[LINK] Of Walled Gardens and Their Dangers

[Frank O'Connor]

Well, I did mention the I/O latency problem.

For instance, in other versions of Mac OS X (from what I remember of Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion) desktop updates were instant when you copied a file or conducted some desktop file based operation. With Maverick, you copy the file, and a second or so later the icon(s), icon placement or whatever updates.

I'm guessing someone at Apple asked "Why the hell are we polling this or that file manager/desktop display mapper/whatever so often? 99.999% of the time users aren't conducting file operations, and even if they are files are saved/updated/copied into directories in the background, they can't even see the change from the applications they are working in. So, instead of devoting X amount of CPU cycles to this, what say we devote X/100" 

Net result, little numbers like the Finder look a teensy bit more sluggish (when they're actually not ... all that's slowed down is the file information display), but you lose 5% off the CPU load and laptops and the like become more battery/power efficient.

Shortcuts like this are probably what contributed in a big way to the more efficient CPU utilisation.

That said, the last Mac OS X I REALLY liked was Snow Leopard (10.6). That puppy was silky smooth, ran legacy Power PC apps in Rosetta, and came out of the door much more bug free than recent releases. Lion was a bit of a Bug City when it was released, which made the now defunct Mountain Lion look good when it appeared.

Where would I rate Mavericks? About the same as Mountain Lion ... with iCloud and iBooks irritation tacked on.

On the upside ... it is free.                 :)

Just my 2 cents worth ...
---
On 1 Nov 2013, at 5:10 pm, Kerry Webb <kwebb at grapevine.com.au> wrote:

> On 1/11/13 3:19 PM, Frank O'Connor wrote:
> 
>> As a (pretty compelling) bonus you get the latest version of iWork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) for free - downloadable through the App store, and all the latest iApps as well. That makes a pretty powerful argument for updating on its own.
>> 
> 
> But I've been reading some pretty damning comments about the new iWork 
> (formats not supported etc).  And I was burned with the last upgrade 
> that drasticly slowed down the CPU activity on my iMac, so I was 
> interested that Mavericks is less of a hog in this regard.
> 
> Decisions, decisions ...
> 
> Kerry
> 
> -- 
> Kerry Webb
> Canberra, Australia
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