OS X 10.9 Mavericks Review

An anonymous reader writes "John Siracusa at Ars Technica has put together a comprehensive review of Apple's OS X 10.9 Mavericks. This is the first time a major OS X update has been free, and it works on any device that supports Mountain Lion. This suggests Apple is trying to boost adoption rates as high as possible. Siracusa says the following about Apple's move away from skeuomorphic design: 'Mavericks says enough is enough. The leather's gone, the fake pages are gone, the three panes are independently resizable (more or less), even the title bar is bone-stock, and it's boring?' On the other hand, he was a big fan of all the internal optimizations Apple has done, since the energy savings over Mountain Lion are significant. He found a 24% increase in his old MacBook Pro's battery life, and a 30% increase for his new MacBook Air. He also praised the long-needed improvements to multi-monitor support: ' Each attached display is now treated as a separate domain for full-screen windows. Mission Control gestures and keyboard shortcuts will now switch between the desktop and full-screen windows on the display that contains the cursor only, leaving all other displays untouched.' The 24-page review dives deeply into all the other changes in Mavericks, and is worth reading if you're deciding whether or not to upgrade."

Comments

Nothing about colour accuracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has really fucked up big time on 10.9.

Basically, the sRGB spec is no longer sRGB, and colour managed applications that use ColorSync are completely hosed. Almost everything is more saturated then it should be. Towers of bug reports have been filed on this alone and absolutely nobody has received a response from Apple, which makes me think it's some retarded "stylistic choice" of theirs to literally try and make the OS "look better" (it doesn't).

So, basically, if you rely on OS X for colour accurate work, you're totally fucked.

Re:Nothing about colour accuracy?

[Just Some Guy]

Have a link? I'm not readily finding anything but I'd be interested in reading more.

Re:Nothing about colour accuracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1651041
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1649988&highlight=saturation

You can actually see the difference in the Ars Technica article just from the screenshots (which likely means it's intentional, since you can screenshot the issue and clearly see it in the pixel colours). Look at the icons closely, and you'll notice that the majority of them seem darker and more saturated then normal. I'd link you to the ADF forum discussion about this exact same issue, but that's kinda pointless since you'll need an ADC account to view it.

We've got a whole bunch of ultra high end Eizo monitors in the office that do self calibration and colour correction inside the monitor itself. These units are all configured to accept a straight sRGB IEC-61966-2.1 colour space, and nothing else. Since the monitor ASIC handles the calibration & correction for the panel, there's no need to use ICC profiles if you don't want. We've found this to be an insane boon when you're targeting the sRGB colour space for mobile app development and graphics design (where sRGB is basically the safest space to target if you want it to look decent on any handheld).

Anyways, under 10.7 and 10.8- setting up OS X to use the sRGB IEC-61966-2.1 colour space resulted in a pretty perfect image on the monitor (which was configured for the sRGB colour space "mode" and self-calibrated). No problems there, or with any of the Cocoa APIs, or OpenGL stuff.

Under 10.9, everything is basically "fucking whacked" (according to our IT guy). About 60% of the Mac OS X UI doesn't adhere to the sRGB spec anymore in that if you have an ICNS file that was generated from sRGB source material, it is no longer displayed as straight sRGB in the Aqua UI- it's being tinkered around with by Apple's bug and/or design decision. A lot of stuff being displayed through NSImageView is totally hit and miss as far as the colours go, even with an sRGB monitor profile (this is even worse on Apple's own computers that use LCD panels which are somewhere in-between a wide gamut and sRGB... The colour variances I've seen on our office laptops running 10.8 and 10.9 side beside are unbelievable). Even OpenGL is hit and miss now- before everything seemed to be uncorrected (which was fine, applications could implement colour management themselves if they wanted), but in 10.9 it seems like some stuff is completely whack and other things almost look partially colour corrected depending on the monitor profile. We think this is due to the GPU drivers and brand, but nobody knows for sure.

In a nutshell, things are NOT as they should be.

