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Review: Apple OS X Mavericks – Part 1

During Apple’s event last week that announced the new iPad Air and iPad Mini With Retina display, Apple dropped a bomb. Their latest OS which is OS X Mavericks would be free to all. And when I say all, here’s the list of Macs that will be able to install Mavericks:

  • iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
  • MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
  • MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
  • MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
  • Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
  • Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
  • Xserve (Early 2009)

That’s one of the broadest lists of Macs I’ve ever seen for an Apple OS X release. I should also note that for the first time that I can remember, Apple hasn’t dropped support for any Macs with this version of OS X. The bottom line is that if your Mac runs Snow Leopard (10.6.8), Lion (10.7) or Mountain Lion (10.8), you can run OS X Mavericks. Now as has been the case for the last few Apple OS X releases, OS X does not come on any sort of media. Instead, you need to download all 5.29 GB of it from the App Store. Now, before you run out and upgrade away, you should do the following:

  • Use Disk Utility to make sure you don’t have any pre-existing conditions on your Mac that might cause you issues. Here is an Apple document that provides instructions on how to do that.
  • Check your apps to see if they can run under OS X Mavericks. If not, you’ll need to get them updated to a version that does. This site will help you with that. Install any updates you need before you install OS X Mavericks.
  • Update your current OS X as Mavericks will not install unless you’re up to date. Run Software Update to make sure you’re good to go.
  • Back up your computer. I wrote a post about how to do that.

If you’ve done all of that, you’re good to go to update to OS X Mavericks.

In my case, I had two computers to do. My 2013 MacBook Pro and my Wife’s 2012 Mac Mini. I did my MacBook Pro first as if I screw up my wife’s computer by having her be the Guinea Pig, she’ll kill me. After downloading the OS which took a while as my Internet connection is only 10 Mbps downstream, it offered to install. If you go ahead with the install, you have to click a few buttons and It does about five minutes of work and reboots. Then for the next 45 minutes or so it installs OS X Mavericks, and you get the pleasure of watching a progress bar go across the screen. Then it reboots again. But it’s not done yet. A second progress bar goes across the screen for about 10 minutes and then the install finishes. For my MacBook, it went well, though I had deal with a couple of things post install:

  • Sophos Anti-Virus tried to update itself to version 9, but it never succeeded. I had to stop the update process from the terminal and install version 9 on top the version 8 that I had installed.
  • Super Duper needed the back up scripts rewritten as per this document to work in OS X Mavericks.

This info was handy as I updated my wife’s Mac Mini to version 9 of Sophos Anti-Virus up front to avoid the updating issue. That install went smoothly except for the fact that at the end of the install, the installer application “unexpectedly quit.” After restarting the Mac Mini, OS X Mavericks came up and after some testing, it seemed fine. I can’t explain what happened. I can only assume it was a fluke.

So now that it’s installed, how does it perform and what are the new features? That’s what I’ll be covering in part two of this review.

This entry was posted on October 29, 2013 at 8:41 am and is filed under Products with tags . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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