Thu, 24 Oct 2013 OS X Mavericks review: Masses of new features - and it's free!

Apple has launched OS X Mavericks and - most surprisingly - it is a free upgrade for all versions of Mac OS X going back to Snow Leopard. Read on for more details about Mavericks, its release, specs and features, in our Mac OS X Mavericks review.

Apple has finally run out of cat names for its OS X updates so it's on to a brand new theme: locations in its home state of California. Mavericks is a surfing spot.  It's a  good choice as Apple can both emphasise its maverick personality, and emphasize the 'Designed in California' message that it's currently pushing via an ad campaign.

Among the highlights in Mavericks are better support for multiple monitors; Finder tabs; improvements to performance and battery consumption; new Maps and iBooks apps; and updates to Safari and Calendar. Plus two notable iOS apps make their first appearance on the Mac in Mavericks: Maps and iBooks.

Read our OS X Mavericks tips and tricks, get more out of Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks feature to uncover the best new features in Mavericks. 

With all these new features, Mavericks looks like an operating system that will make us, and our Macs, more productive. Apple's taken great care to squeeze every last drop of battery performance out of our hardware and software with the advanced technologies in Mavericks, plus, the company clearly believes that there are better ways for us to organise our data other than just tossing files inside folders. As for support for multiple monitors, studies have even shown that multiple monitors increase productivity.

Apple Mavericks: new features

There are more than 200 new features in OS X Mavericks but you may not notice this right away. Mavericks looks a lot like its predecessor, Mountain Lion. However, Apple's designers are continuing their move away from highly detailed UI ornamentation - skeumorphism - and turning the focus more toward content. With that design minimalism in mind, all of the built-in apps in Mavericks - everything from Safari to Mail to FaceTime, Messages, Calendar and Notes - have adopted standard OS X interface elements, ditching of the leather/metal/paper backgrounds that users have grown accustomed to.

The move to less UI ornamentation isn't a surprise, given Apple design chief Jony Ive's penchant for minimalism when it comes to hardware (and he's now in charge of software design).

Apple Mavericks: Finder redesign

One area where you will definitely notice a change is the Finder. The Finder is the way Mac users interact with their files, but over the years, starting with the introduction of the Dock in OS X's first release, moving on to Spotlight in Tiger - made it easy to find files based on their attributes or content, and culminating with the addition of Launchpad in OS X Lion, Apple has been adding alternatives to using the Finder to dig through folders. And yet with OS X Mavericks, Apple has added features that seem positively Finder-centric. Among these improvements the Finder now goes full screen and Finder windows can merge, but the most notable new finder features are Tags and Tabs.

Apple Mavericks: Tabbed finder

Mavericks takes a cue from web browsers by adding tabs in Finder windows, allowing several pages to be contained in a stack of tabs inside a single window. If you want to open a folder in a new tab, hold down the Command key while double-clicking. Just double-clicking a folder in the Finder will still open it in the same window. Unfortunately, it looks like the option to automatically open double-clicked folders in a new window is gone.

As is the case in Safari, you can also type Command-T to open a new tab manually.

If you end up with a whole lot of Finder windows open, you can gather them all together as a series of tabs in one window by choosing Merge All Windows from the Window menu. In addition, you can move files from one tab to another by dragging and dropping them on a tab.

Each tab behaves like its own Finder window; you can adjust the view settings of each one accordingly, so one tab can show an icon view, another a list view, and so on.

If you are a laptop user who sometimes has many Finder windows open at once, you may see appeal in reducing window clutter by collecting all your open windows in a set of tabs.

Apple Mavericks: Tags

With Mavericks Apple is encouraging users to categorize their files even further by using tags. This new way to organize files via meta data is borrowed from the world of blogging and social networking where tags form a simple method of categorising information. Apple wants you to consider tagging your files so that they're easier to find later. You can tag a file with a keyword - or even an entire phrase - like In Progress and then easily find all of the related files by searching for documents using the tag, or navigating to a smart directory in Finder.