1) Their Aqua UI should assume that input images are in the sRGB colour space, and display them as accurately as possible according to the monitor profile
2) NSImageView & friends should do the same thing for data sources that have no associated colour space
3) OpenGL should preferably be totally uncorrected, since anything else would be totally ambiguous and up to the manufacture

Our six 10.9 pilot systems were recently reverted to 10.8, which still has horribly broken colour management... BUT, at least on 10.8, if you tell it to output sRGB then that's precisely what it does (and this works well with our Eizo monitors). 10.9 seems to take this all one step further in that they fuck around with anything and everything at will, and it's just a complete nightmare to deal with as a user.

TLDR; it is very evident Apple has no clue what they're doing in regards to colour management. This is becoming more and more apparent with each release of OS X.

Re:Nothing about colour accuracy?

[Alan Shutko]

All I can find is this in the Apple Dev Forums (login required). It seems that certain people in a workflow without a monitor color profile see differences without embedded profiles look differently. This does not appear to be a problem in a workflow where you regularly profile your monitor (and in fact, I don't see a problem).

So, if you depend on OS X for color accurate work, and if you are working exclusively with untagged images that are to be assumed to be sRGB, and if you have a monitor which does its own sRGB calibration and you're depending on the bits from the image being sent directly to the monitor without adjustment, then you might see problems. I don't know how big of a community that is.

Re:Nothing about colour accuracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

They also dropped off another x86 64bit arch

What the fuck are you blithering about? Mavericks supports all the hardware which Mountain Lion supported.

just as they did with the bullshit 32bit video bus driver bollock.

"32bit video bus driver bollock" is an amazing bit of word salad. Calm down, stop frothing.

Apple only release OS "updates" when they can kill an entire hardware release with the exception of their little cell phones stuck in a 2008 timeloop.

Can't tell if stupid or just trolling.

Re:Nothing about colour accuracy?

[serviscope_minor]

We've found this to be an insane boon when you're targeting the sRGB colour space for mobile app development and graphics design (where sRGB is basically the safest space to target if you want it to look decent on any handheld).

I hope this isn't a silly question, but why on earth do you care about accurate colour matching on mobile devices? Given that they have screens of very variable quality and no decent colour accuracy themselves it seems that putting much effort in will be wasted.

Re:Nothing about colour accuracy?

[tlhIngan]

I hope this isn't a silly question, but why on earth do you care about accurate colour matching on mobile devices? Given that they have screens of very variable quality and no decent colour accuracy themselves it seems that putting much effort in will be wasted.

Just because you use Android doesn't mean people don't care.

The iPhone 4s was about 90% sRGB (mostly due to a faulty blue filter that lets in a little green), the iPhone 5 (and 5s, 5c, and associated iPods) are actually a little over 99% sRGB. And Apple calibrates every display as they come off the line. tests done on the displays have shown excellent calibration with very little variability between devices.

While Androids have better screens, the AMOLED ones, especially Samsung Pentile variants tend to be far worse - the OLED display is nice but oversaturates for the most part. LCD Androids may or may not be calibrated as well - some devices exhibit such wide variations in color accuracy and error that they're effectively uncalibrated screens, while others do calibrated them to an extent during manufacturing (usually the flagships).

The modern smartphone and tablet display is a far cry from early mobile LCD displays - they're often very good (especially Apple displays - if you need color accuracy on a portable, you're pretty much limited to Apple) and people do expect their photos to be somewhat like reality.

If you want to see what crap looks like, check out a cheap digital photo frame, then look at a modern smartphone or tablet display and you'll find they're much nicer.

Re: Nothing about colour accuracy?

[macs4all]

But you conveniently fail to mention three very important facts: 1. Apple has brought back nearly all of the capabilities of FCP 7. There isn't a mass-exodus anymore (actually, ther never was. Most FCP 6 or 7 users simply continued to use those versions until FCPX matured), and many Pros have actually switched back. 2. Apple launched a campaign this March, specifically targeted at video professionals, effectively saying "Come on in. FCPX is ready" 3. The recent "paradigm-shift" update to Logic Pro, making it look more like FCPX, has been nearly universally Praised; PARTICULARLY for the fact that all, or nearly all, of the "old features" have been retained, along with the added benefit of the re-factored GUI. So, Apple DOES care about Pros and their Pro Apps, and Apple DOES learn from its mistakes. Now, here comes the ad Hominem attack based on my Username...

