarily refuse to display certain calendars, and launching Applications, where every so often after clicking an icon nothing would happen, and I would have to click a number of times before an application would open. Due to the new slowness, often there would be a pause of several seconds before any application would launch anyway, making the failure to launch at all particularly frustrating, as I would have to wait several seconds to see whether anything was going to happen.
I could see how Mavericks has a kind of "faux" performance improvement. The animations around scrolling and launching make it look as though the system is really whizzing along. It's kind of the computer equivalent of a car having an oversensitive throttle to make it appear more sporty, when in reality it has less power.
Most of all, I didn't see the point of Mavericks. The new features, such as the notifications, were annoying and unnecessary (my phone is on my desk next to me and the notifications all pop up there anyway), and I didn't like some of the design changes (all of the nice icons that I had in Finder would not display in the sidebar which became permanently monochrome).
I decided to revert to 10.6.8 That was really easy to do, taking about 20 minutes from inserting the 10.6.8 USB to the install finishing, then about another 20 minutes for all the latest software updates to download, plus 20 minutes to copy the files I wanted from Time Machine.
With a fresh install, the computer is faster - bootup now takes 14s and iTunes launches in 3s. Most importantly, everything has a really snappy and responsive feel - no pauses, no multicolour pinwheel and nothing not working. It's the little things like copying items to the desktop where you really feel the performance difference, as unlike bootup those are the things that you do a lot of when working. Those are the things that felt almost broken with Mavericks and that now work invisibly well with 10.6.8 Once again, my three years old computer feels brand new.
Lots of disc space has been freed up. With all my data restored from Time Machine, there is an extra 20GB free on my SSD Some of that is due to applications that I had installed and then forgotten about on the old build, and some I think due to things such as iTunes doing that thing of making a fresh copy of a film every time you launch the file and then keeping that old copy in an obscure folder even after you delete the film form iTunes.
No doubt if I were more technically proficient there would be myriad workarounds for all of the above issues with Mavericks. But the reason I bought a Mac is because I do not want to be technically proficient - my interests are writing, photography and music, not IT. For me, Mavericks was an annoying downgrade, and the way to freshen up my computer and make it feel new again was not to install the latest free OS from Apple, but just to make a fresh install of the OS it came with. And best of all is that this keeps me out of the loop of having the latest thing from Apple, which keeps me one step further away from buying a new iPhone which I neither can afford nor need