Users can tag documents when they save them – even documents in iCloud. In the Save dialog box, there's a new Tags field that encourages you to add as many tags as you want to every file you create. You'll be presented with a drop-down featuring common tags, as well as a Show All link to display all the tags on your Mac. You can click on items from that list to pick them, or just start typing. If you're typing a tag that already exists, a suggestion will appear below as you type. You can click on the suggestion (or just hit Return) to accept the suggestion. If you're typing a completely new tag, when you're done just select Create New Tag or type a comma – the tags interface is essentially a list of items separated by commas.

Once you have created a tag it will appear in the Finder immediately. Users can access their tags from the Finder sidebar and some Open dialog boxes. A small subset of your tags is listed by default, but if you click All Tags a second column appears that lists every tag on your Mac. Click on a tag and you'll immediately see all of the files on your Mac that have that tag. And if you start typing a tag in a Finder window's search box, you'll see an option to search for files containing that tag.

Tags are a little like labels, which feature currently in OS X and allow users to label documents with a colour code. You can assign colours to tags, but there are only eight colors to choose from, and the way they are shown in the Finder differ slightly from the way labels were in the past. Labels surrounded the entire filename of a file with the appropriate colour. Tag colours have a more subtle effect: A small colored circle appears next to the file's name. If the file is tagged with more than one colored tag, you'll see a stack of circles, slightly overlapping. (If you are colourblind you may find the stacked circles hard to discern.)

By the way, on Macs not running Mavericks, files tagged with colored tags behave like files with colored labels. However, if your file has more than one coloured tag assigned to it, older Mac OS versions will only see the most recent coloured tag to be applied. This could be relevant to you if you are sharing files in iCloud between a Mac running Mavericks and one running Mountain Lion, for example.

Once you start adding tags, Mavericks remembers the tags you've previously created and offers them as autocomplete suggestions, so you're more likely to re-use existing tags rather than create new ones.

It is possible to tag an existing file or folder by dragging it on top of one of the tags in the tagging pane inside the Finder - that file will then be automatically tagged with that label. There also a new Tags icon on the toolbar of every Finder window, which will let you add tags to any items you've got selected. You can also tag selected items when you control-click. This only allows you to apply tags that you've already created, and then only one at a time, however.

Apple Mavericks: support for multiple displays

Apple already supports multiple displays, but until now both displays haven’t really acted independently and Apple's workspace-ordering features of Mission Control, Spaces and full-screen mode have not been able to truly take advantage of the second display. For example, when a user opens an app in fullscreen on one display, the other display showed an ugly grey pattern.

In Mavericks users are able to utilize both screens in fullscreen mode and it will also be possible to drag fullscreen apps between displays. For example, when you drag the Calendar app onto the laptop screen and click the full-screen icon in the top-right corner of its title bar, it will expand to fill that screen. Meanwhile, the larger external display will remain fully functional.

You will also be able to view an app's menu on the screen on which it is open, and multiple menus can be viewed at once: one per display. The currently active app's menu bar looks normal while the inactive app's menu bar is less opaque. Having separate menu bars for each display will be a productivity booster for users of multiple displays. Before now, even if you used a second monitor on your Mac, the menu bar would remain on the primary display, necessitating a lot of mousing back and forth.

In addition, each screen can also have its own Spaces and you will be able to summon the Dock on multiple displays. There's still only one Dock though: If you set your Dock to display on the left or the right, it will appear on the leftmost (or rightmost) display and stay there forever. However, if you set the Dock to display on the bottom we discovered that something strange happens; if you move your cursor to the bottom of the display (as if trying to summon a hidden Dock), the Dock slides out of view on the first display and slides back into view on the second.

Thanks to these changes, each screen can have its own collection of full-screen apps and its own sets of desktops. If you prefer the old arrangement, you can still choose to have spaces remain constant across your displays, thanks to an option in the Mission Control preference pane.

In addition to running full screen apps on each display and easily accessing the menu and toolbar, there are a few other nifty multiple display tricks coming with Mavericks. For example, even if you're working full screen on both displays, you can still share information between apps. Say you have iPhoto and Keynote open, you can drag a photo from iPhoto across the first display into Keynote on the second.

Another impressive new feature: if your computer is powerful enough, you can drive not just two displays, you can also turn your Apple TV-equipped HDTV into a third, fully-functional display via AirPlay.

