[NewsPoster]

Five months after launch, Mavericks has already grabbed slightly over 40 percent of all North American OS X usage, according to web traffic data from ad network Chitika. By comparison, Mountain Lion is currently sitting at just 21 percent, and took 14 months to hit a peak of 34 percent. Lion and Snow Leopard each account for 18 percent of OS X usage at present; Leopard has shrunk to one percent, and Tiger and a miscellaneous "other" category each have one percent shares.

The success of Mavericks is owed in part to the fact that it is offered free of charge, unlike its predecessors -- though the last few OS X releases were priced at such low figures ($30 and $20) that it was a trivial expense for most users. However, being free may motivate users to upgrade to Mavericks earlier than they normally would, since the only real obstacles to adoption are compatible hardware, having to upgrade to an earlier version of OS X first, or a person deciding that they don't like changes Apple has made. As more people replace older Macs, the percentage of people on the latest version of OS X is likely to grow still higher.

[The Vicar]

Usually, I'm kind of skeptical of the utility of new OS upgrades — most of the new versions of the Mac OS since, oh, 7.5 (yes, I've been using it that long... and longer, actually) tend to increase bloat without offering new features to really justify it. (Seriously, 7.1 was a gem.) But 10.9 is one of the really good ones which bump the baseline back up, like 10.3 and 8. If your Mac supports 10.9, get it — it will dramatically improve performance on the same hardware over 10.8. They could probably have supported some older Mac models with it which 10.8 wouldn't handle, given how it improves performance. The few gripes I have with 10.9 — basically all related to QuickTime in one way or another — are nowhere near serious enough to alter my opinion. And — best of all — it's free!

[kakman]

I'm a little surprised by this but maybe people using Mountain Lion were sufficiently convinced it was stable they could confidently move to Mavericks. I'm running Mountain Lion on my personal machine and think it's great - very stable and very few annoyances. I have Mavericks running on a couple of test machines (mainly testing Mav. Server) and it has been less ideal. A few little bugs and an occasional crash or hang. For the foreseeable future I'll stick with ML. I do wonder how many people simply upgrade with no concern for the consequences - they just feel the need to have the latest 'thing'.

As I look after a Mac network of close to 100 machines we need to do lengthy testing before upgrading - I wonder if most of the older systems are a reflection on that style of thinking. Server-wise we won't move from Mountain Lion any time soon - it's running pretty well.