What’s the point of Mavericks?
I have a MacBook Air that I bought 18 months ago. I’m using Mountain Lion and am happy with it. Am I missing anything by not upgrading to Mavericks? I’ve seen the list of new features, and none of them seem that essential. Is there anything going on under the bonnet that I ought to upgrade for? Peter Symmonds Yes there is; Mavericks has several power-saving technologies. App Nap slows down apps that are loaded but aren’t doing anything at that moment, while Safari Power Saver pauses animations and video that are on the margins of a webpage. These and other technologies mean you get more life out of each battery charge. You get more from your RAM too, because data from inactive apps is automatically compressed and decompressed on the fly.
More importantly, there’s no reason not to upgrade. With Lion, not everyone liked the changes to the interface and there was an argument for staying with Snow Leopard for a while. But Mavericks doesn’t have any of those and, in fact, it removes some minor irritations from Lion and Mountain Lion. Mavericks isn’t a groundbreaking version of OS X, but nearly all of the changes were better. It’s also free.