Enough already!

[mothlos]

Here we have Soulskill yet again trying to act like skeuomorphic artistic design is some sort of big, bad thing which we should be concerned about. This is not an important issue in human interface design. This seems to be some sort of pet peeve lens which Soulskill keeps bringing up. Skeuomorphism may bother designers who don't want to be tied down to designs based on mid-twentieth-century conventions of office life and people who demand every last pixel of their screen be useful for them. ell, it may even be the plastic teak dashboard of the 21st century, but its presence or lack thereof has such a tiny impact on usability for all but the most constrained interfaces that it is not worth /.'s concern. Please stop.

Re:Enough already!

[drinkypoo]

It is an important issue. It's not the end of the world, but it's dumb to waste screen real estate on gewgaws to make the interface look like something from yesteryear to which it is superior. And notably, the world already rejected these ideas back in the classic MacOS days.

Re:Enough already!

[phantomfive]

From what I've seen, the anti-skeumorphic hatred started with WinPhone 7 users desperate to find a way their phone was superior to iPhone. They tied it with the idea that WP7 was a unique UI (and it was nice, but not as nice as the Zune HD, and not amazingly original). After that some Android users jumped on the bandwagon, also wanting to feel superior. Some iPhone users started to feel bad about it.

Skeumorphism is just a thing, if done right it is great, if done poorly, it is bad.

Re:Enough already!

[UnknownSoldier]

> Skeumorphism is just a thing, if done right it is great, if done poorly, it is bad.

As a 3D, UI, & UX expert I concur 100%.

Skeumorphism is like spice. A little kicks it up a notch. Not having any is TOO plain; having too much and that is worse then not having any.

IMO the BIGGER problem is OSX 10.9 and iOS 7 completely desaturating and removing all 3d shading -- THAT is the hideous UI crime. The UI designers should be forced to use Windows 1.x for their stupidity.

Re:Enough already!

[steelfood]

I guess it depends on what your standpoint is. From a user standpoint, transitioning to a new technology via a familiar UI is better than doing it via an unfamiliar one. Once there however, the real test is how unintrusive and easy to use the UI actually is.

From a designer standpoint, again, when in transition, a familiar UI is easier to work with. However, once the transition period is over, it can be a limiting factor for improvements to the interface or to the functionality of the device.

Take the keyboard for example. We still use the same QWERTY layout of its predecessor, the typewriter. This was the natural course of evolution for typing as people transitioned away from typewriters to keyboards. But it is limiting, in that the key layout is not ideal for the typist, and the flat keyboard layout itself is not friendly to the hand at all.

On the other hand, look at the Segway. It has such a revolutionary interface that nobody really knows what to do with it. It probably would've gained far more traction had it looked closer to a bicycle. It could have eventually replaced all those motorized bikes with the 80cc engines, been legitimately the next revolution in transportation. Instead, it's now associated in my mind with being a fat slob, since the only people I've ever actually seen use one are mall security guards and the occasional beat cop.

Re:Enough already!

[Billly Gates]

You would not pass any computer art class today with that attitude.

Every professor out there has been teaching this is the way to go and flunking out those who do these outdated 20th century things. Unfortunately, this trend is post impressionism which once became popular because herasy to do art any other way. These new students are landing jobs at companies like Apple and Microsoft. Simple color is it.

Re:Enough already!

[TheRaven64]

If you're asking an art professor about HCI, then you're doing it wrong. Try looking over in cognitive psychology for people who can give useful input.

Re:Enough already!

[fyngyrz]

Any "computer art professor" that teaches which style is "superior", as opposed to "how to do" any style you are tasked to implement, isn't worth the time spent with them.

