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Mountain Lion to Mavericks?

W

westcoastin

macrumors member
Original poster
May 3, 2011
78
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For those with a Mid-2011 Mac Mini 2.3 ghz I5 running Mavericks (I have 8GB RAM, FWIW), how does it run compared to Mountain Lion? I've held off on upgrading because of reports of Mavericks being not as responsive as ML. Users reported seeing the beach ball more frequently than they had before upgrading. Granted, this was when the OS was first released, so perhaps it has improved since then.

Basically, I don't want to upgrade from a perfectly working OS to one that is slower and not as refined, but if that is not the case, then please let me know your guys' experience so I can make an educated decision. Thanks in advance.
 
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I have a mid 2011 i7 mini and upgraded to mavericks a couple days after it was released. I have not noticed any downgrade from ML and have no complaints about upgrading right from the onset.
 
westcoastin said:
For those with a Mid-2011 Mac Mini 2.3 ghz I5 running Mavericks (I have 8GB RAM, FWIW), how does it run compared to Mountain Lion? I've held off on upgrading because of reports of Mavericks being not as responsive as ML. Users reported seeing the beach ball more frequently than they had before upgrading. Granted, this was when the OS was first released, so perhaps it has improved since then.

Basically, I don't want to upgrade from a perfectly working OS to one that is slower and not as refined, but if that is not the case, then please let me know your guys' experience so I can make an educated decision. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

make a backup first with something like CCC.

My macbook air had a flawless upgrade. My rMBP has been nothing but problems since I upgraded. Really wish I could downgrade. I will never make the mistake of upgrading without a clone type backup again.

A clean install will probably cure my rMBP but it would literally take a week to get everything setup again.
 
The OP wrote:
[[ For those with a Mid-2011 Mac Mini 2.3 ghz I5 running Mavericks (I have 8GB RAM, FWIW), how does it run compared to Mountain Lion? ]]

VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION:
Do you have an SSD, or a HDD ??

This is "the critical question" for Mavericks.
If you have a HDD, you're likely to get beachballs, etc.

Next important question:

Do you have 4gb of RAM, or do you have more ??

Mavericks will run with 4gb, but I believe it was designed "for more".

My personal experiments with Mavericks have NOT been satisfying. Beachballs, etc.
I will post the disclaimer that my "Mavericks test bed" is an old external HDD via a firewire 400 connection. I believe it would run much better booting from an SSD.

My experience only, and others' will be different...
 
Thanks everyone for your responses. After reading them, I've decided to stick with Mountain Lion for the time being. From what I've gathered there doesn't seem to be a general consensus on Mavericks being a step-up from ML, so I'd rather not upgrade.
 
I upgraded my 2009 Mini the day Mavericks came out and it runs perfectly and I like all the new features like tags, safari improvements, keychain, free pages/numbers upgrades plus the memory manager does seem better with apps faster to load. The only issue I had was with Mail app with my gmail account, it seemed to take a few releases to settle down but was usable from day 1 and if it hadn't been there was always the web access. If you wait too much longer you'll be another whole OSX release behind.

I am of the view that there is no reason not to upgrade.
 
Can someone please help. How can I make Apple Loops Utility works on Mavericks? I can open the program, but space bar doesn't playback,it just give me that boing sound.

Any ideas?
 
now i see it said:
Calling Mavericks an "upgrade" is debatable.
Click to expand...
Why? While I can understand the issue with the various bugs, Mavericks is definitely an upgrade as it has lots of great little low-level features; timer coalescing and memory compression are both great features that can help to boost older systems. App Nap is another good one, and its integration with the new Safari's per-process tabs is a big improvement; you can actually enable per-process tabs in Safari on Mountain Lion if you enable the Debug Menu, but without App Nap they're not quite as slick performance-wise.
 
westcoastin said:
Thanks everyone for your responses. After reading them, I've decided to stick with Mountain Lion for the time being. From what I've gathered there doesn't seem to be a general consensus on Mavericks being a step-up from ML, so I'd rather not upgrade.
Click to expand...

In all the computers I've seen upgraded to Mavericks, it's a huge step up. The utilisation of compressed memory and CPU optimisations means that it runs quicker than ML. In my experience, it's also quicker than Snow Leopard as well (for some reason, Mavericks sings on the Core 2 Duo CPUs).

Mavericks was designed for 4GB RAM and an HDD -- I can tell you this because Apple had a world of problems for years with RAM usage/pageouts on the base 13" cMBP and they were getting a serious amount of complaints about it. People sinking £1K on a computer and getting performance akin to a cheap Wintel.

Mavericks helps reduce those pageouts with the compressed memory, and that makes a massive difference. Macs are utterly crippled when they page out on a physical hard drive.

Upgrade. You won't regret it.
 
Fishrrman said:
The OP wrote:
[[ For those with a Mid-2011 Mac Mini 2.3 ghz I5 running Mavericks (I have 8GB RAM, FWIW), how does it run compared to Mountain Lion? ]]

VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION:
Do you have an SSD, or a HDD ??

