OS X 10.9 Mavericks: The Ars Technica Review
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/safari...
http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/safari...
Flash has been in decline since the first iPhone, but is still used to track people with unkillable cookies and to make obnoxious ads. Hopefully those days are now over.
I wish Google and Microsoft would follow suit. Google probably will resist the most due to the entrenched interests of DoubleClick and YouTube.
[1] primarily because there are no viable competing implementations to what Adobe puts out
Or, more specifically, Adobe's lack of interest in addressing such issues in a timely manner; at least on OSX.
So the cycle continues.
So many sites consume way to many cpu time with js.
This has been a feature in Google Chrome for at least a year. It isn't on by default, but you can change the browser to block any plugins until you specifically allow them on the page.
Advertisers won't stop using Flash because 0.01% of Chrome users dig into their advanced settings and turn it off.
Apple is working backwards from, "what's best for our customers" here and I think that's great.
HTML ads will be rendered by software the user actually owns and controls - the browser market is healthy, largely driven by open source, and there is choice in your "runtime". Making all ads render in HTML will be a tremendous win for the user.
As someone else mentioned also, Flash is one of the worst pieces of software known to man when it comes to bugs and exploits. Nary a day goes by without a serious 0-day Flash breach being discovered, and it is still notoriously crashy.
There are approximately two exceptions, Youtube and Vimeo, and they can be handled with any of several click-to-play Flash blockers.
Making all ads render in HTML will make them much harder to block, because there will no longer be such a common telltale for animating, distracting cruft.
it's lightyears ahead in terms of scope (number of videos' that will play using it) and style compared to the youtube html5 trial.
Many videos don't play in HTML5 on Youtube because of mandatory ads (displayed as overlays) and various settings available to right holders. The Youtube HTML5 player is perfectly potent...
> and style
... and on par with its Flash-based sibling. Now if you want to argue the Youtube player (be it HTML5 or Flash) is not as stylish and functional as Vimeo's, so be it.
If HTML5 ads becomes the defacto standard, you know somebody will be annoyed enough to actually build it.
I've been kicking and screaming to get more of our partners onto HTML5 for a couple of years now. I've met with some success, but there's an awful lot of hoop-jumping to get there. Many advertisers are still of the mindset that "HTML5 is only for mobile", if they're even aware of it.
Maybe once this battle is won we can look at a smarter VAST standard!
And games. A lot of games. As long as the major companies making money off Flash games don't move to a different technology, Flash will never go away.
Besides, they've been moving YouTube to HTML5.
I wish this was working properly. I am using the HTML5 trial and embedded videos will randomly not work, and many, many other videos will simply show static with "You need Adobe Flash to view this video."
For some strange reason, the exact same videos work fine on my iOS devices — just not on a no-flash desktop web browser. I'm suspicious that YouTube purposely allows a larger selection of their content to work with iOS using HTML5, and purposely fails/requires flash on a desktop under HTML5.
This is what you want.
No, they’re not. HTML5 supports session storage which will lead to some very nasty cookies stored for an eternity on your machine.
The other main highlights from my perspective: "App Nap" energy-saving API (p. 13), generally better battery life, even on old hardware (p. 18), & support for offline speech-to-text (p. 23).
I wonder when airplanes are going to be new again, or books, or cars. Maybe you mean everything related to computers? I am not sure of even that though...
These kinds of things are best handled as an integrated component of the operating system, rather than a hacky third party add on, and are likely more viable now that we have so much more available CPU time, on multiple cores so it doesn't even impact latency, and better compression algorithms.
Also note that Ram Doubler, per the Ambrosia Software description, didn't just do compression, it also re-used free RAM that other applications had allocated to them while they weren't running, depending on the cooperative multitasking nature of the operating system to avoid conflicts. Before yielding, it would either compress or swap out that "borrowed" RAM.
A properly virtual memory system and cooperative multitasking make these techniques not particularly useful, while improvements in technology since have made compressed RAM more useful.
Apple systems still leave a lot to be desired if you are serious about 3D work. And the new Mac Pro does not seem to be worthwhile of a 3D workstation.
The LWN article is about it shipping with the Linus kernel.
Considering I've had this feature enabled and running in my Android kernel on my phone 2 generations back, I'd hardly say this is "in the works".
It's actually real live tech and has been for quite a while.
