
OS X 10.9 Mavericks: The Ars Technica Review - cwe
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/
======
nostromo
I am super excited to see Apple push Flash out of the browser.

[http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/safari...](http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/safari-power-saver@2x.png)

[http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/safari...](http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/10/safari-plugin-ask@2x.png)

Flash has been in decline since the first iPhone, but is still used to track
people with unkillable cookies and to make obnoxious ads. Hopefully those days
are now over.

I wish Google and Microsoft would follow suit. Google probably will resist the
most due to the entrenched interests of DoubleClick and YouTube.

~~~
tvon
While I like their opposition to Flash[1], IMO you will eventually just end up
more advanced HTML ads that are harder to detect.

[1] primarily because there are no viable competing implementations to what
Adobe puts out

~~~
roc
While many people like to block Flash for content reasons, Apple's motivation
is more about security and performance.

Or, more specifically, Adobe's lack of interest in addressing such issues in a
timely manner; at least on OSX.

~~~
Joeri
In my opinion a flash animation still outperforms a CSS-based animation in
many cases. The problem with flash was never that it was inherently slow, but
that people abused it to do slow things. On the security front though, you are
absolutely right.

~~~
bruceboughton
But it's within Apple's control to improve the performance/battery consumption
of CSS animations. It's not within their control to fix Flash.

------
mjn
The strategy of compressing RAM pages before resorting to swapping them out is
a nice addition (discussed on p. 17 of the review). Something similar is in
the works for Linux as well:
[http://lwn.net/Articles/545244/](http://lwn.net/Articles/545244/)

The other main highlights from my perspective: "App Nap" energy-saving API (p.
13), generally better battery life, even on old hardware (p. 18), & support
for offline speech-to-text (p. 23).

~~~
mwexler
Though I am reminded of the Ram Doublers from Connectix and others in the
early 90s, and the buzz around magically doubling your memory...
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connectix)
and
[http://www.ambrosiasw.com/ambrosia_times/january_96/3.1HowTo...](http://www.ambrosiasw.com/ambrosia_times/january_96/3.1HowTo.html)

~~~
makomk
Sooner or later, everything old is new again.

~~~
jdgiese
"everything"?

I wonder when airplanes are going to be new again, or books, or cars. Maybe
you mean everything related to computers? I am not sure of even that though...

~~~
freehunter
Concorde was a good try. It failed for political and sociological reasons, but
hypersonic airplanes were set to revolutionize air travel until it became
politically unpopular to support. We're facing down a generation designed
around space-based air travel, though, so it could happen again.

~~~
howeman
You mean supersonic airplanes? I don't think hypersonic airplanes have ever
been seriously considered for passenger travel.

~~~
freehunter
Yeah, supersonic. My mistake.

------
k2enemy
Each release I'm as excited (or more) to read Siracusa's review as I am to
actually try the new OS. Keep up the good work.

~~~
Zaheer
How do you even read the whole review? 24 pages on a single OS update??
Seriously?

~~~
chm
You take an hour of your time.

It's a great review. Every page is not the same length, and some you can skim
over if you're not interested.

~~~
crag
I read every page. Great work. Really. It's a great read.

------
kunai
This part:

    
    
      > In the years that have passed since then, the Mac has 
      > indeed been on a steady march toward the functional ideal 
      > embodied by the iPad, a product that is arguably the 
      > culmination of Jobs' original vision of personal computing
    

concerns me quite a bit. We all know Jobs' original vision of personal
computing was a tightly locked-down walled garden, and I can't help but think
that inching towards this destination is inevitably a change for the worse.

Think about it. With the drop of the non-Retina display MacBook Pros today, no
Macs are now officially user-upgradeable.

What was the reason given?

2mm in thickness. Two. Fucking. Millimeters, so you can stare at the edge of
your laptop with a hard-on. Oh, and that absurdly high resolution display that
you'll need a goddamned loupe to appreciate.

All kernel extensions now must be signed in Mavericks. OS features brought
about in Lion still bug me, like the absolutely back-asswards autosave system
that uses duplication, and the lack of direct manipulation while scrolling.
Also, Gatekeeper is a huge uh-oh.

It's the reason why my MacBook is now sitting in a closet, and why I'm using a
2005 Toshiba Tecra with Debian on it. Amazing how Linux news has gotten so
rare these days... but stick an Apple sticker on something and it shoots to
the top of the front page. Sad.

~~~
oijaf888
How does Virtualbox bypass the requirement that kernel extensions be signed?

~~~
kunai
It places them in a different directory. So far, this works, but this feature
may not be present in future versions of OS X.

------
digitalsushi
The singular improvement I have been waiting for is using an airplay device as
a second monitor.

I have a macbook pro and I hook in with my thunderbolt->DVI connector to get
my big monitor.

I can throw an appletv onto the monitor with an hdmi->DVI connection and
finally go cordless! This is an improvement that means something real to me!