This is "the critical question" for Mavericks.
If you have a HDD, you're likely to get beachballs, etc.

Next important question:

Do you have 4gb of RAM, or do you have more ??

Mavericks will run with 4gb, but I believe it was designed "for more".

My personal experiments with Mavericks have NOT been satisfying. Beachballs, etc.
I will post the disclaimer that my "Mavericks test bed" is an old external HDD via a firewire 400 connection. I believe it would run much better booting from an SSD.

My experience only, and others' will be different...
Click to expand...

I have a HDD iMac and it never beachballs (even when working with 2hr long HD 1080p video with lots of edits, video stabilisation, colour correction, audio and video enhancements...). I guess your HDD is faulty or you have filled it almost completely full (a HDD gets around half the read/write speeds when using the most inner sector when compared to the most outer sector).

And for the matter of RAM, Mavericks was really made with 4Gb in mind the most. This is due to several reasons:

1. The lowest amount of RAM you can get in the Macbook Pro retina's went down from 8Gb (in 2012) TO 4Gb (now).

2. When talking about RAM compression, Apple used 4Gb of RAM as an example ("You can fit 6Gb of data on 4Gb of RAM...). This means if the OP has 4Gb of RAM, they will be better off with running Mavericks over Mountain Lion.

From my tests with my iMac (21'' Late 2013 High End iMac, Quad Core 2.9-3.6Ghz Haswell i5, 8Gb of 1600Mhz RAM, 1Tb HDD, NVidia Geforce GT 750m 1Gb GDDR5 VRAM), I have been able to push my 8Gb of RAM all the way to 18.5Gb before I got heavy page outs and high RAM pressure (where my machine finally started to slow down). On Mountain Lion, I would only have been able to push it to the standard 8Gb before it would slow down.

OP, just upgrade.
 
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westcoastin said:
For those with a Mid-2011 Mac Mini 2.3 ghz I5 running Mavericks (I have 8GB RAM, FWIW), how does it run compared to Mountain Lion? I've held off on upgrading because of reports of Mavericks being not as responsive as ML. Users reported seeing the beach ball more frequently than they had before upgrading. Granted, this was when the OS was first released, so perhaps it has improved since then.

Basically, I don't want to upgrade from a perfectly working OS to one that is slower and not as refined, but if that is not the case, then please let me know your guys' experience so I can make an educated decision. Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...

You will be much better off with Mavericks. In terms of RAM usage, I have been able to push my 8Gb of RAM on Mavericks to 18.5Gb before heavy page outs (due to RAM compression in Mavericks).
 
To those who responded after my second post, thanks for posting about yours and others' experiences with Mavericks. It seems I will have to reconsider after reading your guys' posts. I will likely do what one user suggested and make a backup in the event I am unsatisfied with Mavericks and want to revert to ML.
 
I'm also still on 10.8.5 - I'm waiting for 10.9.3 to be released and then I'll make the jump to Mavericks.....after a tested CCC clone of my 10.8.5 drive - just in case.
 
I have my MacMini mid '11 running fine, no worries, no complaints. I preferred make a clean installation because i changed the HDD to SSD, it was upgraded before to 8 Gb of RAM too
 
I have a Mac Mini early 2009 (2GHz C2D) with 4GB DDR3 and it runs Mavericks just fine!
Fast and smooth.
I have to say that before installing Mavericks I upgraded the Mini with a 240GB SSD from Crucial (M500).
An SSD really breaths new life in these "vintage" Mac Mini's.
 
I have a 2011 i5 2.3Ghz Mini with 16GB RAM that I upgraded from ML to Mavericks. The upgrade worked fine. It seems to run as well as when it was running ML. If anything it seems to be more efficient with RAM usage than before. My advice would be to do a full system backup and upgrade to the latest Mavericks.

After the upgrade I was advised by a friend who is a pro system admin to run a permissions check and corrections afterwards from the OS X boot/pre-boot menu options but this is optional.
 
fhall1 said:
I'm also still on 10.8.5 - I'm waiting for 10.9.3 to be released and then I'll make the jump to Mavericks.....after a tested CCC clone of my 10.8.5 drive - just in case.
Click to expand...

UPDATE.....did the upgrade last weekend - no big issues, only a couple older software items had to be updated (a Geektool script and my version of Truecrypt - so far anyway).
 
Cool. General view is that it takes a day or so to settle down (various stuff going on in the background). I like all the new features (vs ML) and am looking forward to WWDC to hear about the next release, hoping it's free !
 
When I installed mavericks to an external drive for testing, it wouldn't even boot with my Cintiq 22HD connected as a second monitor…even if it was off. Painter 12 had issues with it. Don't know if there were any other issues because those two were enough for me to say no to mavericks.
 
Mavericks has served me remarkably well on my mid-2011 MacBook Air.

It seems just like a faster, more stable and refined Mountain Lion and the culmination of Apple's haute UI design. No "flat" nonsense.
 
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