AppleInsider Staff
Apple on Friday supplied its development community with the first beta of OS X 10.9.1 Mavericks, a forthcoming maintenance and security update for the Mac operating system, and has asked testers to focus their efforts on Mail, Graphics, and VoiceOver.
People familiar with the first OS X 10.9.1 beta said it is identified as "build 13B27." The pre-release software is intended for testing purposes, and is not yet finalized for public release.
OS X 10.9.1 will presumably mark the first update for Mavericks since it debuted on the Mac App Store for free in late October. All Mac users with compatible systems running Snow Leopard or above can upgrade to Mavericks at no cost.
A minor update for Mavericks was issued last week to patch an issue with the native Mail app for Gmail users. It was issued via the Mac App Store.
Mavericks, named after a Northern California surf spot, brings several new features to the OS X operating system, though Apple also paid considerable attention to enhancing performance and battery life with its latest major release. Stats published soon after the release of Mavericks found that public adoption was three times faster than that of Apple's $20 Mountain Lion upgrade from 2012.
As Apple prepares its first maintenance update for Mavericks, the company is also working on its next major OS X release, version 10.10. Traffic data to AppleInsider published earlier this month revealed that testing of the unnamed future operating system has been growing steadily.
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
Oliver Haslam
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
38 Comments
Cue all the newbies saying that it should be 11 that comes after 10. Anyhow, I think 10.9 is truly a beautiful upgrade. So refined, I'm not having a single issue whatsoever. Could be due to a clean install (OSX and applications). Not restoring from backup but copying everything over manually. Fresh .plists and all that. Everything is fast, the few issues I had (would awake spontaneously from sleep, 4 finger gesture on desktop trackpad wouldn't show the desktop) are gone now. I do have some issues, design wise, for iOS7, but that's not for this thread. Keep it up, Apple.
I'm loving it too and the under the hood battery life enhancements and better efficient ram usage drawn by making the OS more savvy is really progressive stuff.
Cue all the newbies saying that it should be 11 that comes after 10.
Anyhow, I think 10.9 is truly a beautiful upgrade. So refined, I'm not having a single issue whatsoever. Could be due to a clean install (OSX and applications). Not restoring from backup but copying everything over manually. Fresh .plists and all that.
Everything is fast, the few issues I had (would awake spontaneously from sleep, 4 finger gesture on desktop trackpad wouldn't show the desktop) are gone now.
I do have some issues, design wise, for iOS7, but that's not for this thread.
Keep it up, Apple.
Here's an issue - right click attached ms office document in an email (Mail) and ask for it to open in equivalent iWork app and the ms app opens. Move the attachment to the desktop and it works.
I made the jump from snow leopard, a clean install and is a remarkable os. Only issues with safari freezing the mac, but that was down to some extensions, uninstalled them and no other issues. Happy but I don't like mail as much as I did on snow leopard.
Mavericks is great. (the updates to Pages, Keynote, Numbers, well... what were they thinking???)
There are two problems I have run in to.
First, wake from sleep can be very slow and the screen jumps through two or three iterations before coming up full (outlines of where things were/are to be, bluish screen). This could be because I just installed directly with the App store and did not do a fresh install. I may do that at some point because I can bet that I have a bunch of junk aboard. Will wait until 10.9.1 is released before I do the reinstall as it isn't that much of a problem (I hope...!)
The second problem is with one element of one app: the render node for Carrara. The main app works fine on a single machine, but the main and render node (on a 2nd Mac running Mavericks, too) will not work together, though they see each other. The render node also will just spontaneously crash. The maker says it is something with the security workings of Mavericks. Poser Pro, however, works fine with its render node.
I too have major issues with iOS7 and dread that the design elements there will make their way to Mac OS as in 10.10. 10.9 would be my last upgrade for a while if that happens.
Edit:
Safari occasionally has a minor crash with error report. Never had that before.