Toronto October 25, 2013. That was simple. On Tuesday of this week Apple announced the release of Mavericks, its latest version of OS X – and it is free. The last couple of releases have been downloads that overwrite the existing system and this was the same. The features are much the same as the previous release but with a tip to the number of laptops sold (about 3x desktops) the major feature is lower battery life. There is also much better memory management.
John Siracusa at Ars Technica has a very good review of Mavericks. In covering the memory management changes, he notes how earlier OS X releases fell off the cliff when memory was pushed to the limit. I am running “just” 4 Gb and after using Lightroom and Photoshop for an evening, my system becomes very slow and erratic indeed. This was cleared by a reboot that purged and tidied up memory, but now I understand why it happened. The other things are a Maps app (nice, but it has my postal code wrong…) and iBooks which finally lets me review iBooks Author texts I have written as well as read other ebooks from Apple (something I have been able to do with Kobo ebooks for ages). And the iLife and iWork programs I have were given a new UI and apparently “simplified” for now.
With free upgrades of both the OS and the “Office” programs, Apple seems to be cutting Microsoft off where it hurts since they make their money mainly from software and have failed badly at smart phones and tablets, the so called post-PC devices. Oh yes, and this is the first post-cat OSX release. Mavericks being named after a California surfing town…