

OS X Mavericks GM is out – how to make a bootable installation USB - dannypovolotski
http://povolotski.me/2013/10/12/osx-mavericks-gm-out-bootable-installation-usb/
The golden master for OSX Mavericks is out! For all you guys who wanna try it out, but need to install it via a USB, here’s a super simple way to do so.
======
yapcguy
Does anyone know if the memory swap issues[1], which plague Lion and Mountain
Lion, have been fixed?

[1] You could have 20GB of hard disk space free, but use XCode, Firefox and a
few other apps, and soon you're down to 10MB and you get the dreaded "Your Mac
is running out of disk space" dialog and you have to force quit all your apps,
and type "purge" into a Terminal in a desperate attempt to get the swap
released...

~~~
Zr40
I run several virtual machines on my 8 GB MBP and I have never seen swap
issues. Are you sure your problems are actually caused by swap?

"purge" doesn't touch swap, it discards disk cache. Its use (according to the
man page) is to simulate cold boot disk performance. The command has no use
for memory management, because disk cache is automatically discarded when free
memory runs out.

~~~
yapcguy
Fairly sure, I've been suffering with this on 10.7 and 10.8 on different
machines. Some more info here:

[http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-
de...](http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-deeply-
broken-in-os-x-memory-management)

~~~
__--__
I second this. It's a big enough issue for me that if Mavericks doesn't fix
it, I'll be switching back to Linux.

------
Bvalmont
Been on Mavericks for about a good week now. Was pretty much a painless move,
the only problem I had was that at this moment After Effects CC is
unsupported.

It's a real tangible performance boost though. Feels extremely snappy on my
Retina Macbook Pro. Scrolling is faster and I went from 2,5 hours of battery
life to 4,5 !

~~~
tuananh
you get only 2.5 hours on MBP Retina !?!?

~~~
terhechte
Maybe he's using Xcode

------
kalleboo
Usual caveats apply about making sure the software you depend on is compatible
before updating. Notably, Adobe products are having a lot of issues
(Photoshop: Save As is broken, keyboard shortcuts break if you have a non-US
keyboard, and I've heard the Creative Cloud installer doesn't work at all).

~~~
neya
Thank you so much, we have Adobe suite running on our machines and I was
tempted to upgrade! Thanks so much :)

~~~
tksb
For what it's worth, I've been running Adobe CC throughout the beta period
(and currently on the GM) without issue.

~~~
m_eiman
I had problems with Save As in Photoshop CS6 in early betas, but it's been
fine for a while now.

------
spullara
The Activity Monitor has been significantly enhanced and includes a page that
tells you what software is using the most energy. That should help people get
more battery life out of their systems as well.

~~~
glhaynes
And put pressure on app developers not to be on that list without reason.
_glances with annoyance at the Twitter app_

------
k-mcgrady
When I upgraded Windows machines I always went with a complete fresh install.
Since switching to MAc I've always just run the upgrade.

What do people on HN recommend? Using this technique to do a complete
reinstall, or upgrading?

~~~
spartango
Upgrading generally works great with OS X; generally the upgrade process blows
away the system/OS files and leaves your stuff untouched. In the normal case,
"your stuff" is well compartmentalized away from system files so stuff works
nicely.

With that said, as a developer sometimes it can be handy to do a clean
install. For example, if you have any custom kernel modules, these will
certainly be blown away in an upgrade. Additionally, developer tools installed
in /usr/ can be interfered with, and in general the probability that something
will be incompatible/broken is a bit higher.

~~~
johnchristopher
I seem to remember a story some OSX version ago about a user who lost her RSS
feeds in mail though. There were still there somewhere hidden in her home
settings but there were no more accessible through Mail because the features
was removed.

So be careful anyway.

------
ics
Those running Mavericks and experiencing significantly improved average
battery life: what machines are you using and how old are they?

~~~
mathieuh
I'm not experiencing any real change in battery life on my specced out 15"
retina. Got ~5 hours before 10.9, get ~5 hours on 10.9. Makes me kind of wish
I'd gone for the base CPU and saved money and battery life.

~~~
jonknee
Is there a difference in battery life? The CPUs all rate the same maximum
wattage (it's the same chip after all!) and CPUs are pretty good about not
using power when idle.

~~~
Osmium
Not to mention that a faster clocked processor has to stay active for less
time to achieve the same task. A similar logic explains why LTE battery life
is often better than 3G/UMTS too.

~~~
mathieuh
Unless I'm mistaken, isn't something like 75% of a CPU's power consumption
just in pushing the clock signal around? I just assumed that a faster clock
would consume more power (as a general rule).

Wikipedia seems to agree with me:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation)

~~~
simcop2387
Yes a faster clock will do that, but as mentioned by quellhorst, you won't
always be running at the fastest speed. There's also another important trick
Clock Gating[1] that will reduce the power even more. That's one of the places
that Intel has been working on in order to get the power usage down as much as
possible to make the CPU have to dissipate less heat too. With a multi-core
system it's just about absolutely necessary in order to be able to avoid
overheating the die.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_gating](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_gating)

------
rsynnott
Does anyone happen to know whether Mavericks installs or can run Apple Java 6?
For a variety of reasons, I don't want to go to 7 just yet (and Oracle doesn't
ship a 6 JDK for MacOS).

~~~
spullara
It does. It auto installed when I ran IntelliJ.

