Well, I'm usually an early adopter for OS X releases, but as it happened I was aware in advance that Mavericks would be problematic to my workflow because my MacBook Pro came with it, and still uses it now. Ironically, my holding off on my iMac didn't protect me from an eventual desire to "Move forward" and standardisation on Mavericks, because of the many Safari crashes and significant Time Machine improvements. But the iBooks, Mail, and Xcode nonsenses proved to be a little too much, and I downgraded again, though not before enduring lots of frustration. And sure enough, many of the Safari crashes have been remedied. Once again I have demonstrated my fickleness to myself; it seems that little features are enough to push me a long way, to the exclusion of stability. I miss the Time Machine improvements, but not enough to miss out on OS solidarity, as provided by Mountain Lion.
Yosemite is what Mavericks should have been. It can't hurt now to say that iBooks can now actually be used, rather than clumsily manipulated. But it still stores data in a container, which is infuriating if you have many PDFs or ePub bought from other places that you want to back up. Perhaps the answer is that my MacBook will be a Mac, while the iMac will be both Mac and Windows and just never use iTunes? I don't know. But a lot of what OS X does better can be virtualised in Linux, so unless I need an always-on Mac for backups or caching server duties, I'm reluctantly forced to admit that I've just not been very happy with Apple's recent decisions. As you noted, many of the immediately obvious problems with Mavericks have workarounds and are minor, but they do strike me as a rather worrying trend at Apple of getting it only half-right, with the implication that they only get it right every other year. And of course Apple's drive for simplification has casualties, some near and dear to me, like the aforementioned loss of plain text viewing in Mail. I guess it ultimately comes down to whether or not I endure it for much longer, or drop it, and we'll soon know which. :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