Apple Mavericks: Apple TV

Currently you can mirror your desktop on your HDTV if it is connected to an Apple TV. With Mavericks, those with an AirPlay connected TV will be able to treat it as an extra display. It will be possible to drag windows from your Mac display to your TV screen via an Apple TV, complete with menu bar and Dock.

Making the connection is no different to how AirPlay Mirroring works in Mountain Lion. If you're on a local network containing Apple TVs, an AirPlay icon shows up in the menu bar. You can select an Apple TV from the menu, and choose to mirror your current display or extend the desktop. Running in extended-desktop mode, the TV becomes just another display. You can set an arrangement via the Displays preference pane, use Mission Control to manage spaces and full-screen apps, and all the rest. Note that AirPlay requires a second-generation Apple TV or later and a 2011-era Mac or later. In our early tests, the display being driven by Apple TV suffered a little bit from lag. As a result, you may need to move the cursor more carefully on the TV display so as not to overshoot and click in the wrong place. However, the lag was less than we expected, and I'd consider it usable. We believe you can only use one Apple TV at a time as an external display, and you've got to have a 'real' display connected as well.

Apple Mavericks: iCloud Keychain

A new iCloud keychain stores your passwords, credit-card numbers, and personal contact information and syncs them between devices running Mavericks or iOS 7. Integration with Safari means that iCloud will automatically fill in your password for you, and it can even help you come up with strong passwords, which it will automatically remember. On the credit card front, you'll be able to store multiple cards and their expiration dates - though you'll still need to know your security code for each card.

This is an optional feature - nobody's forcing you to put your stuff in the cloud. You turn it on by checking the Keychain box in the iCloud system-preference pane.

This means that if you're accessing a site on you iPhone that you'd normally view on your laptop - and you need to log in - you won't have to remember the password. Wi-Fi network and password storage will be particularly useful. It's a bit like the old MobileMe Keychain Sync.

Safari's been able to remember your password for ages now (only the syncing part is new), but it will now also suggest a random password for you when you're prompted to create one. After creating the password, Safari will save the random password in the keychain, so you never have to remember it.

You may be concerned about the fact that, when your Mac is on, every password is available to anyone who uses your Mac. If you're concerned that other people will have access to your passwords and credit-card numbers (although not the credit card's security code), you'll need to set your Mac to automatically lock when it goes to sleep or when the screen saver activates, and set a very low timeout before that happens. We'd prefer an option to have to enter a password to unlock our iCloud Keychain.

Everything is encrypted with AES 256-bit encryption for security purposes, but that hasn't stopped some people worrying. One concern is that if Apple saves all our passwords for us at some point we will no longer know the credentials to the services we use and we will have to rely on our iCloud ID for everything. This is a huge responsibility for Apple, not least after the revelations concerning the NSA and the PRISM data collection system.

Apple Mavericks: Safari

Last year with the launch of Mountain Lion, Safari gained a unified search field – meaning that there was no longer a separate field for URLs and searches. iCloud tabs made it easier to access tabs you have open on your other Macs and iOS devices. And there was also Reading List that meant users could save web pages to read later even if they were offline.

In Mountain Lion three features could be accessed via buttons on the far left side of the Bookmarks Bar: Reading List, Bookmarks, and Top Sites. In Mavericks Safari 7's newly rechristened Favourites Bar features only two: Sidebar (which is the new home of Bookmarks, Reading List, and Shared Links) and Top Sites.

This Sidebar lives on the left side of the browser window. As before, it opens when you click the book-shaped icon on the toolbar. In previous versions of Safari clicking this book-shaped icon would replace the contents of your browser window with a bookmark editor. You can still reach that window by choosing Show Bookmarks from the menu, but this will now reveal a hierarchical view of folders (which we think is more logical than the old interface).

There is also a new Bookmarks tab in the Sidebar that gives you a one-click access to your bookmarks. This loads on the right side of the window. There's even a search box to help you find a specific bookmark. It's a much more accessible way to organize your bookmarks than the old view, but you may find that the Favourites Bar handles your most important bookmarks just fine.

The next tab in the Sidebar is for Reading List. This is similar to the Mountain Lion version, but Reading List will now let users continuously scroll between articles without having to click. When you finish a page, keep scrolling to move on to the next page in your queue.

