Year after year, Apple proves that it knows exactly what's needed in an operating system upgrade. Just like the last few upgrades of Apple's desktop-and-laptop operating system, OS X Mavericks (free) smoothly slots in a few hundred new features, but doesn't force you to forget what you already knew about OS X or send you on wild-goose chases for features that you used to rely on.
At first glance, OS X 10.9 Mavericks looks 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.
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, in Messages, you can finally delete individual messages on your computer as you've always been able to do on your iPhone.
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 twenty minutes.
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.
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's 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.
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