A tablet in body, not spirit

At first glance, the Sony Vaio Tap 11 is downright attractive. The body is made of a premium-feeling soft plastic magnesium alloy while the entire front features edge-to-edge glass. It’s just 0.39 inches thick, which makes it easy to believe Sony’s claim that this is the world’s thinnest Windows 8 tablet with an Intel Core processor. It’s really thin — barely thicker than the iPhone 5S — and the difference between it and the 0.53-inch-thick Surface Pro 2 is striking.

The edges look sleek and clean, with every port hidden by plastic covers except for the power connector on the bottom-left side. The Tap 11 has plenty of ports, but mostly shrunken versions: besides the standard USB 3.0, the Tap 11 includes a mini HDMI and microSD port. It’s one of the compromises for getting so slim, though I would have much preferred the full-size versions — a bagful of adapters kind of kills the point.

A few unfortunate design decisions take away from the overall quality

The Tap 11 is sturdy and well-made, but it’s held back by a few unfortunate design decisions. All those little plastic covers protecting the ports feel flimsy and cheap, and I had a hard time snapping (or rather mushing) them back into place. The charger connector is even worse: it’s short and stubby, and never feels totally connected. This loose connection is supposedly a feature, ensuring that tripping over the cord won’t knock the device off the table, but Sony should have really gone with magnets like the Surface Pro 2 or Macbook Air. The connector is so bad, I initially thought it was broken, and there were a few times I didn’t notice it had somehow disconnected until I got a low-battery warning.

On the other hand, the Tap 11’s kickstand is fantastic — it’s easy to open and stays put at any angle from flat to about 45 degrees. The Surface Pro 2 can go a little deeper thanks to its second kickstand angle, but I liked having the freedom to make tiny adjustments to the screen. The single short leg doesn’t look as nice as the Surface’s full-width kickstand, though, and makes propping the tablet on your lap really hard. The physical glass Windows button feels nice, but is so hard to push that the entire tablet fell back every time I used it. A capacitive button, like the Surface, would have been much better.

The Tap 11’s cover attaches to the tablet using very strong magnets — they’re powerful enough that the two never separated when in my bag, yet slipping them apart was a breeze. But that’s just the problem: they slip apart.

When you pry off the cover, you’ll find a full-fledged keyboard, just like the Surface’s Type Cover, only without a way to connect at the hinge. This is an unattached, wireless keyboard that only touches the tablet when it’s not in use. This is particularly mind-boggling because the keyboard cover also serves as an external battery for the tablet, like the new Power Cover for the Surface Pro. But unlike Microsoft’s tablets, there’s no way to access that extra power unless you completely stop using the device and put the cover back on. Likewise, there’s no way to recharge the keyboard except through the tablet, so both pieces need to be sandwiched together and plugged in for the keyboard to charge. If the keyboard battery dies, you’re done using it until you can stop using the tablet altogether for a few hours.

But the most frustrating thing about the unattached keyboard is that it means you can’t use the complete unit on your lap. If I didn’t have a table to use, I had no choice but to use the device as a tablet and type on the on-screen keyboard. I also had to find a safe place for the cover, which usually ended up awkwardly stacked on the back of the tablet. I longed for the wide kickstand and magnetized cover of the Surface Pro that make lap use a little easier.

Keyboard and pen

The keyboard itself is a pleasant surprise — for the most part it feels carefully crafted to fit the needs of the Tap 11. It provides a surprisingly good typing experience, much less cramped than the Type Cover, with a moderate amount of of tactile feedback. The keys are a little mushy, but it feels more like a low-end traditional keyboard than a tablet cover with keyboard aspirations.

As is all too often the case with Windows tablets, the trackpad lets it down. It’s a tad too short and much too wide, with the cheap-feeling dotted-plastic texture of a netbook trackpad. Using it almost tickled my fingertips, which was not at all pleasant. The mouse button also needs slightly too much force to click, which was a source of consistent frustration.