In previous iterations of Safari, there were toolbar buttons to add stories to Reading List and add links to your Bookmarks. These buttons are no more, instead there is a + button beside the search bar – you click this to add a page to your Reading List, or click and hold it for a menu of options that allows you to add to Reading List, Top Sites, or Bookmarks. This seems much more user friendly than in Mountain Lion where the options to Add to Reading List and Bookmarks were accessed via the Share icon.

The third addition to the Sidebar is the Shared Links tab. Once you've logged in to a Twitter or LinkedIn account via the Internet Accounts (formerly Mail, Contacts and Calendars) system preference pane, any posts that contain hyperlinks are displayed in the Shared Links list. If you truly use your Twitter stream as a replacement for RSS feeds, Shared Links is a concentrated burst of Twitter linkage that eliminates the middleman.

This Shared Links sidebar shows the most recent items at the top, you'll see the avatar of the person who posted the link and an icon representing the service it came from. Click to display the post in your browser window. If you keep scrolling to the bottom of the story you'll be able to scroll right onto the next story in the list. While reading the story you can see who shared it because the post that spawned it remains at the top of the screen. There's also a Retweet button.

One issue with Shared Links is that it doesn't update as quickly as Twitter's own client, and frustratingly you can't 'pull to refresh' in order to see new posts. The only way to get new links, right now at least, is to open and close the Sidebar or Update Shared Links from the view menu. Facebook links aren't on offer.

In Mavericks you'll be able to update your profile pictures from Photo Booth and iPhoto, share to LinkedIn from Safari, see LinkedIn notifications in Notifications Center, and access all of those features via a single sign-on pane, just like with Twitter and Facebook.

Selecting the Top Sites button reveals a new Top Sites interface with a new drag-and-drop reorganization feature. It is a cleaner, flat thumbnail view similar to Chrome's startup page.

Reader gets a bit of a makeover as well, dropping the hover screen for a separate page render and cleaner text, and including the new scroll-through feature for continuous reading.

The new version of Apple's web browser boasts smoother scrolling and several under-the-hood improvements for speed and graphics acceleration, and also new security features.

The smoother scrolling is thanks to system wide Core Animation optimizations. According to Apple, Safari will offer better process per tab architecture, power savings, and background tab optimisation. The new Safari will also use less memory, and less energy, claims Apple.  

One major source of stability, speed, and energy-consumption issues in Safari isn't actually Safari itself--it's browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash. Third-party tools like ClickToPlugin have let users manage whether webpages can load those plug-ins, and in Mavericks, Safari has a similar feature built right in.

The feature lives in the Security tab of Safari's preferences window, under the Manage Website Settings button. From here you can see every browser plug-in being used by your system and a list of sites that have loaded it. You can turn access on and off on a per-site basis, as well as set a default for what happens on your first visit to a website that's trying to load a plug-in. For example, you can set YouTube to always load Flash, but all other sites to block Flash on first load.

The new Power Saver feature will sometimes keep plug-ins disabled until the user clicks on them. The Flash movie will only play if you click it, so it won't consume any additional power.

When Safari's blocking a plug-in, the browser replaces the space occupied by the plug-in with an empty box. Some sites offer non-Flash equivalents if a device (such as an iPhone or iPad) doesn't have Flash, but Safari doesn't see those if Flash is installed but disabled.

OS X Mavericks also introduces a new power-saving feature called App Nap, described below, which decides where your Mac should direct its power supply. When Safari isn't your primary program, App Nap will essentially put it to sleep, greatly reduces your Mac's power usage.

Apple also revealed that SunSpider’s metrics clock Safari’s speeds as 1.44 times faster than Chrome; JSBench logs Safari at 3.8x against Chrome’s 1.5x.

For password protection, Safari will support Mavericks' iCloud Keychain feature described above. Safari will remember your password for you, or auto-suggest a new password, and then sync it to your unique Keychain. 

Apple Mavericks: Safari Notifications

Safari Notifications is another new feature in Mavericks that will bring content from your favourite websites to your desktop without you even having Safari open. 

Safari Notifications will allow web developers to deliver push notifications from their web pages into Safari – the web browser doesn't even need to be open. These push notifications will appear on your Mac beside an icon for the website the notification came from.  

