Mavericks - The worst release of OS X to date?

[sracer]

Yeah, exactly, for everyone who NEEDS it. Speak for yourself. I did a full erase of hard drive and installed Mavericks and it runs beautifully.

I was unhappy with the performance of Mavericks on my late 2011 15" MBP w/8GB RAM. I thought that it was because this machine originally shipped with Lion, I then upgraded to Mountain Lion, only to later install Mavericks.

I wiped the harddrive clean and reinstalled Mavericks. After waiting a few days to allow the system coalesce, I'm finding that Mavericks is now slower.

 

[simonsi]

Everyone who downloaded Mavericks should be offered a free full ML install.

What is the logic behind that? I'll guarantee there are many more happy users of Mavericks than those with problems.

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I'm finding that Mavericks is now slower.

Post the CPU activity, is it really kernel_task using all the cpu? Is Spotlight still indexing etc?

 

[sracer]

Post the CPU activity, is it really kernel_task using all the cpu? Is Spotlight still indexing etc?

Nope. Spotlight indexing completed a few days ago.

CPU activity
System 0.3%
User: 0.2%
Idle: 99.5%

Idle might drop to 90% when launching an app or other activity, but it is a general sluggishness.... responding to keyboard, mouse, etc.

edit:
I ran EtreCheck to see if there was something funky going on under the covers... a few launch daemons that probably didn't need to be there... deleted them, rebooted, no change.

 

[sflomenb]

Mavericks is perfect on my 2013 MacBook Air.

 

[simonsi]

Nope. Spotlight indexing completed a few days ago.

CPU activity
System 0.3%
User: 0.2%
Idle: 99.5%

Idle might drop to 90% when launching an app or other activity, but it is a general sluggishness.... responding to keyboard, mouse, etc.

edit:
I ran EtreCheck to see if there was something funky going on under the covers... a few launch daemons that probably didn't need to be there... deleted them, rebooted, no change.

Internal keyboard and trackpad same as external USB/BT keyboard and mouse?

If not generating cpu it can only be an issue with hw/driver...

 

[adnbek]

1. The most sluggish start up ever
The one thing which made OSX so superb in my opinion was the lightening fast start ups, once the machine was turned on, you were good to go. You could do anything, immediately. Now, the total opposite is true. When the OS is loaded, it is immensely slow for several minutes until the bowels catch up with the visuals.

Upon start up, once the dock is loaded, if one clicks an application, it will happily bounce there for what seems like an eternity. Almost nothing responds instantaneously anymore. When clicking an application, it will bounce and bounce and bounce. Right click the app to quit.... the dock will freeze for a couple of seconds and you will have to force close or just wait for the bouncing to stop. Open up multiple apps.. well you might as well go and make a coffee while you wait.

This is perhaps the most irritating thing about the update; the general sluggishness on start up. I should mention that I am not only talking about a boot up from shut down, these problems occur when awaking from sleep. Very rarely, this will not occur or it will be short lived, it literally occurs every time.

I noticed this too when going from Lion to Mountain Lion and to a larger extent now when I upgraded to Mavericks. Snow Leopard never had this issue.

On my Mac Mini with a slow 5400rpm drive, it would take a minute or longer after the desktop appears for disk activity to cease and it would be sluggish until the disk thrashing would stop. A look in Activity Monitor (under Memory) shows that it is the File Cache that's being built and it takes forever to finish. I guess older OSX versions didn't do much file caching back then so the computer was immediately responsive after the desktop appeared.

I recently upgraded to an SSD on the Mini just because I couldn't bare how slow Mavericks was with regards to disk activity and things are back to being snappy again. I think Apple, as they've done many times before, see SSDs as the future of storage and are abandoning "legacy" hardware. Their OS is being built to take advantage of SSDs as much as possible by doing more aggressive file caching since such operations can be done very quick on SSDs, which unfortunately hurts the user experience for people still on traditional hard drives.

 

[Hephaestus]

This week I decided to replace my 1TB 5400 RPM with a 250GB SSD.

