I had some obvious reservations about it based on what was presented publicly, but I wanted to give it some time and actually use it for a while to see what was just a mistaken gut reaction and what I could get used to.
Long story short, it’s far worse than even I thought. I wish I could believe it’s just a bad joke, a prank, and we’ll get the real thing in a few months, but I just doubt it. It looks deliberate. It’s depressing.
You have to actually use it for a while to really appreciate how badly it’s broken. It’s just hard to explain otherwise – you wouldn’t believe some of it, for a start.
There may be a careful-what-you-wish-for moral here. I’ve long disagreed with Apple’s domineering focus on iOS over all else. The Mac is still what gets the work done in the end, and it’s been horribly neglected. It was a small part of why I left Apple. Yet when I look at OS X Mavericks, aside from the dumb name it is actually a very promising release. Both from an end-user and a developer perspective. I’m actually looking forward to it (but, since as noted I actually need my Mac, unlike my iOS devices, I’m not putting the beta on it).
It appears that all the Mac engineers that were stolen by iOS over the last few years were put back on the Mac, and then some. iOS 7 is superficial, crass, styleless and boring. Mavericks isn’t a correspondingly revolutionary upgrade, but it’s at least some kind of solace.
