Hacker News Reader

Comment by reginaldjcooper | Hacker News Reader

That's because it's a free upgrade that improves speed, battery life, adds multi-monitor support, and removes the dumb leather interfaces. This is the first time since Snow Leopard that I felt new OS X was an upgrade; not a downgrade just to continue using Xcode.

View on HN

Spartan (or leather) have a place. User Experience is what matters and flat design often increases the cognitive load as we try to figure things out. There's a lot of figuring out in Mavericks's UI, but I believe those things will get fixed over time. Maverick's is not flat (yet) but as long as it's not, I'm a user.

If they figure out how to visually separate the buttons and text inputs from the text, I'm all in. I prefer the flat UI.

I was anxious while updating from SL yesterday. I'll have to wait before judging the product, but from the moment it booted I felt like I made the right choice.

One caveat: SL provided me with ~6 hours of browsing battery life while M predicts I'll manage only 4.5 on a 2009 15" MBP.

I think that could be to do with some apps not being optimised yet or something. If I browse using Safari on my 15" Retina, I get ~8 hours of browsing, if I use chrome that falls massively down to ~3.5.

Ouch.

But I can hardly see why that could reduce battery life so much. The new power-saving features in Mavericks shouldn't, in theory, lower the battery life. The OS should act like it did under SL unless lots of RAM is needed (I'm at 50%). I'll let the computer go through a couple of power cycles, maybe that'll fix it.

The reason is in chrome the background tabs don't get frozen and stop executing etc...

Safari has had a huge makeover to improve the amount of energy use for things like background tabs/etc.... Or even not running when occluded by another window. Small things like that add up overall.

I think this is the way forward for improving the efficiency of our software in general. I'm glad someone is bringing power use to light alongside cpu/memory/disk/network.

As for the os level stuff, have you tested the actual time under use or just looked at the estimates?

I got 4:56 minutes out of my battery today. I switched from FF to Safari when I wrote the previous comment. It did make a difference.

I'm noticing the same as well with my retina actually.

The power drain differences are significant enough for me to swap back to safari.

I was getting ~7 hoursish (hard to tell I tend to compile/browse/etc) before and now it looks more like 5. Which is disappointing to be honest. Though using non "best for retina" seems to kick in the discreet gpu more often now.

I honestly don’t get the fuss about multi-monitor support. Mavericks doesn’t add multi-monitor support, it’s always been there. What Mavericks does is fix multi-monitor behavior for fullscreen applications, which I personally would never use on a display larger than 13" anyway, non-fullscreen behavior hardly changed, so I really don’t understand the big deal.

Ideal uses for full screen on an external monitor: Video, presentations, photo slideshows.

Didn't those applications all already support full screen "the old way"?

Not QuickTime Player, Keynote or iPhoto (All Apple's own software)

Wait, how did one even use Keynote at all if it didn't support full screen presentations?

Fixing multi-monitor fullscreen support was my only desired "feature" since they broke it about 4 years ago.

I thought it only broke for fullscreened applications?

I never had any issues with regular multi-monitor setups with any of the recent os upgrades as far as non fullscreen use goes. What was broke there?

Yes, I said fullscreen.

Just making sure I didn't miss anything, thanks!

It is, I'm told, ideal for paired coding.

A lot of people have macbooks and external secondary displays. Just as you said, these people should be able to go fullscreen on their laptop and still utilize the connected display...

Yes, of course. I didn’t say the feature shouldn’t be there, I said that multi-monitor was broken only for fullscreen, so “Mavericks adds multi-monitor support” is a slight overstatement.

But yeah, I see people have strong feelings about this issue, I just personally don’t get it.

Not to mention the addition of menu bars on both monitors, and the ability to trivially show the dock on either monitor with a quick flick of the mouse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com