Apple's new OS X Mavericks will be free
Apple announced Tuesday its new desktop operating system OS X Mavericks will be released for free.
Apple's senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi took the stage at an Apple event in San Francisco to make the announcement and give a live demonstration of the OS in action.
Federighi took the opportunity to reiterate some of OS X Mavericks' features, including Apple Maps, iBooks, tags and memory compression.
The new operating system features finder tabs, tags and multiple displays. Finder now has tabs for easier multitasking. Anything can be tagged anywhere in OSX and be found through a search in Finder. Multiple displays makes using more than one screen more intuitive by having the dock appear in the active screen.
A feature called App Nap directs power to apps that need it and Timer Coalescing monitors the CPU's activity.
Apple is deepening the integration between its desktop and mobile software. OS X Mavericks is also getting iCloud Keychain for storing passwords; Calendar update with continuous scrolling; and iBooks.
Notifications will send push notifications, iMessages and IMs to the desktop. Maps is also coming to OS X Mavericks with features like street maps 3D flyover, POI search, info cards and turn-by-turn directions.
Apple first announced OS X Mavericks at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June. OS X Mavericks is available for download now at the Mac Store.
