Installing OS X Mavericks and the New (and Free) Apple Apps.
(This is English translation from the article below.)
The new OS X, Mavericks, came out this week. Itโs free. Also, iWork and iLife are all free. There never has been the perfect time to buy a Mac, also thanks to the hardware refreshes to the MacBook Pros. (If the high-performance, glorified trash can is your thing, you have to wait until December.)
However, there has been some confusions on downloading these new stuffs. Firstly, Appleโs servers are still not in good condition thanks to the download traffic jam of Mavericks, which is five times as big as iOS 7 (I was still reading some tweets about getting the infamous โAn error occurredโ error, which Iโll elaborate in a bitโฆ), and it takes quite some time for Apple to find out if youโre eligible for free apps. (Mind you, this free offer goes to Macs purchased after October 1.) Making things even more complicated, with the Mavericks release, Apple decided to move the retail licenses of apps such as iWork, iLife, and Aperture onto the Mac App Store.
So here comes my conundrums: first, I had purchased retail licenses for iWork โ09 (which cost $79 at the time) and Aperture 3 (which cost $199), and Apple was to offer a license change to those apps by the means of the new versions of iWork and 3.5 update to Aperture. Making things worse, I was using GM1 version of Mavericks (build number 13A598), and Apple suddenly updated that to the GM2 (13A603) and made that as the final version. That screwed up the whole update process. (Now Apple thinks the final version as the 10.9, which it should naturally.) I had already bought the new Pages on the App Store, so while I thought about the refund, but I decided to leave it alone and pursue the App Store license of other apps.
Which meant first, I had to update Mavericks. The problem was, App Store thought I was already rocking the final version of Mavericks, and blocked the download on the App Store. So I had to fool the App Store as if I was using Mountain Lion (with a system file tweak shown in this Korean blog). However, as I was downloading Mavericks, the first โAn error occurredโ error popped up. At that time, I thought this was due to the fact that Apple somehow detected that I was fooling the Store (which turned out to be very wrong). So, I decided to downgrade to Mountain Lion using the USB drive that I made as a backup, and then upgrade back to Mavericks. In the middle of doing that, I also decided to have a fresh reset on my OS X minus few crucial files, after five and half years of living under the same Time Machine backup. (I made 270GB of free space. The only possible explanation is all those backups for my iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad over the course of five years, which is now all governed by iCloud.)
So I downgraded to Mountain Lion (I suddenly remembered that I hadnโt backed up the iTunes Library file, which I pulled out manually from Time Machine drive), and started downloading Mavericks. Then, โAn error occurred.โ I try it again. โAn error occurred.โ
I googled the issue, and I found the source of the problem: I was doing this on October 24, which was two full days after the Mavericks release, and people were still getting download errors due to congested traffic. Or Apple servers were malfunctioning, since the download speed was the typical Apple server speed. The suggestion from the site above (which involved clicking on the unfinished download file to resume the download, not reset the whole thing) did not work, either. I was frantically clicking on retry more than a dozen times, and finally, Mavericks was downloaded without a single cough of error.
So I installed Mavericks (which was painless), copied some crucial files I backed up on external drive, then I got an update notification for an update to Aperture. As I was doing that, I got the update for Numbers and Keynote, which also moved my license to the App Store. It was over.
Since I reset every setting as well (Somehow it got Accounts info from somewhere. iCloud?), the trackpad setting also changed from the config from five years ago to the new one. It was jarring at first, but now it feels more comfortable and productive. It felt really nice after having a fresh start after five years, and also moving the app licenses to the App Store was a huge thing for me since it was a small stick to my eyes.
Now, whereโs my shiny new Aperture 4, Apple?