Not to nitpick details, but you make it sounds like Apple is pioneering new ground here. They aren't.
Did you see the Wired article headline? http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/
Initial impression, scrolling certainly feels better. Do wish they would leave my desktop background to what I had it set to. Other than that, being an OS upgrade where I don't notice anything odd is key to my satisfaction.
5+ gig download, took about forty minutes, somewhat less I think as I walked off, to install.
After downloading, it took roughly 20 mins to install.
It's a great review. If you care about your tools, do yourself the favor.
It's a great review. Every page is not the same length, and some you can skim over if you're not interested.
If you'd prefer an overview, plenty of alternatives at places like cnet or macrumours or whatever.
Managed to finish it up by Sunday. I'll probably do the same this time.
> In the years that have passed since then, the Mac has
> indeed been on a steady march toward the functional ideal
> embodied by the iPad, a product that is arguably the
> culmination of Jobs' original vision of personal computing
Think about it. With the drop of the non-Retina display MacBook Pros today, no Macs are now officially user-upgradeable.
What was the reason given?
2mm in thickness. Two. Fucking. Millimeters, so you can stare at the edge of your laptop with a hard-on. Oh, and that absurdly high resolution display that you'll need a goddamned loupe to appreciate.
All kernel extensions now must be signed in Mavericks. OS features brought about in Lion still bug me, like the absolutely back-asswards autosave system that uses duplication, and the lack of direct manipulation while scrolling. Also, Gatekeeper is a huge uh-oh.
It's the reason why my MacBook is now sitting in a closet, and why I'm using a 2005 Toshiba Tecra with Debian on it. Amazing how Linux news has gotten so rare these days... but stick an Apple sticker on something and it shoots to the top of the front page. Sad.
I have a macbook pro and I hook in with my thunderbolt->DVI connector to get my big monitor.
I can throw an appletv onto the monitor with an hdmi->DVI connection and finally go cordless! This is an improvement that means something real to me!
All of our conference rooms have a wall mounted LCD with a shitty Windows box driving it. Best we can do now is screen sharing with Skype or join.me.
Most of our Mac users just plug into the monitor directly. We'd LOVE to have an untethered solution.
Have you looked at AirServer? http://www.airserver.com
Also, we have an issue with the TV computers not being on the same subnet as wifi'd laptops, so they don't appear through Bonjour. But that's a whole other issue for enterprise that Apple doesn't really touch.
If you're a single router hop away from something the latency can be imperceptible. Whatever trouble is involved here isn't down to network latency.
FWIW, I think video stream buffering is the culprit rather than inherent channel latency.
For me what really made a difference was to ensure that only the laptop was connected to my network via wifi. My Apple TV is connected using ethernet. Before I made that change, I experienced significant lag, but now the lag is perceptible but pretty low.
YMMV, of course.
Trackpad scroll speed on my 13" MBA is also noticeably slower without significant load on the machine. This seems deliberate, but it's a move in the wrong direction for people that already have the trackpad sensitivity maxed out.
Now imagine VNCing into two monitor setup, when you use vertical monitors...
From the bottom of http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/11/#multiple-...
> But that was all before last year's ouster of Scott Forstall, senior vice president of iOS Software. By all accounts, Forstall was one of the driving forces behind the iOS aesthetic that Lion and Mountain Lion so enthusiastically embraced. Jony Ive's iOS 7 strikes off in a bold new direction based on a philosophy that Apple is eager to generalize to the company as a whole—leaving OS X holding the stitched-leather bag.
Not exactly sullying his name. There has been a design shift, it's fairly striking, at least on the surface, and it seems to be tightly coupled with a changing of the guard.
The story that will go down in history is Scott Forstall was the skeu guy, and he got the boot so Ive could flat-iron everything. We don't know if it's true, but unless Apple tells us otherwise, it fits the data we have better than most things.
In other words, imho I don't think it really means
*beep* *boop* entering opinion modePeople make baseless assertions and throw around absolutes all the time. It's not the end of the world when an absolute is inaccurately applied to a relative quantity or quality!
> "Some people think Ars Technica forces me to break my article up into many tiny pages. That’s not the case. I choose how to paginate the article. I like to break it up on logical section boundaries, which means that the “pages” vary widely in length. I do try to keep any single “page” from being too short, however."
I thought that would have looked awesome on my iMac!
