I just wanted to share my experiences with upgrading two macs from 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.9 Mavericks. I was looking for this same information before I performed my upgrades, and even though there are probably not many people in that camp anymore, I want to put my story out there.
The two Macs I upgraded were a 2007 15" Macbook Pro (2,1), and a 2011 27" iMac at work. I tried upgrading the iMac first, and when that went well, I decided to try the same process on my personal laptop at home. In the case of the iMac, I partitioned my hard drive in two and SuperDuper-ed the first onto the second. Then I upgraded the second partition through the normal installer method. On the laptop, I made an external backup of the Expresscard SSD I've been using as the primary drive, and again upgraded using the normal installer method.
I'll get the Macbook Pro experience out of the way first: it was awful. While the install process was pleasant enough, the system took a long time to log in. Even once it had, just accessing System Preference items was a chorethe CPU would ramp up to 100%, and the preferences screen would sit there loading. All other apps seemed to be slower off too. I gave it a day, in case drive indexing was the caseit wasn'tso I went back to Snow Leopard on that machine. The laptop came with 10.4 on it, so upgrading to 10.9 was probably a bit of a stretch anyway.
My other Mac, which I use at work, came with 10.6 in 2011. The upgrade process went well enough, and my startup times actually seemed improved over my 10.6 installationincluding auto-start of Outlook, Google Chrome, and a script that mounted several network drives. I was happy with the new user interface adjustments, including Mission Control. I ran it for about a week.
There weren't a whole lot of issues, but they were there... and they were enough. My network drive shortcuts would randomly appear and disappear from my sidebar. I could no longer open files directly off the network; I now had to copy them to my local drive first. Things like Notification Center were more annoyances than helpful since I did not use the OS X Mail app, and Calendar was insistent on notifying me of RSS-subscribed events I had already acknowledged before. In general, I was talking more to my boss and co-worker who also runs Mavericks about things that did not work well, and reflected that I never had these conversations when I was running Snow Leopard.
So, with a small bit of regret, I moved the necessary files back to my other partition, and am back to running on 10.6. I liked a lot of things about Mavericks, but it's not refined, and it's not ready for a work environment (mine at least). I'm sure I'll be using it or something like it someday when I buy a new Macbook, but for the time being, Snow Leopard is my OS. It just works.
In b4 "cool story bro"
The two Macs I upgraded were a 2007 15" Macbook Pro (2,1), and a 2011 27" iMac at work. I tried upgrading the iMac first, and when that went well, I decided to try the same process on my personal laptop at home. In the case of the iMac, I partitioned my hard drive in two and SuperDuper-ed the first onto the second. Then I upgraded the second partition through the normal installer method. On the laptop, I made an external backup of the Expresscard SSD I've been using as the primary drive, and again upgraded using the normal installer method.
I'll get the Macbook Pro experience out of the way first: it was awful. While the install process was pleasant enough, the system took a long time to log in. Even once it had, just accessing System Preference items was a chorethe CPU would ramp up to 100%, and the preferences screen would sit there loading. All other apps seemed to be slower off too. I gave it a day, in case drive indexing was the caseit wasn'tso I went back to Snow Leopard on that machine. The laptop came with 10.4 on it, so upgrading to 10.9 was probably a bit of a stretch anyway.
My other Mac, which I use at work, came with 10.6 in 2011. The upgrade process went well enough, and my startup times actually seemed improved over my 10.6 installationincluding auto-start of Outlook, Google Chrome, and a script that mounted several network drives. I was happy with the new user interface adjustments, including Mission Control. I ran it for about a week.
There weren't a whole lot of issues, but they were there... and they were enough. My network drive shortcuts would randomly appear and disappear from my sidebar. I could no longer open files directly off the network; I now had to copy them to my local drive first. Things like Notification Center were more annoyances than helpful since I did not use the OS X Mail app, and Calendar was insistent on notifying me of RSS-subscribed events I had already acknowledged before. In general, I was talking more to my boss and co-worker who also runs Mavericks about things that did not work well, and reflected that I never had these conversations when I was running Snow Leopard.
So, with a small bit of regret, I moved the necessary files back to my other partition, and am back to running on 10.6. I liked a lot of things about Mavericks, but it's not refined, and it's not ready for a work environment (mine at least). I'm sure I'll be using it or something like it someday when I buy a new Macbook, but for the time being, Snow Leopard is my OS. It just works.
In b4 "cool story bro"