The issue of replicating physical interfaces is not, and never will be, cut and dry. Some physical interfaces are highly refined and functional, and abandoning them leads to problems (look at a modern audio system as compared to, for instance, a late 1970's Marantz. Now try to turn up the midrange, or route one recording input to a recording output, assuming your modern hardware even has them.)

There are some excellent UI design guidelines out there. Like, don't constantly show and hide interface elements, it fouls up muscle memory. But "bury everything in menus" is a total newbie suck move, and "remove all familiarity" (which is what the rabid anti sku folk are saying, really) is also a suck move.

Change and so forth in moderation, see?

Re:Enough already!

[AmiMoJo]

and "remove all familiarity" (which is what the rabid anti sku folk are saying, really) is also a suck move.

The problem with skeuomorphism is that the familiarity is often misleading or at best limiting. People experience something like this when they go to a foreign country. Things look similar superficially, but are subtly different and disorienting.

For example a skeuomorphic address book would look like an actual book, but not really work like one. You can fold the corners of real pages down to act as bookmarks, then turn the book sideways to find them. You can't search a real book by entering search terms, so there has to be a non-skeuomorphic text entry box with a magnifying glass, a symbol that represents searching even though it is rarely used for that purpose. It's just a mess.

On top of that space is wasted on the graphical elements, which add clutter and distraction.

In short there is a reason why only Apple did skeuomorphism, and it wasn't that skeuomorphism is better. Rabit skeuomorphism nuts seem to think that ordinary users are complete morons who have never used a computer before and can't understand any information that isn't presenting in a way they are familiar with. I kind of wonder how they imagine people managed to understand the object the skeuomorphic design is based on in the first place.

Why App Store and not software update?

[Joe_Dragon]

app store should not need it's own password/ login for free stuff.

also Software update seems better for OS stuff.

Re:Why App Store and not software update?

[Anonymous Coward]

App Store _is_ Software Update, now.

Re:Why App Store and not software update?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where by personal information, you mean an arbitrary string of characters (log in name), and an arbitrary string of characters (password)?

Re:Why App Store and not software update?

[amiga3D]

I don't know what in hell you are talking about and apparently neither do you. There is no requirement for any info whatsoever to get security updates. I hit the apple in the top corner of the screen, scroll down to software update, it shows the updates and I hit go and it goes. My computer asks for my administrator login/password. That's pretty much it, a lot like updating my linux box. I get the idea you've never used an apple computer.

Re:Why App Store and not software update?

[antdude]

Apple wants control. I found out that Apple uses your ID account to inject your data into each downloaded app as DRM. Read https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-5261 ... I was wondering why my downloaded 10.9 copy did not match others' with file sizes, CRC checksums, etc. :(

Re:Why App Store and not software update?

[nine-times]

You are correct. What people don't realize is that there are actually two different update mechanisms behind the "App Store" updates. When you check for updates, Apple displays the updates for applications purchased from the App Store along with updates for the OS-- but the fact that they're displayed together doesn't mean that they behave exactly the same way. The updates for App Store apps are downloaded from the App Store and require you to have an App Store account, but the system updates are downloaded from a different location, and no account is required.

I administer these things as part of my job. You definitely don't need an account to download system updates.

Maverick McCain

[narcc]

Finally! An OS suitable for Sarah Palin.

She's a real Maverick.

Re:Biased Ars Review of Apple Product

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone needs to counter-balance the horrendous anti-Apple bias found here on /.

Okay, there's the review...

[93 Escort Wagon]

So when can we expect the Review of Ars Technica's Review of OS X Mavericks?

It IS a big deal

[bussdriver]

We use computers and mice, maybe a track pad. It is one thing to theme something with fluff and quite another to try to simulate historical metaphors while ignoring known methods of user input and popular conventions.

Making something look like a book is a nice touch that is a matter of opinion but making you do the motions of the real world to interact with a computer program using a mouse... that is just idiotic and should be a cause for concern.

