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New MBA13 w/Mountain Lion - Should I upgrade to Mavericks?

L

Lily7

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 29, 2013
10
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So I got my new MBA a couple of weeks ago but have only gotten to set it up and play with it in the last few days. It came with Mountain Lion installed - I went to the app store and did every update available except the upgrade to Mavericks, so it's as up-to-date as it's going to get for now aside from that.

This MBA is my return to Mac after 10 years of Windows and I couldn't be happier. However, I obviously have a lot to catch up on. I'm still trying to re-learn everything and figure it all out, and work out problems and whatnot. Other than Mail not playing nicely with Gmail I've not encountered any problems yet (but I'm still not done setting things up and installing programs I know what I want to use).

In googling around and doing research on various things I keep seeing stuff that scares me away from upgrading to Mavericks. It would appear it's riddled with problems and not as stable as Mountain Lion going by what I've read. Is this an accurate observation or has Mavericks been out long enough that it's stable now and I'm just reading a bunch of old threads? A friend of mine swears by Mavericks and says it's way better and I have nothing to worry about. But I'm still tentative. Help?

Also - if I should go ahead and upgrade, what's the best way to do it? I keep seeing something about doing a "clean install" rather than just updating through the mac app store, but I am confused. I'm pretty much a Mac newbie all over again. I don't understand a lot of the techno-gargon surrounding that. So advice on that would be helpful, too.

Thanks in advance!
 
I have no immediate plans to upgrade my 2013 MBA, but my situation is different from yours. I have some ~5 year old software that would be very expensive to replace. I retired 2 years ago, but still sometimes work with CAD and video.

Each new version of MacOSX brings new conflicts and I just don't want to deal with them since I currently have things working pretty well under 10.8. I am definitely of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mindset. :)
 
I had ML on my MBA 2013 and then upgraded it to Mavericks. No problem after the upgrade. There was no visible speedup, mostly because ML was already very fast. The major gain for me is that OS X Mail became much more stable after the upgrade.
 
Lily7 said:
So I got my new MBA a couple of weeks ago but have only gotten to set it up and play with it in the last few days. It came with Mountain Lion installed - I went to the app store and did every update available except the upgrade to Mavericks, so it's as up-to-date as it's going to get for now aside from that.

This MBA is my return to Mac after 10 years of Windows and I couldn't be happier. However, I obviously have a lot to catch up on. I'm still trying to re-learn everything and figure it all out, and work out problems and whatnot. Other than Mail not playing nicely with Gmail I've not encountered any problems yet (but I'm still not done setting things up and installing programs I know what I want to use).

In googling around and doing research on various things I keep seeing stuff that scares me away from upgrading to Mavericks. It would appear it's riddled with problems and not as stable as Mountain Lion going by what I've read. Is this an accurate observation or has Mavericks been out long enough that it's stable now and I'm just reading a bunch of old threads? A friend of mine swears by Mavericks and says it's way better and I have nothing to worry about. But I'm still tentative. Help?

Also - if I should go ahead and upgrade, what's the best way to do it? I keep seeing something about doing a "clean install" rather than just updating through the mac app store, but I am confused. I'm pretty much a Mac newbie all over again. I don't understand a lot of the techno-gargon surrounding that. So advice on that would be helpful, too.

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

Both OSs are fine. If you are hesitant about upgrading to 10.9, you don't have to. I would take a look at Apple's website and read the features of 10.9 and determine if contains additional features that you want/could use.

Most people agree that it extends the battery life of a notebook, so that would probably be a feature that you could benefit from.

If your machine is running fine the way it is, I would just do the recommended upgrade path, which is install it from the App Store. There is little benefit from installing it fresh if you are not experiencing any problems. It was designed to be installed that way (as an upgrade). All you would need to do is download it from the App Store and click through the installer. It will take a half hour or maybe a little more to install. Just make sure that you are plugged up when you do it.

You can run Recovery Disk Assistant before you upgrade if you want a safety net to fall back on. This would ensure that you could reinstall 10.8 in the event you did not like 10.9. It says it is for Lion, but it works on all builds beyond Lion as well.

http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1433
 
I advice you to upgrade. I upgraded to Mavericks from Mountain Lion on my new MBA and everything is still working smoothly. The optimal usage of the Haswell processor in Mavericks significantly increased my battery life from 9 hours at first up to 12-13 hours after the update.

Maybe you should also do a do a 'disk permission repair' after you upgraded. I didn't have any problems but the disk utility found some issues and repaired them. I don't know if that did any good, but definitely no harm.
 
Unless there is a specific reason to stay on 10.8, I don't get why you wouldn't upgrade. May as well get up to speed on the latest platform.
 
Thanks everyone - the reason I was (still kinda am) hesitant is because I've seen so many threads on various forums about the glitches and "broken" things on Mavericks. Of course, those could just be squeaky wheels, but you know. I just don't want to upgrade, and then have problems with it. I'm not sure if I am geeky enough to know how to roll back to the current installation of ML if I don't like it, either, so I might get stuck with it.
 
yosemit said:
The major gain for me is that OS X Mail became much more stable after the upgrade.
Click to expand...

What problems were you having with Mail? It has always been very stable for me under both 10.7 and 10.8. I had mail issues before, but they were related to the hosting company I was using for my own domain. Last summer I switched to iCloud and forwarded my other accounts to it. That has been working great, and I like having mail pushed to my phone, which I couldn't do with my other accounts.
 
Lily7 said:
Thanks everyone - the reason I was (still kinda am) hesitant is because I've seen so many threads on various forums
Click to expand...

This is easy enough.

I would use something like Carbon Copy and make an image backup of my ML. Go ahead and upgrade to 10.9 and if u don't like it, u can always GO BACK to 10.8 from ur image backup. Takes 15 minutes to restore and retains all settings and you wouldn't have missed a beat.
 
There was a problem with sending emails through an Exchange server at my working place, if the emails have attachment. Kind of random: sometimes an email is sent out immediately, sometimes it takes a few hours. It is a requirement at my working place to use the exchange server. Upgrading to Mavericks solved the problem.

Boyd01 said:
What problems were you having with Mail? It has always been very stable for me under both 10.7 and 10.8. I had mail issues before, but they were related to the hosting company I was using for my own domain. Last summer I switched to iCloud and forwarded my other accounts to it. That has been working great, and I like having mail pushed to my phone, which I couldn't do with my other accounts.
Click to expand...
 
Thanks for following up. That explains it then, I retired a couple years ago and am now happily Exchange Free ;) When I was working, I had to run Outlook under Parallels on my 2008 MBP with 10.5. Apple Mail didn't work with Exchange then. Not sure if it was due to my older version of Apple Mail or the even older version of Exchange Server that the office was using. :)
 
One thing you need to consider is the free Pages, Numbers and Keynotes. You might need to register within 30 days.
 
Chatran said:
One thing you need to consider is the free Pages, Numbers and Keynotes. You might need to register within 30 days.
Click to expand...

I did go ahead and upgrade to mavericks, but I don't see these anywhere, and when I go to their app store pages it shows them as having a price rather than free. I've only had the macbook a couple of weeks. What do I do now?
 
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