So Apple had their big event yesterday, the one everybody's been live-blogging screenshots of all week, iPad Air, the new Mac Pro that looks like a trash can, whatever. I'm not going to rehash the whole keynote here because if you've read literally any other tech site since Tuesday afternoon you already know the iPad got thinner and the Mac Pro got round. What actually got me was one line near the end: OS X Mavericks, free. Not $19.99 like Mountain Lion was last year, not the $29 Lion cost the year before that. Free, as in zero dollars, for anyone running Snow Leopard or later.
I've been buying Mac OS upgrades since 10.5 and I'm honestly still processing this. I've spent something like ninety bucks over the last few years just keeping my laptop current, and now Apple's just handing it over. I know why they're doing it, obviously, they want everyone on the same version so app compatibility isn't a nightmare and they can sell more iCloud and App Store stuff to a unified install base. Still counts as a genuinely good thing for regular people though.
Except then I actually tried to download it.
I fired up the Mac App Store around 6pm last night, figuring the initial rush would have died down since the keynote wrapped hours earlier. Nope. The progress bar sat at "Loading" for I think eleven minutes before it even told me the file size (it's about 5.29GB if you're curious, chunky for an OS that's theoretically "free"). Then the actual download crawled along at something like 200kb a second, which on my not-great home connection meant I was looking at a two hour wait minimum. I gave up, went and made dinner, came back, and it had stalled out entirely with some vague error about the App Store being unable to verify the download. Tried again. Same thing. My buddy Dev, who works in the same building as me, said his install failed twice too and he just gave up and went to bed.
This isn't really Apple's fault in the sense that I don't think anyone could have modeled for "worldwide simultaneous free OS download plus a new iPad and a completely redesigned iWork suite that also just became free for new device buyers." That's an absurd amount of demand to throw at CDN infrastructure in one afternoon. But it's a little funny that the headline "Apple makes major software free" comes paired with "and then nobody can actually get it." I finally got Mavericks installed around 1am, mostly by getting up every twenty minutes to nudge the download along like it was a stuck vending machine.
Once it was actually on my machine, it's fine. Tabs in Finder are nice, I guess I didn't realize how much I wanted that until I had it. The tags thing feels like it wants to be more useful than it currently is, like Apple built half a filing system and stopped. Battery life on my 2012 MacBook Air does seem noticeably better already, though I'll reserve real judgment until I've had it a full week, since day-one battery impressions are basically astrology.
The other detail from the whole announcement that I keep turning over: iWork and iLife are now free too, but only for people buying a new Mac or iOS device going forward. If you already own your hardware and just want Pages or GarageBand, you're still paying full price. Feels like a weird half-measure dressed up as generosity, honestly, the kind of thing that reads great in a press release and slightly less great once you notice the asterisk. I get the business logic behind it. Doesn't mean I have to love it.
And can we talk for one second about the Mac Pro shape. I know, I know, everyone's already made the trash can joke a thousand times this week and I said I wasn't going to rehash the event. But I stood in front of a poster of that thing at the Apple Store on my lunch break today and it really does just look like something you'd find in a hotel lobby holding cigarette butts. I'm sure it's an engineering marvel on the inside. On the outside it's a bin.
If you're trying to grab Mavericks today, my advice is don't do it during dinner, don't do it right after work, and maybe just set it going before bed and let it sort itself out overnight like I eventually did. The App Store apparently behaves itself once most of the planet has stopped hammering on it at the same time.