I like using a stylus throughout the OS, but I wish the N-trig-powered Active Pen was more integrated into the Windows 8 experience. It feels premium and has a nice weight, but the tip is treated as a mouse cursor rather than a finger, which means that I couldn’t use it to swipe through the Windows 8 home screen or websites — I had to tap and drag on scroll bars. The Tap 11 can sense when the stylus is close, displaying a little dot on the screen, and tapping while pressing the button on the pen is an easy way to right click. But switching from the pen to my finger and back was so annoying that I mostly just ignored the stylus except when I explicitly needed it.

The stylus is clearly not a critical part of the device, either. There’s no integrated pen dock, only a hook-shaped piece of plastic that snaps onto the left side of the device though a tiny slot in the back. It looks out of place, like a last-minute solution to an ignored problem. The stylus on the Surface Pro at least attaches to the power connector; the Tap 11’s pen holder feels disjointed.

Tablet versus laptop

Despite its slim size, the Tap 11 certainly doesn’t feel like a lesser machine. Sony is using a new Haswell Y-series chip, which is specifically designed to bring notebook-level power to tablets. The Core i5-4210Y chip with 4GB of RAM in my review model made the device act and feel more like a notebook than a tablet. Like any ultrabook or convertible, it’s not a gaming PC or even really suited for heavy graphics work, but it does the basics well. It’s not perfect, though: there’s a hint of stuttering when scrolling websites or even swiping through the Start screen. The notebook is also available with a Core i3 or a Core i7 processor configuration, and has one model with the less powerful Intel Pentium 3560Y. The Pentium processor does help the Tap 11 start at $100 less than the base Surface 2 Pro, but given the i5’s limitations I’d recommend bumping up your configuration a bit.

The Tap 11 has a built-in fan for cooling, but thanks to the low-voltage chip it doesn’t seem to need it much. I never really noticed the tablet getting warm, but the fan did kick on a few times throughout my time with the device. It always happened randomly — once as I was browsing with usually power-friendly Chrome, and again inexplicably right after I turned on the notebook.

The Tap 11’s 11.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 display features Sony’s Triluminos technology, first found in its TVs before making its way into devices like the Vaio Pro and the Xperia Z Ultra. The screen looks great, with solid viewing angles and bright, accurate colors. It packs plenty of pixels, and high-resolution screens are a must on a tablet, but the Tap 11 suffers from the same resolution ailments as the 11-inch Vaio Pro — a significant part of the operating system renders way too small.

The worst offender is desktop mode, where icons and buttons are way too small to accurately tap with a finger, and even the pen gave me issues when I tried to select things like task-tray items. Websites were also small and hard to read, like The Verge, which was relegated to a narrow column in the center of the screen with plenty of empty white space on either side. This can be easily solved by adjusting the screen resolution (in the Control Panel under Appearance) but that defeats the entire point of the 1080p screen because everything looks slightly blurry. You’re left choosing between the lesser of two evils, which for me was keeping the higher resolution and relying heavily on the mouse and pen instead of touch.

I still find 16:9 to be an extremely awkward aspect ratio for a tablet. It’s fine for landscape mode, but flipping over to portrait just feels ridiculous. It’s a shame, since I tend to prefer portrait for internet browsing, but the combination of a weirdly long screen and tiny text made the experience less than ideal. This is where making a hybrid device gets really hard — 16:9 is right for laptops and wrong for large tablets, and finding the right resolution balance is hard.

For both types of devices, battery life is crucial — and doesn’t quite measure up. The Tap 11 did last almost an entire day of moderate use, only making me run for the charger for about the last hour of the day. But that’s not nearly tablet-level battery life, and can’t come close to matching some of the Haswell-powered laptops we’ve seen either. It lasted 5 hours, 42 minutes on the Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of websites and high-res images with a screen brightness of 65 percent. Unfortunately, that just doesn’t hold up to the Surface Pro 2, which lasted 7 hours, 33 minutes on a single charge. Sony might have done well to make a slightly thicker tablet in exchange for much longer battery life.

