Slashdot Mirror
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."
Someone needs to counter-balance the horrendous anti-Apple bias found here on /.
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.
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.
I am really curious what power optimizations were done?
You are in luck. An article about that is the topic under discussion.
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.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You