The difference, as most would expect, is monumental. Everything is now lightning fast, yet to see any delay or beach balls. It only cost £95 and it's literally like having a new MBP. I think it's definitely safe to say that Apple optimise these new OS' for SSDs and neglect traditional HDDs.

Anyway, just thought I'd report back, and I advise everyone to get an SSD. They really do transform your computer.

 

[Ledgem]

This week I decided to replace my 1TB 5400 RPM with a 250GB SSD.

The difference, as most would expect, is monumental. Everything is now lightning fast, yet to see any delay or beach balls. It only cost £95 and it's literally like having a new MBP. I think it's definitely safe to say that Apple optimise these new OS' for SSDs and neglect traditional HDDs.

Anyway, just thought I'd report back, and I advise everyone to get an SSD. They really do transform your computer.

I'm glad to hear that your experience has changed for the better. I couldn't relate to any of the complaints that you mentioned in your opening post, but I had already installed a SSD by the time Mavericks was released. Mavericks runs perfectly fine on my wife's machine (which has a Seagate Momentus XT, aka "SSHD"), so I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple is purely optimizing for SSDs over traditional HDDs... but SSDs always help with responsiveness.

 

[simonsi]

I think it's definitely safe to say that Apple optimise these new OS' for SSDs and neglect traditional HDDs.

I don't think that stands up, sure there might be <some> optimizing but its like saying if I go to the gym I can run faster, then getting in a Ferrari you'll travelwaaaay faster that way irrespective of anything the gym did for you.

The SSD base speed increase will far outstrip any optimization the OS can achieve - and any it would achieve would likely play across HDDs too.

I think you are just seeing a raw SSD speed increase.

 

[827538]

I'm a recent Mac convert but I have to say it is running flawlessly on my system. Boots extremely quickly (I don't usually use sleep its that quick!). As for stability I had a few problems with the Mail App giving me beachballs when I tried to close it but think that has since been fixed as I've not had any of those problems for months now.

Lightning fast, I have W7 on here too and it definitely beats it - but both are fast and responsive - but it probably has a lot to do with the SSD.
Stable, can work all day on it without a single hangup or crash.
Efficient, can last a pretty long time on a single charge - far longer than any other laptop I've ever used.
It's just been a great experience for me, I am really into tweaking and tinkering with Windows, I do plenty of reg edits and all sorts of optimisations. Granted I'm still new to OSX but there's been nothing for me to do. It just works. Aside from gaming I now do everything in OSX as it's just a pleasure to use.

My only gripe is why does it ask me 'Are you sure you want to shut your computer down' when I go to shutdown? Why can't I disable this? Annoys the hell out of me.
Also whenever I update all my apps in iTunes for my iPhone it updates the first one then leaves the rest. I then need to press update again for the rest of them to update - weird bug.
I guess if I was being extremely discerning I miss having a delete button, but that's all I can think of.

 

[Eithanius]

I'm a recent Mac convert but I have to say it is running flawlessly on my system. Boots extremely quickly (I don't usually use sleep its that quick!). As for stability I had a few problems with the Mail App giving me beachballs when I tried to close it but think that has since been fixed as I've not had any of those problems for months now.

Lightning fast, I have W7 on here too and it definitely beats it - but both are fast and responsive - but it probably has a lot to do with the SSD.
Stable, can work all day on it without a single hangup or crash.
Efficient, can last a pretty long time on a single charge - far longer than any other laptop I've ever used.
It's just been a great experience for me, I am really into tweaking and tinkering with Windows, I do plenty of reg edits and all sorts of optimisations. Granted I'm still new to OSX but there's been nothing for me to do. It just works. Aside from gaming I now do everything in OSX as it's just a pleasure to use.

My only gripe is why does it ask me 'Are you sure you want to shut your computer down' when I go to shutdown? Why can't I disable this? Annoys the hell out of me.
Also whenever I update all my apps in iTunes for my iPhone it updates the first one then leaves the rest. I then need to press update again for the rest of them to update - weird bug.
I guess if I was being extremely discerning I miss having a delete button, but that's all I can think of.