Skeuomorphism is great if you are making something tor a target demo that understands some real world item well and would instantly "get it" while you could slowly migrate them to something better suited to the newer technology that is replacing it.

You might want to use VHS tape or film reels as metaphors when introducing video editing in the 90s... But as soon as people can adapt, those metaphors can be chucked for more modern or abstract ones; as Apple and others have done with digital video editing. Some terms like film and reels still remain despite this generation never using or even seeing actual film.

Re:It IS a big deal

[wild_quinine]

You might want to use VHS tape or film reels as metaphors when introducing video editing in the 90s...

But even back then, yes, even with technophobes, if you'd forced your users to rewind those tapes in real time you would have had a serious problem.

Re:It IS a big deal

[jonbryce]

I don't think they will, and I don't think they should. The floppy disk icon is part of our language now. People understand that it means "save", even if they have never seen a real life physical floppy disk.

Fuck You

[Anonymous Coward]

With your "OMG, they must be fucktards" mentality and your openly bias "Linux before God" agenda have you ever stopped to consider for so much as a second that Apple's setup has some real value to ordinary consumers who just want shit to work?

Their closed garden approach may irritate the hell out of you information ought to be freers but good God, it makes certain my grandmother doesn't have to worry about viruses or malware. There is plenty of shit to be found on the app store, but a hell of a lot less than for Linux or Windows [or the Mac for that matter] on the wider Internet. You may prefer a over the antenna, torrenting or streaming approach - or just anything without DRM - but the movies, television shows, etc. provided by iTunes are of a reasonable, watchable quality and portable.

Besides, if you want to talk about the "brainwashed idiots" crowd - who are really not Apple fanbois, but instead the techno hypster - news flash, Linux is next for them. (Fuck, my bet is that you're one of them because you aren't stopping to really consider that OS X may provide all they need for a great many people. Fuck, Windows does.)

Re:Fuck You

[docmordin]

Mac is also not very stable with heavy applications like photoshop, after effects, 3dsmax, etc.

I chuckled heartily over this, especially considering that Autodesk hasn't released a native 3DS Max binary for OS X.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Step Away From The Kool Aid

[IHTFP]

Overall, Siracusa's review of OS X.9 is excellent but I got a chuckle out of this statement about the Sprite Kit: "All of this functionality is provided through a pleasantly abstracted Objective-C API that's a far cry from the typical low-level C/C++ game engine code." I understand the distinction he's trying to make between a pleasantly abstracted API and a typical low-level API, but Objective-C is a fright pig of immense proportions, not to mention overt vendor lock-in bullshit.

Re:Step Away From The Kool Aid

[smash]

Objective-C is available for anything clang runs on.

Re:Step Away From The Kool Aid

[VortexCortex]

A fright pig of immense proportions is available for anything clang runs on.

Re:Step Away From The Kool Aid

[GrahamCox]

Objective-C is a fright pig of immense proportions

No, it isn't. I developed in C++ for 12 years before (initially reluctantly) moving to Objective-C about 10 years ago. After some orientation, I realised it was actually a breath of fresh air. The most productive language I've ever used, bar none.

Re:Step Away From The Kool Aid

[GrahamCox]

The Sprite Kit is just a 2D sprite library

There you go again. Have you used it? It's "just" a 2D sprite library that has the simplest API I've ever seen, and yet handles all the OpenGL stuff behind the scenes for you, has a full particles system AND a physics engine, all built in. The physics alone (which is not just basic collision detection but a full physics environment) is worth the price of admission, which is ummm, free.

As a test I piled sprites of about 100x100 pixels, all with attached particle emitters and each with a physics body into the system, moving randomly and interacting according to their 'natural' physics. On my 13" Macbook Pro Retina I only started to see the framerate dip below 60fps when I got to almost 3000 sprites. That's good performance actually.

2D games may be ho-hum to some, but with simple API, power and performance SK gives you, I look forward to seeing what cool stuff people come up with. Should be fun.

Re:for about impact for unix command line devs?

