Pros & Cons
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- Powerful yet unobtrusive notification panel that includes iMessage sending.
- Tight integration with iOS 7.
- Clean, convenient UI.
- New power-management and security features.
- Intuitive new features like a tabbed Finder and color-coded tags.
- Maps and iBooks give OS X nearly all the features of iOS.
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- Minor inconsistencies in deep features like keyboard shortcuts.
- New color-coded tag feature lacks some conveniences.
Despite recent security problems, Apple's Mac desktop-and-laptop operating system remains PCMag's top choice in the genre. OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks (free upgrade) not only addresses the "goto fail" SSL issue, it also adds some feature boosts that will be welcomed by Mac users—in particular those who also partake in Apple's family of mobile devices running iOS. But in the major upgrade to Mavericks last October, Apple proved that it knows exactly what's needed in an operating system upgrade.
Just as with Mountain Lion, Lion, and Snow Leopard before it, OS X Mavericks smoothly slots in a few hundred new features, but doesn't force you to forget the things you already knew about the operating system or send you on wild-goose chases for features that you used to rely on.
At first glance, OS X Mavericks looks a lot like OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, with the addition of a Maps app and an iBooks app that iPhone and iPad users have had for years. But as you start using it, you discover features that suddenly became much easier to use—for example, when a new-message notification slides into the upper right of the screen, you can click on a Reply button and answer directly from the notification, without switching back to the Messages app.
View All New conveniences include optional background downloads of OS and other updates, so you spend less time clicking Update buttons in the App Store, and only need to click a notification button when the updates are downloaded and ready to be installed. Small improvements are everywhere—for example, the Calendar now lets you scroll continuously, so the last part of one month and the first part of another appear in the same window, and you don't have jump from one full-month view to the next.
Meanwhile, deep below the surface, new power-management features extend the battery life on your laptop. I can't test this, but Apple claims that some of these new technologies can reduce CPU usage by 72 percent, and I've certainly noticed that battery life on the 2012 MacBook Pro that I've been using with Mavericks has noticeably better battery life than it did under Mountain Lion. Other mostly-invisible improvements include major enhancements to security so that apps and browser plug-ins are more tightly controlled than before. The most obvious change between Mountain Lion and Mavericks is in their names. Apple has stopped naming OS X versions for big cats and started naming them for California landmarks—Mavericks is a famous surfing site, and the default desktop image in Mavericks is a spectacular wave.
If you buy a new Mac, you'll get Mavericks installed on it. Any Mac that can run Mountain Lion can also run Mavericks, and you install the new version by downloading it from the App Store. Mavericks, like Mountain Lion, is available only by download, not on DVD or a USB stick. I installed it on a 2009 MacBook Pro running Mountain Lion, and the installation, after I finished downloading, took about 20 minutes.
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The New and the Improved
The most visible changes in Mavericks are the two new apps, Maps and iBooks, both familiar to most OS X users from their iOS versions. The Maps app, as you'd expect, is an elegant alternative to Google Maps, and Apple has ironed out most, but not all, of the glitches that afflicted Maps when it was introduced in iOS. What makes Maps stand out from Google Maps in OS X is its tight integration with the rest of Apple's apps. Hover over a street address in the Contacts app, and a link appears, offering to show the address in Maps.
In the Calendar app, when you create an event and type in a location that OS X recognizes as an address, a map appears on the panel with details of the event, complete with a miniature weather report for the location. Hover over an address in a Mail message, and a map appears. After initial woes interoperating with Gmail, the 10.9.2 update finally allows users of that mail system to use Mavericks' excellent mail client. The update fixes other Gmail syncing and settings issues, too.
Among the glitches remaining in Maps is an annoying disconnect between the street maps and satellite data. In many small-town locations I looked at, Maps' hybrid map-and-satellite view showed a street running through the middle of someone's living room. In the same locations, Google Maps tended to worse-looking satellite imagery, sometimes only in black-and-white, but far more accurate street data.
As for the iBooks app, it has few surprises if you've used the iOS version. Your notes and bookmarks all get saved to your iCloud account, and the general layout is spacious and customizable. One integration feature lets you copy a passage from an iBooks book and paste it into a Mail message or document, and a citation is automatically added in the form of a Web link, but the link takes you to iTunes and is only useful on a Mac or iOS device that has access to the same book in iBooks—it isn't usable as a footnote in a college paper, for example.
Other apps with roots in iOS—Messages and FaceTime—started shipping with OS X in Lion, but get an improvement in the latest 10.9.2 release. Now you can block incoming messages from an annoying individual or spammer. And the Mac Mavericks version of FaceTime now lets you place audio-only calls and includes a call-waiting feature, for those who are in demand when it comes to video calls.
Final Thoughts
Apple OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks
OS X remains the best consumer-level desktop operating system, despite Microsoft's impressive catch-up in Windows 8.1. Newly included apps, automatic app updates, better laptop power management, tight integration with social media, and unified notifications are just a few of Mavericks' highlights.