Apple Mavericks: features from iOS

A number of iOS apps made their way into OS X with the launch of Mountain Lion and some existing apps adopted the names of their iOS counterparts. Now two more iOS apps are making an appearance on the Mac in Mavericks: Maps and iBooks. While Mavericks still looks very much like OS X, certain in built apps have moved away from skeumorphism, as have those in iOS. For example, Calendar has lost its Corinthian leather strips in favour of a more simplified design.

Apple Mavericks: Maps 

When Apple previewed Maps at WWDC last year everyone was impressed. Unfortunately that was short lived and when Apple launched the Maps service fans greeted it with dismay. Apple CEO Tim Cook even had to issue an apology. A year later and Maps has improved (in as much as most railway stations are now visible, and Colchester is no longer under cloud.)

Mavericks brings Maps to the Mac and with it all the vector art, Yelp info and 3D Flyovers that are already part of the mobile version. Once you've planned a trip on the Mac using Maps in Maverick, you can wirelessly send it to an iPhone running iOS 7 and your device will be ready to start directing you once you leave the house.

The inclusion of Maps will mean developers can embed the maps into their Mac applications using the MapKit framework.

The new Mac Maps app lets you look up locations, see maps in 2D or 3D, view  vector map illustrations or overhead photographic views, get directions, see live traffic, just like you can in the iOS Maps app. Maps is actually a little easier to navigate than Google Maps, possibly because it’s a native app and can take advantage of the trackpad in way that Google Maps can’t. 

Apple Mavericks: iBooks

iBooks has come to the Mac, despite Apple's spat with the Department of Justice over price fixing on the iBookstore. Apple hasn't steered clear of eBooks in Mavericks and as a result your whole iBooks library will be available on your Mac as well as your iPad and iPhone. Not are you be able to access and read your iBooks library on your Mac, your place in the book as well as and notes and bookmarks will sync across all your devices.

iBooks has also ditched its skeumorphism in iOS 7, and in the Mac version adopts the new simpler interface. The Mac app also features a night mode for reading. And for students, the Mac app will feature study cards that can be flipped through.

You can browse the entire iBookstore, download books, and read them on your Mac.

While staring at a computer screen isn't the most exciting way to read a book, many of us read quite a lot in this way already when we are browsing the internet. We imagine students and teachers will love being able to skip the book bag in lieu of a laptop packed full of textbooks, plus note-taking, highlighting, and study cards are all built into the application. You can even have multiple books open at once, and there is the added bonus that these can include iBooks Author-created textbooks. Users can copy and paste text from a text book, for example. 

Apple Mavericks: Notifications 

We first got Notifications on the Mac with the release of OS X Mountain Lion in 2012. Like Notifications in iOS, Notification Centre on the Mac will alert you when something happens, such as you get a iMessage, a friend comments on a post in Facebook or Twitter, or your computer requires an update.

While Notifications on iOS can be useful, for some Notifications on the Mac are more of an annoyance – the 'Update your Mac' warnings that we can't just cancel, for example, frustrates us. Ok, we need to update our Mac, just not this minute!

In Mavericks Notification Centre becomes a bit more useful and a bit less intrusive. Pre Mavericks the  Notification merely notifies you, with Mavericks you can respond to the notification from the notification bubble itself.

When you receive a message in Messages, for example, you can reply directly from the bubble: Click on the Reply button, and the bubble expands to reveal a text area. Type a reply and press Return to send it

Similarly, with Mail you will be able to reply directly from the notification bubble, or opt to delete the message you’ve just received. FaceTime calls are also heralded in a notification and you can answer or decline from the notification itself.

In a way that may address, or amplify, our annoyance with Notifications telling us that our system requires an update, Mavericks has an option that will allow it to automatically update your Mac App Store apps. As a result, Notification Center in Mavericks will alert you about apps that have been updated, and warn you if an update requires you to quit an app or restart. We're most excited about the Later button that allows you to set when Notification Center will bug you again about installing that update.

Also new to Notification Centre are warnings about a dying battery, a failed Time Machine backup, and ejected disks that would previously have spawned a big warning dialog box instead create a Notification Center bubble.