~~~
specialist
Yes. Add airplay to generic monitors and you've got a solution for
enterprises. (Do you know of such a product?)

All of our conference rooms have a wall mounted LCD with a shitty Windows box
driving it. Best we can do now is screen sharing with Skype or join.me.

Most of our Mac users just plug into the monitor directly. We'd LOVE to have
an untethered solution.

~~~
untog
We have Mac Minis attached to our TVs. And infuriatingly, you can't use OS X
as an AirPlay target, only as a source. I'd love to see that change, but don't
see any mention of it in Mavericks.

~~~
objclxt
> * And infuriatingly, you can't use OS X as an AirPlay target, only as a
> source*

Have you looked at AirServer?
[http://www.airserver.com](http://www.airserver.com)

~~~
untog
Yeah, we may well end up using it, but it just seems like an annoyance to pay
for something like that.

Also, we have an issue with the TV computers not being on the same subnet as
wifi'd laptops, so they don't appear through Bonjour. But that's a whole other
issue for enterprise that Apple doesn't really touch.

~~~
rbritton
One benefit AirServer has over any of Apple's AirPlay implementations to date
is that it supports 1080p rather than just 720p like the Apple TV when
receiving data from an iPad or iPhone. I specifically have an Apple TV +
AirServer hooked up to a wall-mounted screen instead of an Apple TV just for
this reason.

------
snoshy
For making such a big deal about resolving the multiple desktop and full-
screen issues, Mavericks feels a little disappointing. Switching between full-
screen windows is still accompanied by the painfully slow animation which
_still_ can't be disabled.

Trackpad scroll speed on my 13" MBA is also noticeably slower without
significant load on the machine. This seems deliberate, but it's a move in the
wrong direction for people that already have the trackpad sensitivity maxed
out.

~~~
anologwintermut
I'd bet the animation hides the fact that the transition is actually that
slow.

~~~
snoshy
If that were the case, it would be a matter of overly-aggressive optimization
on Apple's part. Full-screening in the days of multiple monitor setups
shouldn't necessarily mean that windowed apps get paged out (which is about
the only reason I can see for causing a slower transition).

------
Goopplesoft
Its interesting how Scott Forstall has become the goto name to sully in many
of these articles. He pretty much pioneered iOS but one redesign later he's
nothing in the shadow of Ive.

~~~
kennywinker
The only mention of Forstall in the review is on the first page.

> But that was all before last year's ouster of Scott Forstall, senior vice
> president of iOS Software. By all accounts, Forstall was one of the driving
> forces behind the iOS aesthetic that Lion and Mountain Lion so
> enthusiastically embraced. Jony Ive's iOS 7 strikes off in a bold new
> direction based on a philosophy that Apple is eager to generalize to the
> company as a whole—leaving OS X holding the stitched-leather bag.

Not exactly sullying his name. There has been a design shift, it's fairly
striking, at least on the surface, and it seems to be tightly coupled with a
changing of the guard.

The story that will go down in history is Scott Forstall was the skeu guy, and
he got the boot so Ive could flat-iron everything. We don't know if it's true,
but unless Apple tells us otherwise, it fits the data we have better than most
things.

~~~
MaysonL
Actually, Forstall will most likely go down as leaving because he was power-
hungry and didn't play well with others. Skeu probably had little to do with
it (imho).

~~~
dclowd9901
Way way off topic, but: Can we cut the IMHO shit? Why do we have to qualify
every opinionated statement as opinionated? If some mouth breather doesn't
understand that what you wrote is your own opinion that's on them not you.

~~~
danneu
I think it's just used to mitigate the edge of an assertion. Or make it seem
more like a declaration than some point you're willing to vehemently defend.

In other words, imho I don't think it really means

    
    
       *beep* *boop* entering opinion mode

~~~
chongli
This is something I despise about our culture. I see this everywhere and not
just with _imho_. People tack on qualifiers all over the place in order to
give a hint to the reader that they are expressing an opinion. I wish people
would just give each other a break and that people would not be so insecure
about appearing to be _wrong_ in an argument.

People make baseless assertions and throw around absolutes all the time. It's
not the end of the world when an absolute is inaccurately applied to a
relative quantity or quality!

~~~
collyw
I think an IHMO is far better than the kind of crap creationists come out
with. Its usually opinion they are regurgitating, and they talk of it as if it
is fact.

------
nicholassmith
It's that time again. I'm glad they do paid eBook versions now as I'm not an
ars subscriber, but they definitely deserve some money for putting _the_ OS X
review together every release. I love reading Siracusa's minor gripes and
grumbles, and when he feels something deserves genuine praise.

