The golden master for OSX Mavericks is out! For all you guys who wanna try it out, but need to install it via a USB, here’s a super simple way to do so.
Been on Mavericks for about a good week now. Was pretty much a painless move, the only problem I had was that at this moment After Effects CC is unsupported.
It's a real tangible performance boost though. Feels extremely snappy on my Retina Macbook Pro. Scrolling is faster and I went from 2,5 hours of battery life to 4,5 !
You just can't span multiple monitors with a single window. I do like the improvements though. Moving the Dock to a different window by pulling the mouse below the bottom of the screen is taking some getting used to.
If that battery life improvement is representative of general use, it is another indicator that they really are pushing for energy efficiency. The first one, for me, was https://developer.apple.com/osx/whats-new/, where the top item for "develop for OS X Mavericks" is "Energy Saving", not any of the new libraries whose coolness one can demo in a few minutes.
Apple increased the available video memory on the retina machines from 768MB to 1GB. The difference is profound. I was concerned about being stuck with nothing but an HD4000 but I'm very content with everything now.
I've updated to Mavericks about a week ago, just before attending a conference, and I've had a fair share of problems, though it seems that (based on Google Searches) I'm in the minority with the main issue: I can't use tethering with my iPhone anymore. Wireless or wired tethering will setup just fine, and I can even ping hosts on the internet, but domain name resolution fails. I've tried all kinds of things (like adding the 8.8.8.8 server, or running Linux in a VM to see if it works fine in there) but somehow as soon as I am tethered, my Macbook Air can't resolve domain names anymore and using the internet is effectively useless. The other issue that I've had is that the system froze when I connected it via thunderbolt to a beamer.
However, apart from that I'm getting longer battery life (from ~3 hours up to ~4.5 hours) and I like the OS. I guess bugs as the above are normal with OSX point releases. I still remember the pain when I ran Leopard.
It may be worth explicitly restricting the tether connection to IPv4 only; have seen similar things where an ISP has something that looks like a working IPv6 setup but isn't.
I'm not experiencing any real change in battery life on my specced out 15" retina. Got ~5 hours before 10.9, get ~5 hours on 10.9. Makes me kind of wish I'd gone for the base CPU and saved money and battery life.
Is there a difference in battery life? The CPUs all rate the same maximum wattage (it's the same chip after all!) and CPUs are pretty good about not using power when idle.
Not to mention that a faster clocked processor has to stay active for less time to achieve the same task. A similar logic explains why LTE battery life is often better than 3G/UMTS too.
Unless I'm mistaken, isn't something like 75% of a CPU's power consumption just in pushing the clock signal around? I just assumed that a faster clock would consume more power (as a general rule).
Yes a faster clock will do that, but as mentioned by quellhorst, you won't always be running at the fastest speed. There's also another important trick Clock Gating[1] that will reduce the power even more. That's one of the places that Intel has been working on in order to get the power usage down as much as possible to make the CPU have to dissipate less heat too. With a multi-core system it's just about absolutely necessary in order to be able to avoid overheating the die.
May be worth running this: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-power-gadget-... and seeing if any software you use is pegging it to maximum unnecessarily. I find that Microsoft Silverlight on MacOS tends to do that; Flash also does occasionally, though not always.
I'm not noticing much of an improvement on my mid-2011 MacBook Air (< 6 month old battery, 145 cycle count). The fact that the battery life indicator shows applications that are using significant amounts of energy has made me more aware of which applications are sucking away my battery life, however.
I haven't run mine on battery much since upgrading; but as you might expect I feel like my fans run less, which is much appreciated. MacBook Air 11", Mid 2012.
I don't know if it's related to their improvements on battery life but when my Mac mini goes to sleep it breaks my ssh sessions in my iTerm2 terminal it's annoying. I'm wondering if there is a way to maintain my connections alive?
I wonder if iTerm2 could be patched to support the PowerNap functionality - and so send SSH keepalives whilst the system slept (assuming of course your underlying network substrate didn’t change).