When you wake your Mac from sleep it will catch up on everything and notify you about what you missed while it was asleep. We are slightly wary of the way that the newly awakened Mac it will show the Notifications you missed. We can't help but think this could be a security hazard – a stranger could see email alerts and so on without having to enter a password. 

Apple Mavericks: Calendar 

As expected Calendar has been revamped with a new look and feel. Calendar was one app that was pulled up as an example of the hated skeuomorphism. Apple's calendaring app has ditched the faux leather and stitching effects and reverted to grey toolbars and windows that are more akin to iCal.

Along with a new look, Calendar now suggests locations nearby when you schedule lunch, and it will even give you weather for that location. Calendar will even determine travel time based on current driving directions, and you can set it to notify you when you need to leave. Who needs a PA?

You'll also be able to connect the program to Facebook and see location and weather data for any event.

You will be able to change the range of weekly and monthly views using a two-finger scroll. Swipe slowly with two fingers from left to right to advance the view by individual days; a two-finger scroll upward in month view will, similarly, let you scroll week by week; and a fast two-finger swipe from right to left in the week view will advance you to the next week.

The new Month view offers continuous scrolling, and locations will now include suggestion and auto completion capabilities - start typing, and Calendar will offer up possible locations based on your keywords.

Calendar's event inspector has had a revamp. You can allocate travel time (not time travel) to an event. Unfortunately in our testing we were unable to get our Google calendar to display that information though.

The location field is tied to Apple Maps (described in more detail above), so it will display map information. It will use your locations to calculate travel time – of course this isn't always accurate. 

Apple Mavericks: Mail 

Mail has had a less noticeable update, the biggest difference is that it's faster. Everything opens quickly now and scrolls smoothly.

Apple Mavericks: Dictation

Mountain Lion introduced built in Dictation, but notably absent during the keynote was any mention of dictation improvements or Siri on the Mac. 

Dictation remains in Mavericks, but you can download a 780MB Enhanced Dictation package that displays the words you’re saying more or less as you’re saying them, in the style of third-party dictation products such as Dragon Dictation from Nuance (we hope rumours that Apple has ended it's partnership with Nuance don't turn out to be true).

Apple's dictation doesn't offer corrections or individual calibration like Dragon, but this new enhanced version is much more usable than it was. Seeing the words appear on screen helps a lot. 

Apple Mavericks Advanced technologies

Apple has introduced a number of new technologies in Mac OS Mavericks that will address responsiveness and battery life. Mavericks promises to introduce a few interesting technologies aimed at making MacBooks more energy-efficient, thereby extending battery life. That’s an awfully hard thing to test on prerelease software, however we're encouraged by Apple's attempts with features such as App Nap which will regulate apps that are out of sight to stop them draining batteries and resources while you aren't using them. 

Apple Mavericks: App Nap  

The first of these new battery life-preserving features is called App Nap. This simply causes apps you're not actively using to receive less of the system's attention, reducing their power demands in the process. When an app's windows are invisible and the app is not playing back audio, it enters 'nap mode', at which point three things happen: First, its priority is reduced, decreasing the amount of active execution time that the CPU dedicates to it; second, its ability to access devices, such as the hard disk or the network, is throttled, limiting the power drain caused by input/output operations; and third, the app's timers are fired less frequently, causing it to become active only after longer intervals.

Obviously, not all apps can work under these conditions. It would be absurd to be forced to, say, keep QuickTime Player in the foreground while it's encoding a video just to prevent it from being put into power-saving mode. For this reason, Mavericks allows individual programs to opt out of App Nap as needed.

Apple says that App Nap can reduces CPU utilisation by up to 72%. If like us you've experienced a Flash ad in Safari grabbing a load of your CPU in the background while you are working in another application, you may be eager to take advantage of this new feature, which will effectively put Safari to sleep while you aren't using it.

Together, these techniques greatly reduce the demands that an inactive app makes on the system, which significantly reduces its power consumption. A collateral benefit is that more of the computer's capacity is reserved for the currently active app, which becomes more responsive as a result.