Getting started

Like Mountain Lion, Mavericks is available for download in the App Store. But unlike Mountain Lion, which cost $19.99, Mavericks is simply listed as a “free upgrade,” available to anyone currently running Snow Leopard or newer on a wide variety of machines. Once the 5.29GB download finished, it took a little less than 30 minutes for my mid-2013 13-inch Macbook Air to update, after which I was prompted for my Apple ID. Like Mountain Lion, the OS is smart enough to know if there were any incompatible apps, a nice touch that helped me know which needed to be manually updated.

Then you’re let loose in the new operating system, which pretty much feels exactly the same as the old OS, except for the new aquamarine wave desktop wallpaper.

A facelift for your dock

Apple’s Craig Federighi quipped that “no virtual cows were harmed in the making” of the new Calendar app, which is to say the gaudy fake leather and torn-paper aesthetic is completely gone. It’s a big improvement, making the interface feel much more clean and modern. It’s not exactly flat — buttons and checkboxes still have depth and shading — but it feels a lot more open. It’s also much easier to sync, share, and manage Google calendars, which means you won’t be driven to third-party options like Busycal.

Contacts and Notes also received much-needed facelifts, but little more. Contacts now looks more like an email client, with a column of names on the left and detailed information in a larger window on the right — a big improvement over past versions’ book-like design, complete with fake binding stitching. Notes has also lost its skeuomorphism, replacing the fake yellow-lined paper with a subtly-patterned off-white sheet — though it’s still just an ultra-simple app that syncs with your iPhone.

But for all the design changes, Apple forgot about the icons. The Notes icon is still a yellow legal pad, which looks odd against the improved design. As much as people disliked iOS’ new icons, there’s a certain cohesiveness about having all the styles match up. Apple’s redesigned apps should have received redesigned icons, and the result leaves things feelings slightly old-fashioned.

Most of the other core apps haven’t changed much, and Messages and Mail are more basically the same apps as ever. Instead, Apple focused this time on new apps for OS X.

The iOS ports

Apple is freeing iBooks from the iPhone and iPad and bringing it to the Mac. It’s hard to get excited about reading novels on a full-fledged laptop or iMac, but Apple’s execution is pretty much all you could ask for, with a built-in store and a really nice interface. Some may find yet another standalone store to be annoying — it might be better to have iBooks built into iTunes, but it’s nice to be only a click away from the all-important New York Times bestseller list.

Maps doesn’t need its own spot in your dock

Apple says you can swipe the trackpad to “flip” through pages, but most traces of skeuomorphism are gone — you won’t see any page-turn animations here. Instead, pages simply scroll to the left as you progress through a book. One missing action is the ability to pinch to zoom on pages, an odd omission for an interface that relies so heavily on touch and gestures. There are plenty of options that change theme and size, but the simple truth is that no matter which settings you choose, your MacBook Air will never be a Kindle Paperwhite.

It’s not the only app that feels out of place on a desktop, either. Apple Maps is a strange cross between Google Maps and Google Earth, and doesn’t seem to need its own spot in your dock. While Maps makes perfect sense on a mobile device (and has improved a lot since iOS 6), its usefulness in Mavericks is much less apparent. There’s no benefit over maps.google.com, and I can’t see anyone switching from Google’s established website to Apple’s new Maps app, regardless of how pretty it is.

Reminders is still exceedingly basic and poorly designed, just like on Mountain Lion. The main thing I wish it had is Siri, which makes it easy to set time- or location-based reminders on iOS. The mobile Reminders app is one of Apple’s most poorly designed applications, even with the iOS 7 improvements, and much of the same clunkiness has made it into the desktop version.