Usual caveats apply about making sure the software you depend on is compatible before updating. Notably, Adobe products are having a lot of issues (Photoshop: Save As is broken, keyboard shortcuts break if you have a non-US keyboard, and I've heard the Creative Cloud installer doesn't work at all).
I'm looking at their App Nap functionality and I am wondering how it will affect applications that do background work. It looks to be on by default unless expressly turned off by the app. Does it apply to all processes or what is their definition of an app? I wouldn't want just anything to be suspended when I don't have it on my screen (any work that I started and am expecting to continue in the background basically).
Can anyone with an iMac (and not a notebook) comment on how Mavericks performs there?
I've got a 2008 iMac 2.8 dual-core that I thought was getting pretty long in the tooth, but I'm thinking it's just the 4GB ram that's holding it back now. I can't add any more RAM and Mountain Lion just draaaggggss on it.
Mavericks adds ram compression. I don't know if it will turn out to be just a gimmick. I have been testing on a 2009 iMac with only 2GB ram w/ Intel SSD and it does just fine. Compressing 200-300MB when I check Activity Monitor.
I hadn't noticed the "compressed" field in Activity Monitor, thanks for pointing that out. On my 8 GB Mac running quite a few things (Eclipse, Xcode, tons of Safari tabs, all the "standard" built-in apps open), mine's showing "Compressed: 3.21 GB" right now.
Consider adding a Firewire 800 SATA enclosure. Then you can externally add an SSD or an HD for increased throughput (e.g. put the root on the internal drive, your home on the external one; or using OS X logical partitioning to combine both drives into a single volume)
Dont bother with a top of the line SSD, since the FW 800 can be saturated by mid-range SSDs.
I have done it and it's not bad. Well worth the trouble and makes a 2008 feel like a new machine. There are detailed tutorials online with pics and everything you need.
Yeah I was on the fence about it but I might take the plunge soon. I've read the guides over and over and the only scary part to me is the LCD manipulation and coverglass removal.
I have replaced drives in these models a number of times. It is not that hard. You don't have to do a teardown or anything. You just have to remove the keyboard. There are just a lot of screws, and you have to be careful with the keyboard ribbon cable.
Make sure you are on at least 10.6.8, and don't forget to install Trim Enabler. (For 10.6.8 you need version 2.2).
Actually, unofficially, the older iMacs support 6 GB (4+2) since the first aluminium iMac (mid 2007, I think)
I bought a 4 GB DDR2 DIMM for my Dad's mid 2007 iMac, installed it together with a 2 GB DIMM and it has been running non-stop for almost a year now, without any problems. DDR2 is now a bit expensive, due to being old, the 4 GB DIMM cost me around 50$ on eBay.
The next Apple press event is October 22nd. iPad-centric, but also expected to include Mac Pro pricing/availability, so probably Mavericks release as well...
Does anyone know if the memory swap issues[1], which plague Lion and Mountain Lion, have been fixed?
[1] You could have 20GB of hard disk space free, but use XCode, Firefox and a few other apps, and soon you're down to 10MB and you get the dreaded "Your Mac is running out of disk space" dialog and you have to force quit all your apps, and type "purge" into a Terminal in a desperate attempt to get the swap released...
I'm at 53 MB used of 1 GB total swap after three days of uptime, while on 10.8 I would go far over that within minutes of startup (usually topping out at ~10 GB total after a day or two), so something does appear to have changed.
I run several virtual machines on my 8 GB MBP and I have never seen swap issues. Are you sure your problems are actually caused by swap?
"purge" doesn't touch swap, it discards disk cache. Its use (according to the man page) is to simulate cold boot disk performance. The command has no use for memory management, because disk cache is automatically discarded when free memory runs out.
On my previous '09 MBP with a 5400rpm drive disabling the pager meant it went from a really slow crappy experience to amazingly fast. I had periodic hangs when I used too much memory, but I would put up with those to have general performance not suck.
