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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
Possibly a big part of this fast adoption is that you can upgrade to Mavericks from previous OSX releases - you can skip over Mountain Lion, etc. So a lot of the people who never paid to upgrade their OS before can now skip directly to Mavericks and get all of the previous OS improvements for 'free'.
Although looking at these charts, it seems like right now it's only users who were already on Mountain Lion who are upgrading - the other lines are flat.
Going off the 'chart' (which is probably the worst chart I've ever seen), it looks to me like the bottom line has dropped a lot. I think the bottom line probably isn't Mountain Lion?
Are you using some chart where you can actually see which OS is which ?
EDIT: The chart is broken in Firefox - it works fine in Webkit only. Goodbye open web, was nice knowing you.
Anyway, I see you're right. Lion and Snow Leopard are both roughly where they started. So I change my opinion - the 7-8% who have upgraded to Mavericks are likely the people who follow Apple closely and so were already on Mountain Lion to start with. This might signal that the fast upgrade speed may slow down quickly as it implies only the small part of the OSX population who follows Apple news is upgrading so far?
Apologies for the lack of support on the chart, SVG rendering is terrible in Firefox.
If you click on the 'Day' view and then 'Show only Mavericks' you can clearly see a rise from 0.20% at 7pm yesterday up to almost 10% at 5pm today. The other lines have had a slight decrease, but yes it does look like Mountain Lion users are upgrading fastest. I'd be surprised if Leopard/Tiger users upgraded quickly as I'm sure they'd be apprehensive of updating their old and potentially fragile kit.
The bold line is Mavericks, and correlating the lines to the numbers, the top one is Mountain Lion. Looking at the numbers on the onhover legend, neither of the bottom two lines seemed to have changed much if at all (it's very noisy).
That's impressive, but then again Apple is _giving away_ copies, so I'm not too surprised.
It's more interesting considering what this means as an Operating System developer. If they're giving away copies, it shows that Operating Systems are truly commoditized (as well as the huge profits that Apple is raking in!)
Apple is playing a slight of hand trick here. Mavericks isn't free. Apple makes higher margins than anyone else in the PC hardware industry, and you can only run OS X on Apple hardware (I'm talking broad market here, not hackers). What Apple has done is combined the hardware and software in to a single SKU.
No one gets all excited when a new version of iOS is free because that's just "the way things are" in mobile. I think the strongest reasons for paid OS updates on the Mac in the past are because of precedent. When IBM chose to license DOS from Microsoft, they created the operating system pricing model that would define all future operating system pricing models in the consumer market. Apple has always charged for OS updates because that's just how OS updates were done.
Apple has learned a great lesson from the success of iOS and the app ecosystem there. The consumer doesn't want to buy hardware and operating system software, they want to buy a device. That device should fulfill their other wants and needs, which are delivered through software that have been abstracted through the term "Apps".
A lot of people fear a wholesale re-implementation of OS X as a giant form iOS that runs on a laptop/desktop. I don't think that's where Apple is headed. Rather, Apple is going to apply the same broad strategies to OS X, but will maintain a distinction in the actual implementation (tactics, if you will).
> What Apple has done is combined the hardware and software in to a single SKU.
When you buy an off-the-shelf PC, you have the same experience. The Windows licence is included in the price of the computer, for which the OEM pays Microsoft. However, subsequent major releases of Windows aren’t included in the price. Given the trend, that might change. I can imagine Microsoft making all future consumer OS releases free for those with a valid Windows 8 licence. For enterprises, little is likely to change, as they already pay for seats, not specific OS versions.
Not to be too pedantic, but I don't think this situation fits the formal definition of commoditization. For a product to be a commodity, the various alternatives need to be interchangeable or indistinguishable.
Edit: Web apps (Google Docs/Drive, Spotify, Basecamp, Facebook, etc.) would fit the bill as a force for OS commoditization.
No all it really shows is that it's a loss leader for Apple.
Much the same way Microsoft made the browser a loss leader because it made money on the OS, Apple is making the OS a loss leader because it's making money on the hardware.
I'm not even sure if I'd call it a loss leader, solely based on "making it up" in hardware margins.
I think you could show that by having much larger %'s of its user base being up to date and adopting new releases faster, that it cuts costs in other areas and makes it a more attractive platform. Just spitballing here, but less users on old versions should reduce support costs, create a better user experience for more of its users, and entice developers to take advantage of new features, which may further differentiate the platform from competitors.
I'd have to think that creates more long-term value for the company than making $30 bucks per license. And that's not even calculating the customer goodwill by making the updates free.
It's not a loss leader. OSX has always been supplied as a component that is integrated with the Mac. I.e. You never had to buy a Mac and then separately purchase OSX.
What they are doing here is to integrate ongoing support for OS upgrades into the cost of the computer.
I think this is the key. Last night it took only a few clicks to download and install Mavericks. I walked away, came back a couple of hours later and it was finished. My stuff was exactly where I left it.
When I used Windows only crazy people upgraded. Most people did a clean install of the OS then spent days reinstalling software and putting files back where they were supposed to be. I would have to wait until I had a few days free to make sure it didn't affect my work.
> I walked away, came back a couple of hours later and it was finished.
FWIW, yesterday I installed Mavericks on two Macs. On a Late 2009 Mac mini, the installation process took 40 minutes (upgrade from Mountain Lion). On a Mid 2012 MacBook Air, the installation process took 30 minutes (upgrade from Mountain Lion).
I'm using a late 2011 MacBook Pro and it took about 60mins - but then it stuck on 'one minute remaining' for another 45mins. Still, I can't complain that's still pretty impressive imho.
Nowadays Windows upgrades are much easier than all that. Mac OS X may still be better (haven't had to perform an upgrade myself since 10.6, since I turned in my work MBP for a Linux laptop), but Windows ain't bad compared to the old days, recent bricking issues aside.
I upgraded last night and haven't had any kinks. The only thing I had to do was re-set my maven environment variables for some reason (and was prompted to install a Java runtime when I opened IntelliJ, but that was an automatic process).
Other than that...no kinks. It's been a pretty smooth transition...just trying to get used to having menus on both monitors (which is AWESOME)
It seems way too noisy to me. Like a data point can swing from 4.59% to 2.66% in a minute interval. That's nearly doubling, so how can you interpret either value?
I don't know enough about the Apple ecosystem to have an opinion, but I wonder whether and how much Apple expects to save on support for older versions of the OS, over time.
In addition to being "nice", "free" may have payoffs that at least partially offset supposedly lost revenue from charging for the upgrade.
The cost for Apple operating systems is low or free because the cost is built into the premium cost of the hardware along with a license which does not allow you to install OS X on anything but Apple hardware.
It's a win for consumers not being stuck with old software, and a win for Apple having to be much less concerned with their old software.
