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OS X Mavericks Adoption Pushing Toward 50%
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Sounds about right.
My i5 2.3GHz mid 2011 Mini with 8GB felt distinctly sluggish when moving from 10.7.5 to 10.9.0 (for the first time in my life I was swept up in the emotion of a new release and went straight for the initial release).
I believe that Finder responsiveness has improved with subsequent updates, but equally I could simply have got used to the lags.
10.9 on a C2D Mac doesn't bear thinking about.
My wife's late 2009 (21.5" 3.06 GHz C2D 8GB RAM) handles it fine and there have been little to no lags. The RAM usage is usually at 7GB + on hers so I'll most likely be upgrading the RAM some time soon. Mine however has 16GB RAM and for basic tasks I normally don't go over 6.
Well on the other hand, would there be any benefit in running Mountain Lion? It seems to me this version was quite short-lived.
I'm not sure what the improvements were over Lion since I was at Lion when I sold my 2009 iMac(20" 2.66GHz C2D) and then used PPC Macs for a while and was stuck with Leopard.
I would assume though that ML was a better version of Lion whereas Mavericks seems to utilize more resources and with better technologies. So I would suggest at least trying it out and seeing how that goes.
Well I know I strongly disliked Lion mainly because of ergonomics issues and lack of compatibility two years ago, to the point I decided to reinstall Snow Leopard to be able to work properly on my thesis. But this is one is a secondary machine where compatibility isn't too important (although likely won't be solved), and I don't feel like spending any more money to update its OS, unless significants gains are to be made. Other than that I don't know about ML.
Maybe word of mouth? If I could go back, I would. Mavericks is noticeably slower and less stable than Mountain Lion on my iMac (which I use 40-60 hours per week). It does add nice features, but they're not good enough to trump stability and performance. Honestly, I think Mavericks was free because it simply is not good enough to sell.
I am a software developer. And no, they do not just deserve it. They have to make something worth buying. Something compelling. The subscription model exists because software developers on some products ran out of ideas that would make you want to buy again, but they still rely on you buying again.
If something is serving you well, does everything you need it to do, then no, you should not buy a new version just because one exists. That's ridiculous. It's financially unsound, and even if it were free, it introduces risks that might ultimately prove costly. You should only upgrade when the new product has features that will make you even more productive, when it can serve you even better.
For many people, there is nothing in a Windows version past XP that will make their PC even the least amount more useful. And for Macs, Mavericks does add some nice features, and being free helps, but it's still a hard sell because it reduces productivity overall due to its slowness and stability. I thought I left periodic reboots to clean up the OS when I quit Windows a couple years back, but with Mavericks, I've had to reinstate that practice.
I agree.
Question though. What machine do you have that makes Mavericks seem slow and unstable? I have left my iMac on for days on end with no issues at all. It's the same with my wife's iMac.
That's well said.
Snow Leopard sold well to Leopard users because it provided a significant upgrade on Leopard's functionality. Almost none have been broken, and it hardened those that were desirable. It was famously touted as an upgrade that didn't provide any new features, yet people bought it. We have yet to see a more recent iteration of OS X doing that. They added functionality, with all good intentions I guess, but at the expense of backwards-compatibility, including by third-party software editors. It always comes to me as silly and unfortunate the latter routinely support 2008-era XP SP3 for their multi-platform software, but only the most recent OS X, from 2012 or younger. There is even less excuse for that given how OS X SDK is reputed to be more streamlined than Microsoft's.
I also second the cost argument. While I was ready for a new computer in early 2012 (late-2011 models), I was in the middle of a big project whose software didn't play well with Lion, which came as a surprise to me, since demo computers don't allow for full testing. As Apple Store dryly refused to give me a rebate for lost productivity due to the new OS or even have their genius work on ironing out issues (even for a fee), I discovered that, luckily, this precise machine was hardware-compatible with the last one sold with Snow Leopard. So I reinstalled it with the assistance of a trusty "BlackBook".
Snow Leopard is the most stable OS X imo, it's a great OS.
Maverick taking it to new height with efficient memory handling and power consumption.
Because it works at the moment and I have work to do. Don't want to spend time making sure things work, moving data etc.
my 2011 11" MacBook air with only 2GB ram and the 64Gb hard drive, Albeit, the lowest end model they had available at the time, does not run Mavericks particularly well.
- I have frequent Finder crashes.
- I often get network glitches that causes Finder to crash, especially when accessing Samba based filesharing.
- oddities like, Programs and Applications on boot / resume from sleep that start before the network interfaces even start (sometimes resulting in toast spam for things unable to connect to the network, like Network drives that always have to be re-connected)
- sound doesn't always resume from standby.
- The touchpad is not nearly as responsive as it used to under Lion or Mountain lion, often requiring me to repeat gestures multiple times.