I eventually bought a 2012 Air (got sick of carting a 17" laptop around) and so haven't seen any issues (yay for ssd!).
Looking forward to seeing if this is fixed - I've always found page management decisions made by OSX to be less awesome than linux.
This sounds more like an issue with an app (or a kext) consuming way too much memory than any innate OS-level issue with paging. Activity Monitor and/or top can be useful in figuring out what the heck is using up all that memory. Xcode can use a really surprising amount of memory sometimes but it's not going to just gobble up 20GB of pageable VM.
Does anyone happen to know whether Mavericks installs or can run Apple Java 6? For a variety of reasons, I don't want to go to 7 just yet (and Oracle doesn't ship a 6 JDK for MacOS).
Same here: when I first launched Eclipse, it asked if I wanted to install JRE 6. Was kind of surprised it didn't ask if I wanted to install JRE 7, not sure why it's still set to 6.
The Activity Monitor has been significantly enhanced and includes a page that tells you what software is using the most energy. That should help people get more battery life out of their systems as well.
Upgrading generally works great with OS X; generally the upgrade process blows away the system/OS files and leaves your stuff untouched. In the normal case, "your stuff" is well compartmentalized away from system files so stuff works nicely.
With that said, as a developer sometimes it can be handy to do a clean install. For example, if you have any custom kernel modules, these will certainly be blown away in an upgrade. Additionally, developer tools installed in /usr/ can be interfered with, and in general the probability that something will be incompatible/broken is a bit higher.
I seem to remember a story some OSX version ago about a user who lost her RSS feeds in mail though. There were still there somewhere hidden in her home settings but there were no more accessible through Mail because the features was removed.
Unfortunately, this is not possible; 10.4 was the first release of OSX that supported Intel, and 10.5 was the last to support PowerPC. Alas, you can't have a machine that was on 10.1 that can also run 10.8..
That said, you can definitely chain update your way from 10.4 to 10.8 without issue, and similarly from 10.1 to 10.5. The latter case is a little tricky as many of the machines that ran 10.1 were not deemed fit for 10.5 (e.g. the G4 Cube variants), but there are workarounds.
You can move bootdisks (physically or just the image) between a power based Mac to an Intel based mac. The OS is upgradable from 10.1 to 10.8, you just have to swap hardware around Leopard to make it work. :)
I routinely have coped my bootdisk from Mac to Mac as I upgraded systems.
Modern OSs do a lot in the background that OSs in the 90s did though. For example, indexing and scanning every file on your hard drive so I can find a document that contains a certain word or phrase in a few seconds.
I totally agree with you but folks from the 80s said similar things about computing in the 90s. :) I can only imagine what the folks from the 70s would say. Like another poster said, it's not ALL bloat- there are lots of memory-hungry things going on in the background for user convenience that would have been unacceptable tradeoffs 10-20 years ago (in terms of how much system resources are consumed vs. the utility and convenience provided to the user), but on modern hardware those tradeoffs are less meaningful, and things that might have seemed wasteful 10 years ago become practical to do. I think a lot of it also from more and more graphics resources needed per app (high resolution images for UIs can consume an absurd amount of memory), as well as many apps being much more aggressive about caching stuff in memory for snappier response times (web browsers, or any kind of media-centric application). It seems inevitable that as memory gets cheaper, the average machine has more memory, and as the average memory of the average machine goes up, the perceived cost of memory consumption goes down, leading application (and OS) developers to figure out more and more ways to use all of that memory. It's a vicious circle (or a virtuous one, or both).
Well programmers should offer different version of their apps, or allow to disable those memory hungry features.
And honestly I'm not really sure that a feature that is memory hungry is really useful anyways, especially at that scale. At that point I feel it's all about the planned obsolescence, they just make algorithms that require to buy more hardware.
