So Apple did the big splashy event on Tuesday, iPad Air, the new iPad mini with the Retina screen finally, the trash-can Mac Pro that everybody's been staring at for months without actually holding one. I'm not going to spend this whole post rehashing that keynote because honestly every other tech blog on the internet already did, in more detail, with better photos than I could ever take. What I actually want to talk about is the thing that got announced almost as a footnote in that same event and then quietly ruined my Thursday night: OS X Mavericks.
Mavericks is free. Not "free if you already bought Mountain Lion this year" free, not $19.99 like Mountain Lion was, not $29.99 like Lion was when that came out back in 2011. Free, full stop, download it from the App Store and go. That's a genuinely strange thing for Apple to do and I don't think it's gotten enough credit for how unusual it is. Every OS X release since Snow Leopard has had some kind of price tag on it. This one doesn't. I keep waiting for the catch and there doesn't seem to be one, unless you count the four gigs of hard drive space and the hour of your evening it wants back.
I installed it Wednesday night on my mid-2012 MacBook Air, the 11-inch one, after backing up to Time Machine like a responsible adult for once. Download took about twenty five minutes on my home connection, install itself was another forty or so, and then it rebooted into this new dock and I spent a solid ten minutes just poking at Finder tabs, which is a feature we've apparently been begging for since 2003 and finally got. Tags are in there too, and there's a "Compressed Memory" thing under the hood that Apple's claiming will make everything snappier on older hardware, which is exactly the kind of promise I never believe until I've lived with it for a month.
Here's the part that isn't in any of the glowing launch-day writeups though. Mail.app is broken for a lot of Gmail users right now, mine included. I opened Mail Thursday morning and found duplicate messages stacking up in my inbox, threads that wouldn't collapse properly, and at one point a sent email just never showed up in my Gmail web interface at all even though it clearly went out because the person replied to it. I'm not the only one, there's already a pile of forum threads and support requests about it as of this week. Nothing catastrophic, nobody's lost data as far as I can tell, it's just annoying in that specific way where a piece of software you use forty times a day starts lying to you a little. I ended up just going back to using Gmail in Safari for anything that actually matters until Apple sorts it out, which feels like a step backward but here we are.
Small tangent, not really related except in that it also happened this week: Nokia had their own event in Abu Dhabi and announced a 6-inch phone called the Lumia 1520, plus a 10-inch Windows RT tablet, the Lumia 2520, priced at $499. A six inch phone. I held my phone up against my face measuring in my head and I genuinely cannot picture using something that size one-handed on the subway, but I guess somebody at Nokia thinks there's a market for phones you basically can't fit in a normal pocket. Maybe I'm just bitter my hands are small. The 2520 tablet actually looks kind of nice in photos, orange and cyan color options, but Windows RT has been such a dead end so far that I have a hard time getting excited about another device running it.
Anyway. If you're on Mavericks and use Gmail through Mail.app, keep an eye on it for a few days before you trust it with anything important. And if you haven't upgraded yet because you're waiting to hear whether it's worth the hassle: it's free, so the actual cost of finding out for yourself is basically nothing but your evening.