OS X Mavericks GM is out – how to make a bootable installation USB

[dannypovolotski]

The golden master for OSX Mavericks is out! For all you guys who wanna try it out, but need to install it via a USB, here’s a super simple way to do so.

[yapcguy]

Does anyone know if the memory swap issues[1], which plague Lion and Mountain Lion, have been fixed?

[1] You could have 20GB of hard disk space free, but use XCode, Firefox and a few other apps, and soon you're down to 10MB and you get the dreaded "Your Mac is running out of disk space" dialog and you have to force quit all your apps, and type "purge" into a Terminal in a desperate attempt to get the swap released...

[Bvalmont]

Been on Mavericks for about a good week now. Was pretty much a painless move, the only problem I had was that at this moment After Effects CC is unsupported.

It's a real tangible performance boost though. Feels extremely snappy on my Retina Macbook Pro. Scrolling is faster and I went from 2,5 hours of battery life to 4,5 !

[kristofferR]

I was just about to say the same thing - it's stunning how much faster/smoother it is.

The new way Multi Display works is also much better than the old way, Full Screen Mode is actually really useful now.

[Someone]

If that battery life improvement is representative of general use, it is another indicator that they really are pushing for energy efficiency. The first one, for me, was https://developer.apple.com/osx/whats-new/, where the top item for "develop for OS X Mavericks" is "Energy Saving", not any of the new libraries whose coolness one can demo in a few minutes.

[selectodude]

Apple increased the available video memory on the retina machines from 768MB to 1GB. The difference is profound. I was concerned about being stuck with nothing but an HD4000 but I'm very content with everything now.

[tuananh]

you get only 2.5 hours on MBP Retina !?!?

[kalleboo]

Usual caveats apply about making sure the software you depend on is compatible before updating. Notably, Adobe products are having a lot of issues (Photoshop: Save As is broken, keyboard shortcuts break if you have a non-US keyboard, and I've heard the Creative Cloud installer doesn't work at all).

[neya]

Thank you so much, we have Adobe suite running on our machines and I was tempted to upgrade! Thanks so much :)

[snowwrestler]

Best resource for keeping up with these issues? I used to use Macintouch but I don't really trust that it gets all the user reports it used to.

[grey-area]

Has anyone tried Adobe CS5.5? Any problems?

[spullara]

The Activity Monitor has been significantly enhanced and includes a page that tells you what software is using the most energy. That should help people get more battery life out of their systems as well.

[k-mcgrady]

When I upgraded Windows machines I always went with a complete fresh install. Since switching to MAc I've always just run the upgrade.

What do people on HN recommend? Using this technique to do a complete reinstall, or upgrading?

[spartango]

Upgrading generally works great with OS X; generally the upgrade process blows away the system/OS files and leaves your stuff untouched. In the normal case, "your stuff" is well compartmentalized away from system files so stuff works nicely.

With that said, as a developer sometimes it can be handy to do a clean install. For example, if you have any custom kernel modules, these will certainly be blown away in an upgrade. Additionally, developer tools installed in /usr/ can be interfered with, and in general the probability that something will be incompatible/broken is a bit higher.

[marban]

I've read posts from folks who started at 10.1 and upgraded all the way to 10.8 without any issues.

[protomyth]

I was fine with just upgrading except for Lion -> Mountain Lion. A lot of little nitpicks were fixed after I did a clean install.

[ics]

Those running Mavericks and experiencing significantly improved average battery life: what machines are you using and how old are they?

[mathieuh]

I'm not experiencing any real change in battery life on my specced out 15" retina. Got ~5 hours before 10.9, get ~5 hours on 10.9. Makes me kind of wish I'd gone for the base CPU and saved money and battery life.

[selectodude]

13" MacBook Pro retina.

Probably get a solid and consistent extra hour. From 6 solid hours to 7. I can push to 9 now if I lower the brightness and don't browse the web.

[aroch]

2009, 13" MBP. Went from ~2.5 hours up to ~4hours

[rdrake]

I'm not noticing much of an improvement on my mid-2011 MacBook Air (< 6 month old battery, 145 cycle count). The fact that the battery life indicator shows applications that are using significant amounts of energy has made me more aware of which applications are sucking away my battery life, however.

[glhaynes]

I haven't run mine on battery much since upgrading; but as you might expect I feel like my fans run less, which is much appreciated. MacBook Air 11", Mid 2012.

[samsnelling]

2013 13" MBA (with i5). I'm getting more or less the same. 7-9 hours under normal usage. Up to 10-11 under very light load.

[jawngee]

2012 Retina MacBook Pro. An extra hour.

[terhechte]

2012 Macbook Air 11"

[Alphasite_]

Last year i7 MBA went from ~2.5h -> ~3.5-4.5h

[rsynnott]

Does anyone happen to know whether Mavericks installs or can run Apple Java 6? For a variety of reasons, I don't want to go to 7 just yet (and Oracle doesn't ship a 6 JDK for MacOS).

[doe88]

I don't know if it's related to their improvements on battery life but when my Mac mini goes to sleep it breaks my ssh sessions in my iTerm2 terminal it's annoying. I'm wondering if there is a way to maintain my connections alive?

