OS X Mavericks with "one free upgrade" announced

I'm tempted. I'm on 10.8.something and my iMac has started slowing down. Aperture is also behaving very badly. I figured an upgrade of both - for free! - might fix it. Alternatively I could spend £1000 or so on a new iMac with 16gb of memory instead of the 4Gb in my 2009 model...
 
Martin, I've got an early 2012 iMac with an i7 processor and 8 gigs of RAM. I upgraded to Mavericks a number of months back and it seems to work fine. My previous iMac easily lasted six years. I'm hoping this will last as long. We'll see if OS and key app (Aperture, etc) updates change that. But, I'd say if you can easily afford the new iMac with 16 gigs, I'd go for that. If not, then definitely upgrade the OS now.
 
I'm still on OS X 10.6.8 so perhaps it is time I moved forward?

I just moved forward on our 2007 Macbook... updated it to OS X 10.6.8 the other week :redface:

It's great! Things run smoothly again and I can run/update software that didn't run before... (Guess I'm an extremely late adopter on this one :)
 
IYes, I would move on but I personally believe in keeping OS's up-to-date. I don't think it would hurt to move over. I haven't experienced any issues but I do not know what software you're running. So it's always good the check the compatibility of your software with the newest OS X.

Don't know if the features are worthwhile. I forgot what they were, but if it's a free upgrade, so why not? I don't think it will make your system slower.

If you really want to speed things up, a clean install would be the best. But it's not necessary. A clean install requires you to reinstall everything and to make sure you've backed up your data and photos.
 
I'm running a 4 yr old iMac
3.2ghz i3 with 8 gig of ram. I went to mavericks straight from snow leopard.
I now have a slower start up time
In fact over double what it was before I can open a program . Not a big deal really but when you are used to a 40sec start up . 1min 40 seems an age. Also some programs take longer to open.
 
I really like Mavericks. I was in the beta program for a while, but the early betas were just awful so I bailed out. This is the first time the OS has been completely free. I remember paying nearly $AU200 for my first OS upgrade for my old eMac. How times change.

A word to the wise.
1) BACKUP! Use time machine or whatever your poison (mine is Carbon Copy Cloner)
2) COPY the downloaded Mavericks file to an external drive. It self deletes if you go straight into an install, like it wants you to. Nothing will happen if you don't. If you make a copy you will have the opportunity to create a bootable USB drive or DVD for a clean install. If the file deletes, and something goes wrong, you will have to download all over again. Also if you want to upgrade more than one machine, you will need that file.
3) Clean install or upgrade? My Mini is going just fine after simply upgrading from Mountain Lion - which I had done as a clean install. The value in doing it clean is that the leftover cruft from previous versions of OSX just goes away.
4) You need (IIRC) a minimum of Snow Leopard to be able to download the file and do the install. This is now starting to get difficult but if you are stuck on an older OS, it is possible to buy it from Apple for ~$20 or so... I think you still can.
5) Not all older computers will be able to be upgraded. http://www.apple.com/au/osx/specs/
 
I just moved forward on our 2007 Macbook... updated it to OS X 10.6.8 the other week :redface:

It's great! Things run smoothly again and I can run/update software that didn't run before... (Guess I'm an extremely late adopter on this one :)

You won't be updating to Mavericks on that machine... But Snow is a great version of the OS, and the last one with legacy support for old PPC apps.
 
I'm tempted. I'm on 10.8.something and my iMac has started slowing down. Aperture is also behaving very badly. I figured an upgrade of both - for free! - might fix it. Alternatively I could spend £1000 or so on a new iMac with 16gb of memory instead of the 4Gb in my 2009 model...

How old is your iMac? Apple artificially restricts it's software so that it won't install on older machines. This isn't for technical reasons but a marketing one. Apple sells more new machines if people think their machines can't run the latest software. You can hack the software so that it will install on a machine on the Apple bad list. It'll run just fine. The engineers have made sure it will. It's weird that an OS that according to Apple can't run on an older machine has all the drivers to support that older machine. :) Traditionally it's been easy to "hack". There's just a text file listing all the "bad" machines so that the installer will put up an error message. Edit that text file and a bad machine becomes a good machine. My Mac is running an OS that wasn't supposed to install on it two releases back.
 
You won't be updating to Mavericks on that machine... But Snow is a great version of the OS, and the last one with legacy support for old PPC apps.

Yes, I just checked the minimum system requirements and it's too old.

But the clean install of the old OS has sped things up enough that we'll be fine for some time longer...
 
Thanks Steve. I haven't upgraded operating systems for a long time, obviously. Now I feel free to push the button.:friends:

BB, are you running an iMac or a MacBook? If it's an iMac, I would go for a new one now - with the fastest processor and the most RAM I could afford. SSD would be great as well if you can afford it. Make it as future-proof as you can but think of it as your last desktop. By the time it reaches the end of its service life, we will be well past the PC era. Your next machine will no doubt be some laptop or tablet variant.
 
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