~~~
glhaynes
Same here: when I first launched Eclipse, it asked if I wanted to install JRE
6. Was kind of surprised it didn't ask if I wanted to install JRE 7, not sure
why it's still set to 6.

~~~
spartango
JRE 6 is the last JRE that Apple distributes itself via Software Update. JRE 7
comes direct from Oracle for the time being.

------
doe88
I don't know if it's related to their improvements on battery life but when my
Mac mini goes to sleep it breaks my ssh sessions in my iTerm2 terminal it's
annoying. I'm wondering if there is a way to maintain my connections alive?

~~~
mherkender
You want OSX to keep network connections active while asleep? It seems to me
that going to sleep means not actively doing anything.

The most common solution to this problem is to use tmux or screen, or just
disable sleep.

------
ancarda
Does anyone know when the public release (Mac App Store) will be available?

~~~
matthew-wegner
The next Apple press event is October 22nd. iPad-centric, but also expected to
include Mac Pro pricing/availability, so probably Mavericks release as well...

~~~
X-Istence
I hope to hear some news about updated MacBook Pro's as well!

------
casperc
I'm looking at their App Nap functionality and I am wondering how it will
affect applications that do background work. It looks to be on by default
unless expressly turned off by the app. Does it apply to all processes or what
is their definition of an app? I wouldn't want just anything to be suspended
when I don't have it on my screen (any work that I started and am expecting to
continue in the background basically).

~~~
riffraff
I'd suspect it is limited to Cocoa stuff, so GUI only. It should be
controllable via a setting anyway.

------
terhechte
I've updated to Mavericks about a week ago, just before attending a
conference, and I've had a fair share of problems, though it seems that (based
on Google Searches) I'm in the minority with the main issue: I can't use
tethering with my iPhone anymore. Wireless or wired tethering will setup just
fine, and I can even ping hosts on the internet, but domain name resolution
fails. I've tried all kinds of things (like adding the 8.8.8.8 server, or
running Linux in a VM to see if it works fine in there) but somehow as soon as
I am tethered, my Macbook Air can't resolve domain names anymore and using the
internet is effectively useless. The other issue that I've had is that the
system froze when I connected it via thunderbolt to a beamer.

However, apart from that I'm getting longer battery life (from ~3 hours up to
~4.5 hours) and I like the OS. I guess bugs as the above are normal with OSX
point releases. I still remember the pain when I ran Leopard.

~~~
rsynnott
It may be worth explicitly restricting the tether connection to IPv4 only;
have seen similar things where an ISP has something that looks like a working
IPv6 setup but isn't.

------
nailer
This article is unnecessary for most users.

Open the .dmg, drag the install .app into /Applications and run it from there.
The upgrade works fine.

------
idoescompooters
What is the difference between the GM version and the App store released one?

~~~
msoad
You have to fresh install developer releases while you can just upgrade to
public release.

~~~
idoescompooters
Oh, wow. I just did a clean install of Mountain Lion on my early 2011 MacBook
Pro to "freshen" up.

------
jokoon
can't believe modern OSes can't run properly with 2GB of RAM. In the 90s we
certainly didn't have the same standard.

~~~
mwfunk
I totally agree with you but folks from the 80s said similar things about
computing in the 90s. :) I can only imagine what the folks from the 70s would
say. Like another poster said, it's not ALL bloat- there are lots of memory-
hungry things going on in the background for user convenience that would have
been unacceptable tradeoffs 10-20 years ago (in terms of how much system
resources are consumed vs. the utility and convenience provided to the user),
but on modern hardware those tradeoffs are less meaningful, and things that
might have seemed wasteful 10 years ago become practical to do. I think a lot
of it also from more and more graphics resources needed per app (high
resolution images for UIs can consume an absurd amount of memory), as well as
many apps being much more aggressive about caching stuff in memory for
snappier response times (web browsers, or any kind of media-centric
application). It seems inevitable that as memory gets cheaper, the average
machine has more memory, and as the average memory of the average machine goes
up, the perceived cost of memory consumption goes down, leading application
(and OS) developers to figure out more and more ways to use all of that
memory. It's a vicious circle (or a virtuous one, or both).

~~~
jokoon
Well programmers should offer different version of their apps, or allow to
disable those memory hungry features.

And honestly I'm not really sure that a feature that is memory hungry is
really useful anyways, especially at that scale. At that point I feel it's all
about the planned obsolescence, they just make algorithms that require to buy
more hardware.

In that case software performance would only apply because of bigger hardware,
not better programming. I'm sorry but with the computers of today, I really
doubt programmers can invent resource hungry features that are really useful,
maybe they can just do sloppy programming that requires more memory.

------
joezydeco
Can anyone with an iMac (and not a notebook) comment on how Mavericks performs
there?

I've got a 2008 iMac 2.8 dual-core that I thought was getting pretty long in
the tooth, but I'm thinking it's just the 4GB ram that's holding it back now.
I can't add any more RAM and Mountain Lion just draaaggggss on it.

~~~
luismarques
Actually, unofficially, the older iMacs support 6 GB (4+2) since the first
aluminium iMac (mid 2007, I think)

I bought a 4 GB DDR2 DIMM for my Dad's mid 2007 iMac, installed it together
with a 2 GB DIMM and it has been running non-stop for almost a year now,
without any problems. DDR2 is now a bit expensive, due to being old, the 4 GB
DIMM cost me around 50$ on eBay.

~~~
joezydeco
I've seen that unofficial fact but never heard from anyone that actually had
it done. Thanks.

If I go to 10.9 I'll definitely up the RAM.

------
jawngee
Anyone notice how _slow_ the iOS simulator is when running apps on the 6.1
simulator?

------
kevinxucs
Wow, such a one-week-late news.

