So I've been using this MacBook Pro with Mac OS X 10.7 (Mountain Lion) for the past year and a half or so, and it's generally been a good machine, despite a few quirks. Being slightly outdated hardware, I had resigned myself to the idea that I would be stuck in the past as new versions of the OS passed it by. What I had was working reasonably well and I'm also a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to paid upgrades. There has to be a compelling reason for me to shell out the cash and I darned well better be getting a good discount.
I've been relatively content with 10.7 since it allows most current software to run on my six-year-old laptop, but when I read that the latest Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) had been released earlier this week with an unbeatable price tag of zero, as in free, and that it was (just barely) compatible with my machine, I couldn't resist. And as it turns out, I'm glad I didn't.
The biggest challenge I had installing the new OS was clearing off enough space to download the sucker. I'm bad for letting things accumulate on my hard drive, so I didn't have the requisite 5 GB of space available. Fortunately, I did have an empty 32GB flash drive handy, so transferring and deleting files was easily accomplished. Of course, the next challenge to my patience was actually downloading a file that large. Good thing I have other computers I can use.
I don't know exactly how long the download took, because I just started it and put the MacBook aside for the night and let the download proceed unsupervised. When I got back to it the next afternoon, the upgrade was ready to install, which still took a couple of hours.
My previous experience with upgrading to the latest version of a software title on an older piece of hardware has usually been disappointing in that performance slows to a crawl, and being that my MacBook Pro is one of the oldest machines for which this upgrade is available, I had a fear that the same would prove true in this case. Fortunately, my fears proved unfounded. Not only did it not slow the computer down, it actually sped it up!
Among the numerous improvements under the proverbial hood, Mavericks makes more efficient use of RAM and processor cycles, which improves performance and extends battery life on a laptop. Because it uses RAM more efficiently, it requires less virtual memory, which presses hard drive space into use to supplement physical RAM. This translates into more available hard drive space! I call that a win, win, win scenario. All that efficiency is also allowing the cooling fan to work a little less.
Applications that traditionally struggled a bit under 10.7 are now purring along nicely. It even cleared up an annoying bug in the free LibreOffice office suite. Ever since version 4.1 came out earlier this year, text has appeared jumbled on the screen when I'm typing, but resolves itself in a second or two after I stop. That simply doesn't happen under 10.9
When you throw in the various interface enhancements and new applications like iBooks and Maps, that originated on the iPhone and iPad, there is really no reason not to upgrade if your Mac is less than six years old (check Apple's Web site for a complete list of compatible models), has at least 4GB of RAM, and is already running OS X 10.6 or newer. It really is a no-brainer.
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