Ondrej Holzman After WWDC, iOS 7 is the main topic, but Apple also presented it in San Francisco a new operating system for your computers. OS X Mavericks is nowhere near as revolutionary as iOS 7, but it still deserves attention. Selected journalists, to whom Apple provided test machines with the new OS X 10.9, have now begun to share their first impressions.
Reactions to OS X Mavericks are nowhere near as dramatic as iOS 7, dividing journalists and users into two camps. The changes between Mountain Lion and Mavericks are rather mild and evolutionary, but welcomed by many. And how do selected journalists see the new system?
Jim Dalrymple of The Loop:
A really crucial part of Mavericks is the continued integration between OS X and iOS. Whether it's a route in Maps shared to your mobile devices or passwords synced from iPhone to Mac, Apple wants the entire ecosystem to work for users.
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The changes in Notes, Calendar and Contacts are the most significant for me. These make sense because they were the apps that had the most skeuomorphic elements in them. Gone is the quilting and the lined paper, which has been replaced by basically nothing.
Calendar and Contacts are too clean for my taste. It's like loading a web page without CSS - it seems like too much has been taken away. However, I don't mind this with Notes. Maybe it's because they left some color in them that works for me.
Brian Heater of Engadget:
Although some functions here are ported from iOS, the complete fusion with the mobile system, which some feared, did not happen. There are still plenty of things you can't do on an iPhone. However, it's a bit of a shame to see iOS in such a big leak when it comes to new features. It would be great if some of the news was also directly related to computer users, but since PC sales are still relatively stagnant, we probably won't see that in the near future.
Apple promised 200 new features in this update, and this number includes both large and small additions and changes, such as panels or labeling. Again, there's nothing here that's likely to entice someone who hasn't switched from Windows yet. The growth of OS X will be gradual for the foreseeable future. But there are clearly enough new features that users shouldn't have a hard time updating in the fall, when the final version is released. And in the meantime, I hope Apple shows even more reasons to give OS X Mavericks a try.
David Pearce of The Verge:
OS X 10.9 is still in its early days, and Mavericks is likely to change significantly before its fall release. It certainly won't be a total change like in iOS 7, but that's okay. It's a simple, familiar operating system; even less of a change than Mountain Lion, with only some improvements and without the unnecessary amount of covers and weird torn paper.
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OS X has never been good at handling multiple monitors, and things only got more complicated with the arrival of Mountain Lion. When you launched an application in full screen mode, the second monitor became completely unusable. In Mavericks, everything is solved smarter: a full-screen application can run on any monitor, which is how it should have been all along. There's now a top menu bar on each monitor, you can move the dock wherever you want, and Expose only shows apps on that monitor on each screen. Also AirPlay is better, now it allows you to make a second screen from the connected TV instead of just forcing to mirror the image in weird resolutions.
Everything works smoothly and looks like it should have been here a long time ago. If you use multiple monitors, you used to have to choose between using Apple's cool features and using your two monitors yourself. Everything is working now.
Vincent Nguyen of SlashGear:
Although Mavericks won't be released until the fall, it still looks like a ready system in many ways. We didn't encounter a single bug or crash during our testing. Many of the real improvements in Mavericks are under the hood so you can't see them, but you benefit from them in everyday use.
Apple saved a revolution this year for iOS 7. The iPhone and iPad operating system was outdated and needed a change, and that's exactly what Apple did. In contrast, the changes in OS X Mavericks are merely evolutionary, and while that's something that sometimes faces criticism, it's exactly what the Mac needs. Apple is moving between current users and those new to OS X who typically come from iOS. In that sense, bringing Mavericks closer to the mobile system makes perfect sense.
I was very pleased to solve the problem with fullscreen applications on two monitors. So, I'm not angry anymore, how someone could have missed something so important.
I know it doesn't belong in this article, but since I'm a current switcher, I hope I'll be forgiven :) I'll be buying a new Air in a few days and I want to ask how much disk space the system will take. thank you for answer
Up to 10 Gb, the system itself includes iwork and ilife
Great, thanks :)
I know it doesn't belong in this article, but since I'm a current switcher, I hope I'll be forgiven :) I'll be buying a new Air in a few days and I want to ask how much disk space the system will take. Thank you in advance for your reply
And sorry for the spam, somehow the previous comment didn't show up
Is it worth buying a macbook pro? Or do I have to wait for the hw upgrade...
I would wait until autumn to buy a Macbook pro. There will probably be some innovation. And if it was just WiFi ac or a faster pcie ssd, then it's worth the wait.