As far as the last twenty-four hours have gone, the news cycle has been dominated by new hardware. New iPads, new MacBook Pros and a new Mac Pro have been enough to take attention away from possibly the biggest thing to ship straight after Apple's media event finished yesterday.
OS X Mavericks, Apple's newly-released update to its famed desktop operating system, may not offer a mind-boggling set of new features and improvements to the naked eye, but in actual fact, the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air notebooks both look set to reap the benefits of extended battery life.
Having been announced all the way back at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, OS X Mavericks -- Apple's first break from the series of "big cat" releases of the desktop operating system -- is now ready for public consumption. Available as a free download to those starting from OS X Snow Leopard all the way to Mountain Lion, it brings quite a few changes from last year's release of OS X Mountain Lion, and if you've been waiting for the update following last month's release of iOS 7, you can now go ahead and get started with Mavericks.
The iPad media event has just kicked off and Craig Federighi has announced the final availability of OS X Mavericks along with its pricing structure. More details can be found right here.
Apple’s latest new operating system for its computing lineup, OS X Mavericks 10.9, has just gotten pushed to Gold Master (GM) level, and is now available for developers and AppleSeed users to download and play around with. If you’re a registered developer or user, now is the time to go ahead and grab the GM version for OS X Mavericks as you please.
iOS 7 may have already made its ceremonious entry into the market, and save a couple of complaints about vertigo and motion sickness thanks to the new animations, the vast majority of consumers have adapted well to the new software.
All of the Apple-related focus may have been on the new iPhone models and imminent release of iOS 7 but it seems the OS X engineers are still beavering away in the background. With an expected October release time ticking away for the Mac software team to eradicate any reported bugs and glitches within OS X 10.9 and get it ready for the primetime, the company has taken an additional step to reaching that end-goal with the release of OS X Mavericks Developer Preview 8 which also includes an updated version of iTunes 11.1.
Some analysts and Mac users expected Apple to use Tuesday's iPhone event to announce the availability of the OS X Mavericks 10.9 Gold Master seed for registered developers. It didn't happen. The general acceptance is that the Cupertino based company applied all of its collective efforts and resources into ensuring that iOS 7 and the two new iPhone models were launched without issue. We now expect OS X 10.9 to land next month at some point, but for those who simply can't wait for new stuff, Apple has today pushed out a point version of OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 that fixes a number of niggling issues.
Apple likes to keep its nose clean when it comes to security flaws, and prides itself on offering consumers a slightly better deal than rivals when it comes to keeping its products water-tight from potential attacks. By and large, the company manages to remain a top of any such issues, and when such time comes as they do arise, the response is usually swift and successful. However, an old, and as-yet unpatched security flaw within OS X offers intruders a route to root, so to speak, and the method, which involves playing around with certain clock and user timestamp settings, is rather alarming.
Since the focus of mainstream attention has remained almost squarely upon the progress of Apple's iOS 7 betas, it's rather easy to forget about OS X Mavericks 10.9, which is also currently being readied for prime time. While the name may have raised one or two eyebrows after a series of big cat releases, the changes made to the Mac operating system are very much business as usual, and the sixth developer preview doesn't appear to offer anything radically different from the previous offering.
