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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

The Tech Deck

Upgrading your Mac to Mavericks

Goodbye cat land (Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Garfield, Lion, Mountain Lion, etc.), hello California (pronounced kal-ee-four-knee-uhhh).

Today we're going to update my personal 11" Macbook Air to Mavericks, the newest OS from Apple. They released it a few days ago, but only n00bs upgrade the day of, instead waiting a day or two for the other impatient fanbois to spot the gotchas. (If you are one of the early-upgraders, let me know how that went.)

Apple is giving the OS away for free (that sound you hear is a thousand Redmond accountants hissing), and since I was lazy and never updated my Lion machine to Mountain Lion, I get to skip versions. The madness!

More after the break >>

Before I get started, I make sure I have done the following best practices:

  1. Power cord. Don't want to have your computer bork in the middle of an OS upgrade when your battery dies.
  2. Backups. Backups? We don't need no stinking backups. I use Dropbox for all my files. But srsly, backup anything you don't want sent to /dev/null.
  3. A good internet connection. I do not want to wait 11.5 hours to download the software/
  4. HD space. I have a puny SSD card, so it's time to delete all the videos and stuff I don't need anymore. I don't know how much disk space I actually need, but I'm guessing that 10GB is a safe bet.

Open the App store app (where your app can download apps), and you'll see Mavericks is the big banner promotion. Click that. There's the "download" button, which you should also click.

After confirming your Apple ID and agreeing that you have read the Terms and Conditions (who are we kidding?), Mavericks will start downloading. Once that's done, you'll get the install & restart screen.

And then the wait.

The machine restarts and...

OSX MAVERICKS FROWNY FACE OF DOOM

ZOMG. What is that?

What the what is this?

That can't be good. I hope this isn't serious. What does my screen look like now?

Oh, it's pixellated and wonky

What did it do to my monitor?! It's all pixellated and jaggedy.

OSX Mavericks screen display bug

Closeup:

Looks like the computer is having color display issues. That's a problem. I have AppleCare, so it's not a deal breaker, but this isn't the droid I was looking for.

At this point, I have two options:

  1. I can turn my machine off and on.
  2. I can call tech support who will suggest that I turn my machine off and on.

How about turning my machine off and on?

Works. No more weirdness.

So that's it. I updated my Mac. So far so good. I'll spend some time with the new software and follow up with another post griping about how app was broken. (So far, I know my Clusters app is incompatible, and I have a warning screen telling me that a Java runtime is required to start Adobe Illustrator. Adobe, how could you?)

Let me know if you experienced any upgrading weirdness.



The Tech Deck