Is Mavericks worthwhile?

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Which one? I have ten. Current one is MacBook Air (late 2013)
I have never gone for a new OS just after it has been released because, in my experience which goes back to OS 2, it always take a little while for an upgrade to settle down and run reliably. I was just looking at the forum and noting all the problems people seem to be having with Mavericks and was about to ask is it worth it?

Ever since just after I got my MB Air which came with Mountain Lion I have been being 'nagged' by apple to upgrade it to Mavericks.

Coincidentally my wife has unintentionally 'upgraded' her late 2012 MBPro, bought new earlier this year, to 10.9.3. while I was composing this post. I'm not sure what she was upgrading from but she has been complaining to me for several days of odd behaviours of the type described by people having trouble with Mavericks so I suspect she has had it for some time. The clue was the lack of information about what was being upgraded that DonaG was talking about.

So now I have TWO questions:

* Is Mavericks worth the upgrade? ie Are the benefits of Mavericks sufficient to put up with the hassles?

* Macs don't seem to ship with install discs these days. How do we get back to Mountain Lion? … Or is that an even bigger hassle?
 

Slydude

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I think a search of the forum will point to Mavericks being pretty stable for most users.

As har as your other questions are concerned it is possible to go back to Mountain Lion first if you do a little prep work first. Here's the approach I would take:
1. Make sure your current installation is stable. There's no point upgrading if there are problems.
2. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to create a "bootable' copy of Mountain Lion on an external drive.
3. Download and install Mavericks. If you don't like it you can boot from the clone, erase the current drive, and reload clone from the external back to the internal drive.

Edit: When the installer for Mavericks downloads consider making a bootable Mavericks disk. You must do this before the installation finishes.
 
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You can disable the notifications regarding updates if it bothers you that much.

I have had zero hassles since upgrading to Mavericks from ML. (zero hassles with every single OS upgrade beginning with Leopard in '08) Most of the posts of people complaining is because they didn't verify their software was compatible with Mavericks and now they're mad it won't work, or their system had a problem before the upgrade and instead of fixing that first they assumed upgrading would fix it for them. Stuff like that mostly. There are flukes where an update or upgrade just doesn't go right, but you restore with Time Machine and do it over (or use a combo update depending on the circumstance).

You can create a USB flash drive or DVD of ML in case you want to go back. This guide tells you how to make an install of ML and also how to go back from Mavericks LINK
 
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Fast and rock solid.
 
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Fast and rock solid.

+1

no problems here

the only issue I have ever had with upgrading was from Leopard to Snow Leopard on my old 20" 2007 iMac. The initial uphgrade was fine but 10.6.2 to 10.6.3 resulted in freezing and graphics issues.
 

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