Mac convert...? Hmm...

Guess you've never used previous versions of OS X before... I guess your words don't count since 99% of Windows users who converted will say same bloody damn thing. OS X is far superior to Windows in terms of stability and ease of use. But had you used any OS X pre-Lion, you'll know how SOLID some of those versions, especially 10.4 and 10.6... 10.7 onwards are basically Apple heading the way of Microsoft...

 

[phillytim]

I absolutely LOVE Mavericks; but I've had great experiences with the 'Lions since my 2011 MBPro came with Lion built in. It's impossible to contemplate returning to any previous Mac OS, with all the awesome Mavericks functionality that I've become accustomed to (such as the energy saving issues, share features, etc.)!

However, the one foible unique to Mavericks so far is that I do experience the Wi-Fi reconnect (lack thereof, actually) issue, at least since 10.9.1. With the latest update to Safari, oddly enough it has noticeably improved to my surprise. But I still do get the reconnect issue on occasion.

Other than that, I can't wait for the next Mac OS update!

 

[827538]

Mac convert...? Hmm...

Guess you've never used previous versions of OS X before... I guess your words don't count since 99% of Windows users who converted will say same bloody damn thing. OS X is far superior to Windows in terms of stability and ease of use. But had you used any OS X pre-Lion, you'll know how SOLID some of those versions, especially 10.4 and 10.6... 10.7 onwards are basically Apple heading the way of Microsoft...

I don't know how you can claim they were more solid? Mavericks hasn't set a foot wrong. It's been 100% solid, unbelievably fast and responsive. How can it be any more solid than that? Like I said, apart from the Mail app giving me some problems at the start - which has since been fixed - Mavericks is the single most solid experience I've ever had, along with iOS which I've used since it launched. Maybe it's Apple focusing and tailoring their OS to newer tech's like someone else mentioned. Utilising the latest CPU instruction sets and sleep modes, blisteringly fast SSD's, high speed internet, massive amounts of RAM etc? Just an idea, but whatever Apple is doing I hope they continue this way as it is great to use.

Although I have noticed in the Activity Monitor that the System uses over 6GB of RAM, and more like 7GB when browsing with a bunch of tabs open. If I was on my Windows partition it would be less than 2GB. Not that it's a problem with this massive amount of RAM that's on my system but definitely a bit odd, or has OSX always been that way?

 

[fivenotrump]

Mavericks is the best yet – but looking forward to Yosemite!

 

[smokesletsgo]

Worst name, worst appearance (oversaturated colors, raped notes, address book apps, and that beautiful gray login screen lol), worst default desktop wallpaper.

 

[Eithanius]

Then you'll love Yosemite... superbly monotonous colors...

 

[smokesletsgo]

Then you'll love Yosemite... superbly monotonous colors...

The problem is that the old OS X interface with that color palette looks way off. Yosemite looks great.

 

[cjmillsnun]

I love Mavericks - it's given my Early-2011 MBP a new lease of life! The only thing that bugs me is the UI could of done with more polish - yes Reminders.app, i'm looking at you!

The worst release of OS X was Lion, followed by Mountain Lion.

I remember going back to ML during the Mavericks DPs and noticing the difference straight away - everything was just sluggish. Lion was just an abomination.

Here I disagree.

The worst ever release of OS X was Cheetah. It was abysmal. Puma was slightly better. Lion was third worst IMO.

The best release was Tiger. Without a shadow of a doubt. Fast, responsive, and once updated, rock solid. Then Mountain Lion, then Leopard.

Snow Leopard suffered from memory management problems, which meant it would not use inactive memory (memory that should've been freed by closed apps) and would instead page to disk. They never fixed this.

 

[Gochugogi]

I've been running Mavericks for one year now on a 2013 Mini, 2009 MacPro and for 6 months on a 2014 iMac and it's been fast and rock solid. Not one crash on any of the Macs. The only gotcha I've experienced has been spotty support for FW drives: they work fine but won't spin down during system sleep. Luckily I only have a few working FW drives and will be converted wholly to USB3 in a year or so.