------
smackfu
A blog post from the author, about the review:
[http://hypercritical.co/2013/10/22/mavericks](http://hypercritical.co/2013/10/22/mavericks)

~~~
alxndr
Interesting:

> "Some people think Ars Technica forces me to break my article up into many
> tiny pages. That’s not the case. I choose how to paginate the article. I
> like to break it up on logical section boundaries, which means that the
> “pages” vary widely in length. I do try to keep any single “page” from being
> too short, however."

------
jasonwilk
IS it just me or is anyone else disappointed that they didn't port over the
flat design elements of iOS7 into the OSX Mavericks UI?

I thought that would have looked awesome on my iMac!

~~~
crs
I've only been using 10.9 for a few hours but I have already noticed that some
of the unnecessary decoration was removed. Notepad, the notification sidebar,
launcher, widgets screen, etc have been toned down.

------
pavlov
Mavericks GM hasn't been too good for my 2011 MacBook Pro. This machine has
only 4 GB RAM, and it shows. It's swapping noticeably more than before, and
overall everything feels less snappy than on Mountain Lion.

On the other hand, the battery life is definitely better. It's not really
worth the performance hit, though...

~~~
Synaesthesia
Interesting, the RAM compression should actually increase performance. Well I
would highly recommend an SSD for you, with 4gb RAM my Macbook Air flies, and
it's all thanks to the SSD.

~~~
prawks
What year Air? I'll likely be making the switch on my late '11 model with 4GB.
Skipped Mountain Lion due to laziness and skepticism on performance.

~~~
ImprovedSilence
I'm in the exact same boat as you. Imma wait it out a few weeks, let the bugs
get sorted out, and update. Maybe...

------
malandrew
Any incompatibilities people have run across yet. I want to figure out if
there are any obvious dealbreaking changes before I spend time making a backup
and upgrading.

~~~
philfreo
MacPorts isn't really ready yet.

~~~
topbanana
OT: is macports the best package manager for a developer? Considering buying
my first Mac. (Macbook Pro 13 is perfect hardware for me)

~~~
nicholassmith
Homebrew is the current choice for most of us, I've found it much more stable
than MacPorts.

~~~
topbanana
Thanks

~~~
masklinn
pkgsrc also works, supposedly. I'm currently using Macports on 10.6, but
wondering whether I should stay on macports (known quantity, huge number of
ports), switch to homebrew (hype, easy to write & push new packages, lower
number of ports) or switch to pkgsrc/pkgin (cross-platform, good number of
ports, but very low popularity & likely support)

------
dylandrop
If you're going to give us a 24 page whitepaper on a free OS upgrade, at least
give a brief intro about your findings... verbiage and metaphor excluded.

------
gmisra
If you know of a shorter, more useful review, or are willing to tl;dr this for
non-fanboys, please share.

~~~
dbecker
tl;dr Mavericks isn't the name of a cat.

This article would more appropriately be called a "rambling" than a "review"

~~~
songgao
off topic: I would be more entertained by the name Sea Lion. Although
Mavericks is a cool name too :-)

~~~
rapind
Maverick's is dangerous.

------
Kurtz79
It has come to that I'm looking forward to John's reviews almost as much as
the release itself.

Great reading.

------
sarreph
Kudos to Siracusa for making such an extensively documented review.

------
npalli
So, I updated to Mavericks. Ran python and it Segfaulted. I think this is the
first time I have had python crash like that.

Python 2.7.5 (v2.7.5:ab05e7dd2788, May 13 2013, 13:18:45)

[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> a = 1000

>>> a/1000

Segmentation fault: 11

~~~
mythz
Just tried it on Mavericks, Works for me:

    
    
        Python 2.7.5 (default, Aug 25 2013, 00:04:04) 
        [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 5.0 (clang-500.0.68)] on darwin
        Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
        >>> a = 1000
        >>> a/1000
        1
        >>>

~~~
npalli
Yeah, I realized this after posting. Mavericks is installing its own version
of python compiled with clang-5.0. My path was modified by the python
installer (from mountain lion) to point under Library and was compiled using
the older gcc 4.2. Looks like that program crashes for simple things
(division, addition etc.).

~~~
rattray
thanks for sharing. What did you do to solve this?

~~~
karanlyons
You could swap your PATH back to the OS's python, or compile python yourself.
Homebrew is great for the latter, and much more.

------
rambojohnson
the opening 5 paragraphs into this article was infuriating -- from cats having
9 lives, to self-actualization, the after life -- get to the point already.
it's an operating system. a new version is out. talk about it.

~~~
innino
The author's been reviewing OS X like this since 10.0. Probably involved with
Apple's OSes since even further back. It's clearly become something dearer to
him than a child.

~~~
rambojohnson
haha. I'll stop being snarky. :)

------
dzhiurgis
Anyone had random logouts when using Expose? Not sure if it's USB DisplayLink
adapter, or some weird bug in OS X. It's quite rare, perhaps twice or once a
day. Haven't lost important data yet, but I feel it's coming.

