Apple’s OS X 10.9 – dubbed Mavericks – will arrive today and be completely free, the company has said.
The latest version of OS X will work on devices as far back as Snow Leopard, or even on an iMac bought in 2007, according to Apple’s Craig Federighi, who said the days of spending hundreds of dollars on a new OS are over.
He promised it would be a single-step upgrade, and would work on Macs running the latest Mountain Lion release.
“We’re doing free in not a small way,” he said. “Whether you have our latest release or you’re a complete laggard and you’re still on Snow Leopard, you can update.”
Federighi took to the stage to demo some of the 200 new features in the operating system, including compression tools that squeeze 6GB of data into 4GB of RAM, the ability to read iBooks on a Mac, and responding to notifications directly, without switching to a different app. It also features a new Finder that lets users apply tags to make it easier to find different documents.
Federighi also promised it would extend battery life and performance, and features improvements to multiple display support.
Federighi said Mavericks would be available to download today.
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