Speaking of power-consumption, Apple is making this information available via a drop-down menu under the Battery icon in the menu bar. You will see a list of currently running applications that are "using significant energy". If this reminds you of the Activity Monitor utility, that now offers a new Energy tab that shows you the energy impact of all the currently running processes on your Mac, plus historical data going back several hours.

If you need to get the most out of your battery, it’s a great way to see what apps you might want to quit. 

Apple Mavericks Compressed memory

Another new technology in Mavericks is Compressed Memory. RAM is always a precious resource. Because every app needs it, and because it needs to be very fast, having plenty of memory available is often crucial to ensuring optimum system performance. In fact, RAM is so important that most operating systems extend a computer's hardwired memory by storing it on the hard drive as needed. This virtual memory, as it's called, ensures a nearly unlimited supply of memory, but at the cost of increased hard-disk activity and reduced performance.

However, an application might not be actively be using all the memory that's being hijacked by it. With this new Compressed Memory technique Apple can compress the portions of RAM that, though nominally in use, are not actively employed by any app. Doing this increases the free memory available to the system without requiring disk swapping, and because the algorithm used to compress the memory is very efficient, this process is much faster than traditional disk swapping. In simple terms, Apple can compress the inactive memory and make free space available. It also ends up saving more power by preventing the physical disk from spinning up and down continuously.

Apple claims responsive systems under load can see up to 1.4x improvements, even on SSD. It's also possible to see a 1.5x improvement on waking a system from standby, according to Apple.

Apple Mavericks: Timer Coalescing

Apple's third power-saving technique relies on the fact that almost all apps schedule tasks to occur at specific intervals in the background by using a software construct called a timer. Because apps have no way of coordinating with each other, these timers fire in an often chaotic way, continually forcing the CPU to exit power-saving mode, execute a few lines of code, and then go back to sleep.

With Mavericks's Timer Coalescing feature, when a computer is running on battery power, the operating system will automatically aggregate timers that are scheduled to fire within a short time of each other and execute them concurrently, thus reducing the number of times the system is forced to enter and exit power-saving mode and increasing the time it spends idling (during which power consumption is at a minimum).

Apple has long told developers that they shouldn't count on the absolute accuracy of a timer, noting that many external conditions, such as system load, could delay (or even accelerate) their firing in unpredictable ways. Therefore, Timer Coalescing should work right out of the box, without requiring programmers to tweak their code.

Apple Mavericks: Software Update 

Like iOS 7, Mavericks will update the apps you have bought from the Mac App Store in the background. No more checking the App Store app and pressing the Update All button; the app updates will be downloaded and installed in the background without any intervention from you.

A setting in the App Store pane of System Preferences lets you turn off automatic updating if you’re afraid that a favourite app will get an unpleasant or unwanted update

Apple Mavericks: Better battery life

As users continue the shift to more mobile devices, a renewed emphasis has turned to longer-lasting batteries. Mavericks is set on improving battery life with the new technologies described above. If you're curious about which apps are hogging the most resources, in Mavericks you can simply check the Battery Menu. There's a new section that displays which app is using the most resources; or it'll show you that all apps are using nominal power. This makes it easy to see if something you're running, but perhaps not using, is sapping your battery.

Apple Mavericks: Media Playback

Media playback has also got a few tweaks. According to Apple, iTunes will take greater advantage of the hardware acceleration provided by a Mac's GPU, reducing the amount of power needed to watch movies and play music by as much as 35 percent

Apple Mavericks: working with Haswell

The new OS X is able to take better advantage of the Haswell processor's support for firing up and boosting the clock speed of individual cores, ensuring that each core is fully utilised before a new one is brought online and allowed to eat up more power.

Apple Mavericks: system requirements

Mavericks will run on the majority of Mac desktops and notebooks that are able to handle the current OS X Mountain Lion, the only exceptions being a few pre-2009 13in MacBook Pro laptops.

Apple Mavericks price, cost, upgrade price

Mountain Lion cost £13.99. The big surprise at the announcement of Mavericks is that it is completely free! 

How can I get Mavericks now?

YOuc an download Mavericks from the Mac App Store. If you are running a Mac OS X that predates Snow Leopard you won't have the Mac App Store, but all is not lost. Apple is still selling Snow Leopard, read about how to get Snow Leopard here. 

Additional reporting and images by Jason Snell