Now that I had some free time (and a backup drive within arm’s reach), I finally upgraded my laptop to OS X Mavericks. And it’s….eh. Everything works fine and I haven’t really had any problems so far, but not many of the new features really excite me that much. Better social integration only really matters if you’re a social person. I’d still rather go to the Google Maps site than use an Apple Maps app. I don’t use Safari, so I haven’t even checked its new features. And it’ll take a while before I can really tell how much the battery life improves. The tabs in Finder are nice, though.
The one other thing that does look interesting is iBooks. Not so much for the Apple book store, but just as a convenient place to organize and read stuff like the books I’ve bought from O’Reilly or Gumroad, since you can import your own files. I’m sure there are a dozen third-party apps that could do the same thing, but I’m lazy and iBooks was just one click away… :) It supports PDF and EPUB, but it uses different apps to view each type and it’s not really clear which is preferable yet. I’ll have to play with it a bit more.
So, not a great upgrade, but not a bad one either, and it was free after all.