- in ANY browser, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, I get frequent random beachballs. they only last a second, but it's noticable 1 second little "glitches" while it happens.
- Some programs that should be very tiny and load instantly take 2-5 seconds to start, that used to be instant, Like Safari, Notes, Calender or even resource monitor.
- The occasional random full system crash
- Shutting down the system doesn't always power off the laptop. Sometimes it just stops and hangs on the grey screen requiring me to hold the power button and do a hard reset.
Overall, there was little that Mavericks has brought me that mountain Lion had. The only thing that to me was an "upgrade" was the way Mavericks handles full screen applications and multiple Monitors.
as for trouble shooting.
I have tried
- Reinstalling from the online system recovery. Straight to Lion, then upgrade to Mountain Lion, then Upgrade to Mavericks.
- I've tried Reinstalling from Online system recovery from Lion straight to Mavericks.
- And i've tried installing mavericks directly from USB memory stick.
Anyone can call themselves a software developer, so no, I don't believe you. But even if you were, you'd know how much of a pain in the ass it is to try to improve your product AND support old OS's at the same time.
Please see other developers' obvious conclusions on the matter.
So, you can't have it both ways. You either don't improve your product to support far too many laggards that aren't your best customers, or you improve your product and the good users will follow.
Well now that I know what machine you have, I can see why youre having difficulty with the OS and crashes. Even with the memory management technology that Mavericks has, your RAM isnt nearly enough for the memory demands of the OS. Even though the compression algorithm is great, you'll at most have 3GB of RAM (after compression and subsequent increase in virtual memory). That is not nearly enough in my opinion to run the OS unless you disable Flash and other things that use too many system resources (which I think is lame if you actually want to upgrade the OS).
If you can, I would recommend downgrading to ML.
Do you have Activity Monitor up and running a lot to see whats going with your memory usage? I know with my PPC Macs which averaged 2GB of RAM per system, I would have that up and running and use the purge command whenever the memory usage was getting too high. Luckily, I only have to do that now when I use unarchiver or Handbrake.
Reinstalling is useless if it isn't a clean install. Always clean install an upgrade. Try it for a day without bringing back ANYTHING from a backup.
Then it's a hardware issue. I work with your model all the time on 10.9.2 and 2 GB of RAM, and it's fine. You might have RAM errors or SSD errors. I'd get a service provider to run overnight stress tests.
I've been lazy and not in my computers much at home. But that's a good idea and I'll run through some this weekend. Its just of since I got none of these problems on ML.
Hopefully nothing wrong. Is been an amazing laptop. But if I had to buy a new laptop now, it wouldn't be a macbook air.
Then downgrade it to ML again and see if any of these problems happen there. If they don't then you'll know for sure that Mavericks is not the right OS for that machine.
And I would NEVER get a MBA unless it had at least 8GB RAM with the i7. I know that sounds crazy, but from what I've seen of memory usage in Mavericks, anything less than that wouldn't be a great experience in my opinion. I'm starting to wonder if the MBA with 4GB RAM will be a single OS machine at this point.
its still a perfectly capable machine for your average everyday usage. Obviously not a powerhouse.
the i5 is more than quick enough CPU wise, and 2gb IS enough for basic use.
my "memory pressure" in Mavericks isn't that high either. unless i have mutiple browsers open and media and flash, it doesn't often go into Swap.
4gb is sufficient for most modern machines for your average everyday use. Most computer users, especially non gamers aren't going to push 4gb very hard, and 8GB is more than sufficient for even your typical "gamer" of today.
it is only when you start pushing systems with more professional style software that 8gb ever becomes really too little.
case in point. look at your machines. Any machines. And tell me how frequently your system goes into swap memory? if you're not touching swap, you're still mainly in physical ram. most systems these days also don't really report what amount of physical ram is actually available to the system. They tend to take and "use" the ram for system cache and the like. For example, on my desktop (running as a hackintosh), the system statistics show my RAM usage at 7.99GB of 8GB. Meanwhile, actual memory pressure (what OSx Mavericks calls it) is at almost nothing.
2GB IS on the low side, but still entirely usable. However, you are likely right that Mavericks being that much newer than Lion and Mountain lion might just not like only 2gb. Which is a shame, because Apple touted Mavericks to run better on lower powered hardware. That was the point of added features like App nap and the more advanced memory management. So, if my performance on 2gb of ram is real world performance, Apple has misled everyone on what hardware it really runs best on.
As I said. if it turns out to be just Mavericks running like crap on my hardware, I'll just go back to Mountain Lion and call it a day.
If on the other hand, I have a hardware problem. I'm out of warranty, and I'm not in the market to pay Apple what they think the current Macbook air's are worth.
Why are they understandable? You can upgrade from Snow Leopard to Mavericks.