OSX Mavericks installation warning

So I noticed the Free Upgrade button to replace Mountain Lion with Apple’s latest 10.9 revision of OSX. I hovered over the button a few times this week and then, last night, thought what the heck.

It initiated a 5.29GB — yes Gigabyte — download, cheerily informing me it’d take an hour and forty-five minutes to complete the task. I presumed that was the entire installation procedure, as is the case with other OS updates.

Wrong.

It rebooted and started installing, telling me that it would take a further forty-five minutes. After one more automatic reboot, it ran through the Finishing Up portion of the installation procedure which it estimated was going to take seven minutes. Turned out that was conservative at best, as the last “about a minute” took eight.

But was the result worthwhile? Though I can live without Maps and iBooks, it’s all very shiny and the Finder tabs are a great addition. It is a mite slower to bring up the Dock and I’ve seen the beach ball a fair bit more today, which is a shame. But it’s certainly not bad for nowt.

My only major gripe is that, had Apple put up a disclaimer in the opening blurb that I should set aside the best part of three hours to complete the upgrade, I may have deferred my click to a more suitable time than midnight. Lesson learned.