Mavericks - minor enhancement or total re-write ?

Question

I'm confused. Moving from 10.8 to 10.9 would indicate a minor update, but the massive amount of problems being reported from BlueTooth through the Gmail Emails maked me wonder what on earth has been changed. I mean what was wrong with the old email.
As a developer myself I would have assumed that you take something which is tried and tested and working well and just extend it - but the reports I'm reading imply that huge swaiths of logic and functionality have been re-written from scratch - why ? Has someone lost the origin source code ? Are they trying to avoid a legal copyright issue - what gives. I've been with OSX for 4 years now and had no worries about the upgrade to Mavericks because of the excellent track record of quality control in the past. Now I"m shocked and loosing confidence in the apple infrastructure - this is a major disaster.
I spoke to Apple Care yesterday after the Apple Mail update as I was still having weird problems with the Mail application and my Gmail accounts and was very dissapointed that the person I was chatting to was completely unaware of the widely publicised problems. Eventually I had to paste links to their own website describing the problem and the update.
So - can anyone "in the know" describe what's going on here. Had I know the scope of the changes I would have definately not upgraded. For me to go back to Mountain Lion is a 2-3 day job as I have a complicated development enviroment and a number of non Apple Store installs to re-apply.
Today I also had a grey screen appear for no apparent reason. Thought the machine had crashed, but pressing the power button resulted in a pop-up dialog appearing and asking me if I would like to shutdown or reboot.
Sigh.....
So sad.
Problems I've had myself.
Finder crashing - usually during shutdown
Bluetooth for mouse and tethering - hopeless and unusable.
Grey screens
Lots of app updates for incompatibilites - including having to pay for OSX Server new version which was not publicised until it was too late
Gmail messages - well documented - for me I keep getting messages which have been read reappearing as unread.
Mailbox Behavoir preferences can't be saved (you click save but the changes dont keep)
Mailbox accounts duplicated across devices due to iCloud Sync
Event log full of crash and hang messages
I feel sorry for the people who have had their time machine backups wiped due to incompatibilies with external drives.
I use carbon copy to clone my disk, but I don't have an ML backup to restore from now.
In summary this comes across as a huge change rather than a minor tweak/enhancement.
I'd love to have access to an official know bug list to see what they are likely to work ok. You can read the forums yes - but given my disappointing conversation with Apple Care this is no guarantee that the problem has found it's way back to the people who can fix it.

Answer 1

DaveGarratt wrote:
I'm confused. Moving from 10.8 to 10.9 would indicate a minor update,
No. 10.8 to 10.8.1  would indicate a minor update as would 10.8.1 to 10.8.2. Mavericks was a completely upgraded system. Thus the diffent name and different OSX no. 10.9 It was clearly advertiised as a new operating system on the download site of the Ap Store. I have had no issues with it all on my 5 Macs. Most of what you are reading is caused by failing hardware or Incompatable third party Apps. If bugs arise in this first release, they will be addressed as they have always been.