Inside OS X Mavericks 362
rjmarvin writes "Apple's era of naming OSs after big cats is over. The Mavericks wave is rolling in, and the first four developer previews have given an inside look at the cutting-edge OS. Users and developers have almost entirely positive things to say about Mavericks, from faster speed and improved stability to new features like iBooks and iCloud keychains. While some installation concerns and errors have arisen, developer preview have improved version by version, and Mavericks is looking good."
AirDrop (Score:4, Interesting)
If by "looking good", you mean "looking like iOS". (Score:5, Interesting)
> He concluded by mentioning that he hoped Mavericks would serve as the bridge between OS X and iOS, allowing his company to make Mac versions of its iOS titles.
So basically this guy is happy that OS X is bridging closer to iOS (because his business stands to gain from this).
How exactly is that supposed to warm my heart as a user who already thoroughly loath the very idea of the "Natural Scrolling(tm)" option on previous updates?
Is it too much to ask for them simply not to break anything and leave me with the halfway-decent UI to a powerful *nix that I am happily using?
Re:Apple press release (Score:4, Interesting)
Been using it since beta 1. What kind of problems did you see? I saw no issues other than the email sync issues.
Re:If by "looking good", you mean "looking like iO (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? What change have they introduced to improve iOS compatibility that you can't just ignore if you don't like it?
The OS X desktop and interface have not changed much at all.
The scrolling, which is a vast improvement for many, you can turn off. Autohide scrollbars, again a godsend for many users, you can turn off. Everything else, you can just not use.
Re:If by "looking good", you mean "looking like iO (Score:5, Interesting)
I hated... HATED... "Natural Scrolling" when it first came out. But I gave it a week. You push up on the trackpad... screen goes up. You push down, screen goes down. It just feels.. natural.
Now when I use another computer the scrolling just feels weird.
The OS is good, but the hardware pushes me away (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been a Mac OS user since 1997, and I love the interface (in some respects I still like Mac OS 9 better than X). I have owned two PowerPC Macs before, but when their move to Intel coincided with a little personal economic downturn, I went the hackintosh way. Sometimes I think of getting a new actual Apple, but when I look into it, they don't offer a machine that suits me.
You just can't get a headless system with good specs, except the Mac Pro, and that's crazy overkill. The mini is a complete joke, with little memory, lame Intel video, no optical drive, no expandability whatsoever. I could go for an iMac (and deal with external drives, a single 1TB disk doesn't really cut it anymore). But I'd have to go with the rather expensive 27-inch ones to get a video card that beats my rather outdated GTS 250. Seriously, I assembled this machine a couple years ago, penny-pinching all the way, and even back then I knew this video card was the bottleneck. They still sell machines with worse video. It's quite ridiculous.
So... too much money for little benefit. Maybe some other time, Apple.
Re:If by "looking good", you mean "looking like iO (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:AirDrop (Score:5, Interesting)
As the previous poster said about Parallels,
> They eventually found the bug and fixed it... in Parallels 3. Their solution to the problem of
> selling me a product that was not fit for purpose was for me to give them more money
And I'd bet they both learned this trick from the MSOffice team.
Nope. Apple has known this forever. The Rev.1 B&W G3 macintosh [xlr8yourmac.com] had a UDMA data corruption error. Apple's "fix" was to either buy FWB toolkit and disable UDMA (and half a disk's performance!) or to buy a mac ATA card which, due to the mac tax, would cost literally four times as much as buying the same card for the PC, with a different ROM. When they rolled the old TechInfo Library (TIL) into the modern Apple Knowledge Base (KB) they imported articles before and after the one where they describe this problem, but they deleted the article on B&W G3 data corruption in an attempt to hide the fact that they told their customers that they had to spend more money because the product they purchased did not in fact meet specifications (didn't do ATA correctly.) Early Sun UltraSparc machines which I have used personally have the same chip and don't have the same bug.
Nobody has anything to teach Apple about blaming the victim or hiding the evidence.
Re:If by "looking good", you mean "looking like iO (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple sees what Microsoft is going through with the XP transition. Why would they want that?
That being said... 25% of the userbase holding back from Lion / Mountain Lion is an interestingly high number.