[mherkender]

You want OSX to keep network connections active while asleep? It seems to me that going to sleep means not actively doing anything.

The most common solution to this problem is to use tmux or screen, or just disable sleep.

[dewey]

you could use http://mosh.mit.edu/

[rsynnott]

It may just be more aggressively sleeping, as opposed to just turning the screen off. You can change this in power management settings.

[ancarda]

Does anyone know when the public release (Mac App Store) will be available?

[matthew-wegner]

The next Apple press event is October 22nd. iPad-centric, but also expected to include Mac Pro pricing/availability, so probably Mavericks release as well...

[yottabyte47]

I expect it will be released on the 29th of this month given that last year Apple released Mountain Lion the day after their earnings call.

[casperc]

I'm looking at their App Nap functionality and I am wondering how it will affect applications that do background work. It looks to be on by default unless expressly turned off by the app. Does it apply to all processes or what is their definition of an app? I wouldn't want just anything to be suspended when I don't have it on my screen (any work that I started and am expecting to continue in the background basically).

[terhechte]

I've updated to Mavericks about a week ago, just before attending a conference, and I've had a fair share of problems, though it seems that (based on Google Searches) I'm in the minority with the main issue: I can't use tethering with my iPhone anymore. Wireless or wired tethering will setup just fine, and I can even ping hosts on the internet, but domain name resolution fails. I've tried all kinds of things (like adding the 8.8.8.8 server, or running Linux in a VM to see if it works fine in there) but somehow as soon as I am tethered, my Macbook Air can't resolve domain names anymore and using the internet is effectively useless. The other issue that I've had is that the system froze when I connected it via thunderbolt to a beamer.

However, apart from that I'm getting longer battery life (from ~3 hours up to ~4.5 hours) and I like the OS. I guess bugs as the above are normal with OSX point releases. I still remember the pain when I ran Leopard.

[rsynnott]

It may be worth explicitly restricting the tether connection to IPv4 only; have seen similar things where an ISP has something that looks like a working IPv6 setup but isn't.

[nailer]

This article is unnecessary for most users.

Open the .dmg, drag the install .app into /Applications and run it from there. The upgrade works fine.

[idoescompooters]

What is the difference between the GM version and the App store released one?

[sigzero]

They should be exactly the same barring any showstopper bugs that get uncovered in the GM.

[msoad]

You have to fresh install developer releases while you can just upgrade to public release.

[jokoon]

can't believe modern OSes can't run properly with 2GB of RAM. In the 90s we certainly didn't have the same standard.

[mwfunk]

I totally agree with you but folks from the 80s said similar things about computing in the 90s. :) I can only imagine what the folks from the 70s would say. Like another poster said, it's not ALL bloat- there are lots of memory-hungry things going on in the background for user convenience that would have been unacceptable tradeoffs 10-20 years ago (in terms of how much system resources are consumed vs. the utility and convenience provided to the user), but on modern hardware those tradeoffs are less meaningful, and things that might have seemed wasteful 10 years ago become practical to do. I think a lot of it also from more and more graphics resources needed per app (high resolution images for UIs can consume an absurd amount of memory), as well as many apps being much more aggressive about caching stuff in memory for snappier response times (web browsers, or any kind of media-centric application). It seems inevitable that as memory gets cheaper, the average machine has more memory, and as the average memory of the average machine goes up, the perceived cost of memory consumption goes down, leading application (and OS) developers to figure out more and more ways to use all of that memory. It's a vicious circle (or a virtuous one, or both).

[edude03]

Modern OSs do a lot in the background that OSs in the 90s did though. For example, indexing and scanning every file on your hard drive so I can find a document that contains a certain word or phrase in a few seconds.

[joezydeco]

Can anyone with an iMac (and not a notebook) comment on how Mavericks performs there?

I've got a 2008 iMac 2.8 dual-core that I thought was getting pretty long in the tooth, but I'm thinking it's just the 4GB ram that's holding it back now. I can't add any more RAM and Mountain Lion just draaaggggss on it.

[luismarques]

Actually, unofficially, the older iMacs support 6 GB (4+2) since the first aluminium iMac (mid 2007, I think)

I bought a 4 GB DDR2 DIMM for my Dad's mid 2007 iMac, installed it together with a 2 GB DIMM and it has been running non-stop for almost a year now, without any problems. DDR2 is now a bit expensive, due to being old, the 4 GB DIMM cost me around 50$ on eBay.

[micro-ram]

Mavericks adds ram compression. I don't know if it will turn out to be just a gimmick. I have been testing on a 2009 iMac with only 2GB ram w/ Intel SSD and it does just fine. Compressing 200-300MB when I check Activity Monitor.

[eunice]

On a mid-2010 iMac with 4GB I find it snappier than 10.8

[bluedino]

Have you thought about adding an SSD?

[jawngee]

Anyone notice how slow the iOS simulator is when running apps on the 6.1 simulator?

[kevinxucs]

Wow, such a one-week-late news.