Everything is synced through iCloud, so if you have your phone or tablet within reach, you can dictate a reminder that will show up everywhere. In fact, iCloud is a virtual necessity with Mavericks, since SyncServices, which used to govern the syncing between devices, is now gone. You can use protocols like CardDAV and CalDAV, but iCloud is the easiest, and most integrated, solution.

Safari

Apple hasn’t tried to reinvent the game with its latest version of Safari. Instead, it’s spent the last year working to speed up the browser on every platform, and the results of that effort are noticeable. Safari feels quicker, lighter, and more responsive in Mavericks, thanks to improved JavaScript performance and memory optimization. Like Chrome, each webpage now runs as its own process, which should ensure that your entire browsing session won’t collapse if one website or plug-in becomes unresponsive.

But there’s another reason to give Safari a shot when you install Mavericks: Apple has brought some genuinely useful social integration to its browser. Once you’ve enabled your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts within OS X’s system-settings pane, a new Shared Links section — which appears both in the Safari Sidebar and alongside your Top Sites in any new tab — provides a list of everything your friends are linking to. It’s one of the best new features of the entire OS, and I started using it often. By sticking purely to tweets that contain links, it cuts down on the constant noise that can overwhelm my Twitter timeline, and I never failed to find a link that piqued my interest. And when I finished a page, I could just keep scrolling — Safari takes you straight to the next link.

All in all, Safari’s definitely worth another chance if you’ve been ignoring it in recent OS X releases. It might not totally replace Chrome’s simplicity and huge extension library, but it’s a far better, cleaner browser than it’s ever been.

iCloud Keychain

I’ve been using 1Password for years, and I don’t know what I’d do without a secure and convenient password manager. iCloud Keychain is a built-in replacement for the $50 app: it’s a system-wide password manager, complete with a secure password generator and the ability to auto-fill credit card information.

Unfortunately, the implementation just isn’t up to the standards of the third-party competition. iCloud Keychain is deeply integrated into Safari, but doesn’t do me any good for the time I spend using Chrome. I couldn’t find any way to import my information from another app, and the Keychain Access app only offered a limited feature set. It’s great to see Apple getting started with password management, but it’ll take some time before it’s ready to replace the real power-user options.

Finder tags and tabs

Apple’s Finder now has an organization system more akin to Gmail or Evernote. The oft-ignored color labels for files have been rebranded as tags, allowing users to view all files or documents within an assigned category. There are six tag colors, and users can write their own labels — with text or emoji.

The tags system works exactly as described, but it’s a hard system to push on users. If you upgrade from a previous version of OS X (rather than doing a clean install of Mavericks), all your previous labels will be automatically converted to tags, ready for sorting. But any other type of organization system needs to be built from the ground up, with each file manually selected and labeled. And even then, the only real benefit is being able to view a finder window with each of those files, which is a lot of work for something that so closely resembles a traditional file folder. A single file can have multiple tags, which is cool, but not cool enough to rethink the way you organize everything.

Once tags get integrated more deeply with other apps, then I’ll be more excited. If I could tag a file “dropbox” and have it automatically upload to my Dropbox account without moving to a different folder, then and only then would I start tagging documents.

Finder now supports tabs, too, just like major web browsers, allowing users to cut the Finder window clutter when navigating through numerous directories. Command-T opens a new Finder tab, just like Safari, or you can select New Tab in the File menu — though it’s oddly the sixth option down, and easy to miss or forget. There’s no little plus button indicating that users can even make a new tab, either, and with the same interface as Mountain Lion it’s easy to slip into old habits.

Like a browser, holding the Command button while double clicking a folder will open it in a new tab, which I liked, but there was no way to make all new Finder windows open as tabs. Whenever you open a folder from anywhere other than Finder itself, you’re stuck with a new window. The Finder should be cleaner than ever, with tabs and tags, but it’s mostly the same. And Finder’s buggy date-based organization, the missing features that have sprung a cottage industry of third-party replacements, still remain.

