So Mavericks is out. OS X 10.9, released yesterday, and the headline that actually matters to normal people isn't tabs in Finder or tags or any of that. Its that Apple just made a major OS upgrade free. No more $19.99 checkout screen, no more the "do I really need this" debate you have with yourself every fall. You open the Mac App Store, you click Download, and thats it. I remember paying $129 for Leopard back in the day. Then it dropped to $29 for Snow Leopard, then $19.99 for Lion and Mountain Lion, and now its just... free. Thats a real shift and I dont think enough people are talking about what it means for Apple long term (probably tighter hardware-software lock-in, but thats a post for another day).
Anyway. I started the download around 9pm last night before bed, because I am apparently incapable of learning from previous OS release days. The Mac App Store choked completely. Progress bar sitting at "a few minutes remaining" for what felt like forty-five actual minutes while half the internet tried to pull the same several-gigabyte installer at once. I gave up, went to bed, and it had finished by the time I got up around 6:45 this morning. If you're planning to grab it tonight, maybe just let it run overnight instead of babysitting it, that's what worked for me on the second attempt.
The install itself was smooth, I'll give them that. Reboot, progress bar, done, no drama. First things I actually noticed:
- Finder tabs. Finally. I've been using TotalFinder as a hack for this for probably two years and I can uninstall it now, which feels good in a small petty way.
- Tags, replacing the old colored-label system. I havent decided if I like this yet. It's more flexible but it's also one more organizational system I now have to actually maintain, and we all know how that goes.
- Maps and iBooks are on the desktop now, ported over from iOS. I opened Maps once out of curiosity and immediately closed it. Not sure who's asking to plan a route on a 27 inch monitor instead of their phone but okay.
The one thing that's actually bugging me, and I've seen a few other people mention this already this morning, is Mail. The Mail app got a pretty significant rewrite in Mavericks and if you're on Gmail over IMAP (which, who isn't at this point) the unread counts are doing something weird — showing messages as unread that I've already read on my phone, or just not syncing the read state properly between devices. It's not broken exactly, its just off, in that annoying way where you cant quite tell if its the app or your account or something upstream at Google. I spent about twenty minutes this morning toggling the account off and on before giving up and just ignoring the badge count, which, fine, I guess that's a valid life strategy too.
Small thing but a nice one: App Nap, which is supposed to throttle background apps that aren't doing anything visible to save battery. Hard to say yet if it actually moves the needle on battery life on my 2012 MacBook Pro, I'll need a few more days of normal use before I trust any before-and-after numbers I'd come up with right now. Anecdotally the fan has been quieter today. Could be placebo.
Also worth a mention, separate from Mavericks but same news cycle: iOS 7.0.3 rolled out yesterday too, and it patches that lock-screen bug where you could get into someone's Photos and even send tweets from Siri without unlocking the phone. If you've got an iPhone sitting around on 7.0.2 still, go update it, that one was a genuinely bad hole to leave open, not a "eh someone would need physical access and get lucky" kind of bug.
None of this is the flashy part of yesterday's Apple event obviously — that was the new iPads and the trash-can Mac Pro getting all the coverage, and I'm sure every other blog on the internet is covering that angle today so I won't bother repeating it here. But the free OS upgrade and the quiet little Mail/Gmail sync annoyance are the parts I'm actually going to be living with for the next year, so that's what got the writeup. If your unread counts are acting up too, you're not imagining it, and no I don't have a fix yet beyond "wait for 10.9.1."