While some software products reach perfection, Mavericks OS X is an exception.  With its release in October 2013, people are still waiting for bug fixes and much needed improvements to be made to the operating system. Similarly to apple’s iOS 7 release, which fell short to many expectations, Mavericks OS X also seems to have many lose ends and has left people scratching their heads and wondering “what the heck is apple thinking?”.

So the main question that everyone is asking is “Should I update to Mavericks?”.  The answer to this question can vary as it all depends on what you’re looking to get out of the operating system.  If you are looking to improve the speed and performance of your computer, we would recommend not to.  Mavericks OS X unfortunately seems to have slowed things down for everyone.  Updates require more time, applications run slower than normal (often crashing), and Spotlight’s quick look (preview of documents) takes several seconds to preview (sometimes not previewing at all) which defeats the purpose of a ‘quick look’ all together.  

Besides the bogged down speed that Mavericks brings to the table, there is a massive list of bugs that need to be fixed. Among the problems is the fact that Mavericks will no longer prompt you for a password after waking your computer from sleep (or screensaver) even if you have your preferences set to require a password. Another issue is Apple’s new multi screen feature which was supposed to give ease to users who wished to use full screen apps on multiple displays, but instead has caused file problems, connection / disconnection issues, freezing, crashing, and overall strange behaviour.  Then, theres the aspects of frequent audio drops, major issues with mac mail (especially for gmail users), not so smooth scrolling in various applications, SMB problems (Service Message Block), and incompatibility between apple products.  Yes, incompatibility.  Can you believe that Mavericks does not support airdrop between OS X devices and iOS devices.  What was apple thinking?

Overall, it is safe to say that if you do not require a software update, you might want to wait for a better version to come out (one with bug fixes and overall improved performance) before upgrading to Mavericks OS X.