[Guy Harris]

10.6 to 10.8 was a pretty difficult transition. different X, command line compiler tools hidden in a couple of directories underneath XCode, signed applications, grudging support for java, different open source package manager.

as someone who should probably be running linux, how difficult is this going to make my life?

X: just like 10.8, you need XQuartz. At least it's not different from 10.8.

Command-line compiler tools: if, for example, you just type "gcc" at the command line just for the lulz, it'll pop up a window (so your command line had better be in a Terminal window on the machine on which you're running your shell) asking whether you want Full Frontal Xcode or just the command-line tools. If you select the latter, it'll plop them in an obscure directory under /Library but will plant stuff in /usr/bin that runs those commands. If you select the former, I suspect it'll plop them under /Applications/Xcode.app but will plant stuff in /usr/bin that runs those commands. (Having installed the command-line tools on my Mavericks VM, and then installed Xcode, I don't know what happens if you start by installing Xcode. I do know that if you do both, you get two count 'em two separate copies of, at minimum, the clang program.)

Signed applications, Java: not much, if anything, has changed there from 10.8.

Open source package manager: OS X doesn't come with one, so no change.

Re:Whoah! Battery life

[Anonymous Coward]

I am really curious what power optimizations were done?

You are in luck. An article about that is the topic under discussion.

Re:Whoah! Battery life

[Anonymous Coward]

In case you don't want to read the 28 page article.

Timers of all programs are synchronised so they are fired right after each other so that there are longer periods processing and longer periods of idle. This means that frequency throttling up and down happens a lot less often.

Also for invisible and inaudible applications (obscured, or minimised, and not producing or recording audio) they reduce the rate of the timers, so less screen redraws and other things are done.

When showing the battery menu it will show power using/abusing applications, this will probably yield calls to support for those application developers hopefully pushing them to make their applications more power efficient.

This is all done by default on old applications, as a user you can opt-out on a per application basis.

If the developer uses the new SDK the user can no longer opt-out, because they expect the developer to know what is going on. The new SDK includes changes to the timer API to set not only the period but also the accuracy of the tick. For developers they show the power usage of your application during debugging.

During the WWDC they had many sessions about how to reduce the power of your app. This includes letting your application work more bursty, using all the cores for a short while. Using the performance math APIs, and grand central dispatch.

Re:Biased Ars Review of Apple Product

[mrxak]

John Siracusa's reviews of OS X over at Ars Technica have always been in-depth and informative, and while John Siracusa himself may be a fan of OS X, he doesn't shy away from being very critical when it does something not-so-great, or he sees a problem with Apple's direction. This year he (rightfully) railed against several UI elements that are pretty bizarre. It's hardly a puff piece. It's more educational, than anything.

In general, I find his reviews much more about explaining how things work, than actually praising or criticizing. It's a review, in the sense that it's an overview of the new operating system, rather than some sort of grading of the operating system. He's not comparing it to anything except the previous versions of OS X, and then only in objective technical respects. It's not about competing views of different products, it's to tell existing OS X users what they can expect if they upgrade.

Mostly Siracusa talks about under-the-hood workings of the operating system and computer hardware, and past Siracusa reviews have even included code examples to explain new APIs to developers interested in the platform, and users who may be the beneficiaries of developers using new APIs. This year it talks quite a bit about race-to-sleep and other technical issues that apply to computing as a whole. It's exactly the sort of review somebody would want to read if they were technically-inclined, like the Slashdot audience. I would say a Siracusa OS X review is entirely appropriate, here. If you're just looking for some kind of Windows vs. Mac (vs. Linux) argument fodder, it's not the review for you. I wouldn't want or care about those sorts of reviews on Slashdot.

Re:Whoah! Battery life

[nmb3000]

Timers of all programs are synchronised so they are fired right after each other so that there are longer periods processing and longer periods of idle. This means that frequency throttling up and down happens a lot less often.

That sounds a lot like the timer coalescing added in Windows 7, and it did have notable improvements in power usage over XP. So while the idea isn't new or innovative on the part of Apple, it does help them maintain their lead over Windows when it comes to lower power consumption.