In that case software performance would only apply because of bigger hardware, not better programming. I'm sorry but with the computers of today, I really doubt programmers can invent resource hungry features that are really useful, maybe they can just do sloppy programming that requires more memory.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadIt's a real tangible performance boost though. Feels extremely snappy on my Retina Macbook Pro. Scrolling is faster and I went from 2,5 hours of battery life to 4,5 !
The new way Multi Display works is also much better than the old way, Full Screen Mode is actually really useful now.
However, apart from that I'm getting longer battery life (from ~3 hours up to ~4.5 hours) and I like the OS. I guess bugs as the above are normal with OSX point releases. I still remember the pain when I ran Leopard.
Probably get a solid and consistent extra hour. From 6 solid hours to 7. I can push to 9 now if I lower the brightness and don't browse the web.
Wikipedia seems to agree with me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_power_dissipation
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_gating
http://gigaom.com/2012/02/17/why-lte-sucks-your-battery-that...
The most common solution to this problem is to use tmux or screen, or just disable sleep.
E: Oh, looks like it's already there in waiting: http://new.roaringapps.com/
I've got a 2008 iMac 2.8 dual-core that I thought was getting pretty long in the tooth, but I'm thinking it's just the 4GB ram that's holding it back now. I can't add any more RAM and Mountain Lion just draaaggggss on it.
Dont bother with a top of the line SSD, since the FW 800 can be saturated by mid-range SSDs.
Make sure you are on at least 10.6.8, and don't forget to install Trim Enabler. (For 10.6.8 you need version 2.2).
http://www.groths.org/software/trimenabler/
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_yQ3qzpzclhM/S8uSR76KeDI/AAAAAAAAAJ...
I bought a 4 GB DDR2 DIMM for my Dad's mid 2007 iMac, installed it together with a 2 GB DIMM and it has been running non-stop for almost a year now, without any problems. DDR2 is now a bit expensive, due to being old, the 4 GB DIMM cost me around 50$ on eBay.
If I go to 10.9 I'll definitely up the RAM.
[1] You could have 20GB of hard disk space free, but use XCode, Firefox and a few other apps, and soon you're down to 10MB and you get the dreaded "Your Mac is running out of disk space" dialog and you have to force quit all your apps, and type "purge" into a Terminal in a desperate attempt to get the swap released...
"purge" doesn't touch swap, it discards disk cache. Its use (according to the man page) is to simulate cold boot disk performance. The command has no use for memory management, because disk cache is automatically discarded when free memory runs out.
http://workstuff.tumblr.com/post/20464780085/something-is-de...
I eventually bought a 2012 Air (got sick of carting a 17" laptop around) and so haven't seen any issues (yay for ssd!).
Looking forward to seeing if this is fixed - I've always found page management decisions made by OSX to be less awesome than linux.
What do people on HN recommend? Using this technique to do a complete reinstall, or upgrading?
With that said, as a developer sometimes it can be handy to do a clean install. For example, if you have any custom kernel modules, these will certainly be blown away in an upgrade. Additionally, developer tools installed in /usr/ can be interfered with, and in general the probability that something will be incompatible/broken is a bit higher.
So be careful anyway.
That said, you can definitely chain update your way from 10.4 to 10.8 without issue, and similarly from 10.1 to 10.5. The latter case is a little tricky as many of the machines that ran 10.1 were not deemed fit for 10.5 (e.g. the G4 Cube variants), but there are workarounds.
I routinely have coped my bootdisk from Mac to Mac as I upgraded systems.
I should know this actually, I built OS X Live DVDs back in the day...
And honestly I'm not really sure that a feature that is memory hungry is really useful anyways, especially at that scale. At that point I feel it's all about the planned obsolescence, they just make algorithms that require to buy more hardware.
In that case software performance would only apply because of bigger hardware, not better programming. I'm sorry but with the computers of today, I really doubt programmers can invent resource hungry features that are really useful, maybe they can just do sloppy programming that requires more memory.
Open the .dmg, drag the install .app into /Applications and run it from there. The upgrade works fine.