~~~
valleyer
Look in

~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports and /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports

for crash logs happening around the same time; if you find any, file a bug
report with Apple.

<[http://bugreport.apple.com/>](http://bugreport.apple.com/>)

------
justin66
I would love to know if John Siracusa is paid by the word.

~~~
gaius
Paid by the page view, certainly.

~~~
lostlogin
He goes to some pain to make the page breaks logical and helpful rather than
click whoring. He has discussed this on podcasts at length, most recently on
ATP. I appreciate this may address a point you aren't making.

------
pstuart
Too bad they didn't bother to upgrade bash. Bash 4 is nice to have on tap.

~~~
krallja
They can't, because Bash 4 is GPLv3. Apple's lawyers will not allow any GPLv3
code out the door.

~~~
hdevalence
They certainly can. They _choose_ not to.

------
exo_duz
The 2nd monitor upgrades and fixes really help out a lot. I think as a
developer who works mostly with 2 monitors now working in full screen mode
both monitors can be properly used.

Really looking forward to upgrading.

------
chm
" Frankly, this entire window is a user-interface disaster. And we haven't
even mentioned the checkbox to the right of each label. Can you guess what
those do? (No, there's no tooltip when you hover over one.) I'll spoil the
surprise. When that box is checked, it means the Tag appears in the Finder
sidebar; unchecked means it doesn't."

I think he overlooked the text right on top of the menu, which says "Show
these tags in the sidebar:". Pretty obvious to me.

------
milhous
Know it's too early, but can anyone comment on Screen Sharing improvements in
Mavericks? I regularly access a headless mini and have had to occasionally
kill screensharingd for hanging sessions, and/or lose connectivity on occasion
for whatever reason. Screen Sharing's been improved with every OS X release,
but it's not spectacular.

------
anton_gogolev
John had had a lot of complaints regarding how his Kindle version of a
previous review was not available for the iPad [1]. I wonder if this is still
a case.

[1]: [http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/85](http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/85)

------
mustapha
Does anyone know if the password manager / iCloud Keychain / Safari auto-
suggest can import passwords from a .pif?

------
PeterWhittaker
I don't use iTunes or iBooks or any other Apple media apps. I've only had my
Air for a few months, and I do love it so, but....

If Mavericks is free, why does the App Store need a credit card in order for
me to download it?

I do not plan on purchasing anything through iTunes. Never say never, sure,
but I don't. Ever.

Guess I can't have Mavericks.

Even though it's free.

Kudos, Apple, you've given me my first reason to feel less than happy about a
hardware purchase I reveled in.

~~~
bluedino
It's possible to make an iTunes store account without a credit card:

[http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2534?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...](http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2534?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US)

~~~
PeterWhittaker
OK, thanks, I'll try the "free app" approach.

(But, man, do I hate such kludgey workarounds.)

EDIT: Seems to have worked fine - download in progress, and I didn't actually
complete installation of the free app (AFAIK; I did have to enter tombstone
info, but I can live with that).

------
mustapha
I wonder if the NSA has root on iCloud.

------
benihana
It's like the author didn't like all the gray words so he wanted to spruce up
the copy with a splash orange everywhere.

~~~
chc
Those are links. Providing lots of references is usually considered a good
thing.

~~~
scottbruin
You know, you're right but until I saw parent's comment I didn't realize why I
found it hard to scan through the first page of the review. I wonder if orange
is harder to scan through than a blue link with black text.

And sometimes it does seem there are links to excess.

------
lnanek2
Boy that first page was completely worthless. Maybe there was one useful
sentence in there, saying there are new features and bundled apps. Not sure I
should bother reading page 2. Ars' latest iPad announcement coverage was
awesome, though.

~~~
untog
You should know what to expect from an Ars review by now. It's 25 pages long
for a reason.

------
dpham
"The 10th major release, OS X 10.9 Mavericks, is named after an awkwardly
plural California surfing spot..."

Can't tell if he's joking or not.

~~~
roryokane
He’s not joking. Later in the first page, Siracusa says

‘Mavericks is the first California-themed release of OS X, named after "places
that inspire us here in California," according to Craig Federighi, who says
this naming scheme is intended to last for at least the next 10 years.’

And the words “California surfing spot” in your quote link to
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks_(location)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks_\(location\)),
so that is the name of the place. I guess it’s just coincidence that
“maverick” is also a word.

~~~
chongli
It's named after a dog called Maverick. I'm guessing they made it plural to
refer to the waves themselves.

~~~
KC8ZKF
Or it was "Maverick's", misspelled.

~~~
pohl
Yes, he should have written "an awkwardly plural-esque possessive". Siracusa,
I'm disappointed by your inattention to detail!