On the other hand, the battery life is definitely better. It's not really worth the performance hit, though...
Fresh Mavericks setup + a Safari window - 3.7GB or RAM.
Just upgrade mate. It will make a huge difference.
When SSDs big enough for amateur photographers are affordable, I'll consider the switch.
16GB is roughly $100.
Depends on the vintage of your laptop. Cheapest I can find on Crucial US at present is $164 for 16 GB DDR3.
For 2008 laptops, DDR2 is coming in at $220 for 8GB.
Maybe check to see what apps or plug-ins is hogging all the RAM? Which should also be very hard to do in Mavericks.
https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/21000
:S
And has been failing since before the GM was seeded.
Seems to sum up Apple as a whole for these past couple of years, and probably for the foreseeable future as well.
I really wonder sometimes if Apple is not slowly dropping OS X in favor of iOS.
This article would more appropriately be called a "rambling" than a "review"
Herp, derp. Siracusa has been somewhere between critical and brutal toward the Finder (desktop slash file browser) since Mac OS X was born. He is also very well-known for being meticulous. Your comment reflects poorly on you.
Taking casual cheap shots at strangers from behind a meaningless alias reflects on you as well.
Great reading.
Python 2.7.5 (v2.7.5:ab05e7dd2788, May 13 2013, 13:18:45)
[GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> a = 1000
>>> a/1000
Segmentation fault: 11
Python 2.7.5 (default, Aug 25 2013, 00:04:04)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 5.0 (clang-500.0.68)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> a = 1000
>>> a/1000
1
>>>~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports and /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports
for crash logs happening around the same time; if you find any, file a bug report with Apple.
I always look forward to Siracusa's OS X reviews. It's fun to read his past OS X reviews, especially of Tiger, Leopard or even all the way back to Panther and Jaguar when OS X was still in its early days.
I think I used home-brew to get it. but, if you want it, it's trivial to get installed nicely
> # brew install bash
Really looking forward to upgrading.
I think he overlooked the text right on top of the menu, which says "Show these tags in the sidebar:". Pretty obvious to me.
If Mavericks is free, why does the App Store need a credit card in order for me to download it?
I do not plan on purchasing anything through iTunes. Never say never, sure, but I don't. Ever.
Guess I can't have Mavericks.
Even though it's free.
Kudos, Apple, you've given me my first reason to feel less than happy about a hardware purchase I reveled in.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2534?viewlocale=en_US&locale=e...
(But, man, do I hate such kludgey workarounds.)
EDIT: Seems to have worked fine - download in progress, and I didn't actually complete installation of the free app (AFAIK; I did have to enter tombstone info, but I can live with that).
One of the reasons I finally dumped my HP PC and Ubuntu was that I no longer wanted to play sysadmin. I wanted my computer to "just work" with minimal (non invasive) effort on my part.
So far, I am supremely happy. This Air is the bomb: Fast, silent, robust, well made, wow. Nice piece of work.
But needing a CC to get a free OS update is neither non-invasive nor effortless, which the platform had been up until now.
(Sure, I could get the update from somewhere else, but I would only be doing so because Apple failed to address my particular use case. I'd rather get it from them, jic - as in "just in case something borks in the update" - then I can go back to them with ground upon which to stand. Sure, as noted elsewhere, my use case is in their 1% outlier fringe, but that doesn't mean I wish to be without support or without minimal privacy invasion.)
I've a S2 and an Asus 300T: I read ebooks via Google books on those devices.
Music is streamed through rdio, which allows me offline access to several GB worth on my phone.
I have Netflix.
I do not own any iOS devices.
I see no reason why I would ever want to buy anything through iTunes, since I am happy with my music service, with my books account, and with OSX and the few apps I've added to it.
Yeah, I know, I am a 1% outlier (Android Google mobile user, OSX only for the reliable hardware for business and not for personal use). But why use iTunes to distribute Mavericks when the App Store is already there?
And sometimes it does seem there are links to excess.
Can't tell if he's joking or not.
(It's not a joke.)
‘Mavericks is the first California-themed release of OS X, named after "places that inspire us here in California," according to Craig Federighi, who says this naming scheme is intended to last for at least the next 10 years.’
And the words “California surfing spot” in your quote link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavericks_(location), so that is the name of the place. I guess it’s just coincidence that “maverick” is also a word.