Behind the scenes

Last year’s Mountain Lion update gave OS X a noticeable improvement in speed and performance, flying through files and folders and waking up from sleep much more quickly. That doesn’t really leave much room for improvement, but Mavericks is able to keep up with the the previous system for the most part. One area that does leave some room for improvement is scrolling throughout the system. It feels slightly choppier, even when compared to Mountain Lion running on a mid-2012 13-inch Macbook Air. It’s a slight difference, barely noticeable, but it’s definitely not as smooth.

Initially, battery life seemed like one of the most obvious reasons to upgrade to Mavericks — just by upgrading, Apple said, your computer would instantly last longer. There are a variety of reasons, but one is particularly clever: in order to conserve power, Mavericks puts any app that’s not currently being used in slow motion mode. This is a smart move for Apple, ensuring fast performance even for users who never quit out of their apps. I didn’t really notice any tangible difference in day-to-day use, and you can disable it for any app you choose as well. Having more free memory space is worth the tradeoff, especially if Apple can translate it into better battery life.

At first, though, battery life was significantly worse with Mavericks on my mid-2013 13-inch Macbook Air. I needed to plug in the computer by mid-afternoon, whereas before the notebook would easily last well into the evening hours, even with constant use.

The Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of websites and high-res images at 65 percent screen brightness, showed the same results. The most recent 11-inch MacBook Air model, running Safari, lasted 7 hours, 57 minutes with Mavericks compared to 10 hours, 23 minutes for the same notebook before the OS upgrade. Those numbers have improved over time, but are still only slightly better than on Mountain Lion. Other publications have seen much bigger gains, and we’re still running more tests — we’ll update here as we go.

Notifications and Dictation

One of the handiest improvements in 10.9 is interactive, synced notifications, a feature sadly still missing from iOS. Users can respond to Messages directly from the notification alert, and reply to or delete emails without leaving their current app. Almost all of Apple’s apps have been updated to take advantage of the enhanced abilities, and hopefully third-party developers do the same in short order. It’s the fastest, best notification system Apple’s ever had, far better than iOS.

Mountain Lion provided a very basic way to silence notifications: a switch that turns alerts and banners off until the following day. Mavericks makes this feature actually useful by giving it the same advanced options as Do Not Disturb for iOS. It’s handy at night, and even more so if you’re just trying to get focused work done.

Multiple Displays

It’s rare for a nerdy feature like improved multiple-display support to be a major selling point for a new desktop operating system, but considering how much of a headache it’s been since Lion, there’s good reason to pay attention to the changes Apple has made here in Mavericks.

Using more than one display got complicated when Apple added virtual desktops (called “spaces”) in Leopard, as Macs could no longer simply extend the usable desktop across two monitors like Windows does. Instead, each virtual desktop was extended across both displays, leaving you with multiple pairs of extended desktops. When Apple added long-overdue support for full-screen apps in Lion, things got much worse; opening a full-screen app on your laptop would leave your external display with a useless panel of gray linen.

Mercifully, the situation is a lot better with Mavericks. The desktops on your primary display and your external display are no longer bound to each other. You can see this when you enter Mission Control: if you have five virtual desktops on your laptop, your external monitor will then show up as “Desktop 6.” And since they’re not paired together, you can switch between desktops on your primary display without changing anything on the external monitor. You also aren’t forced to have multiple virtual desktops on your external monitor anymore, and moving apps from your primary monitor to your external display is as simple as dragging it in Mission Control. (This was inexplicably impossible to do in earlier versions.) Full-screen apps now function properly as well: you can open an app in full-screen on any display, and the other monitor remains unchanged. (No more gray linen on entire displays.) And if you use two full-screen apps at the same time, it all works just as it should.

With Mavericks the menu bar is now on both displays, as it always should have been. The display in focus gets the standard menu bar, while the other monitor is left with a very transparent version. The menu bar you see corresponds with whatever app you’re using on each display; for example, it will give options for Chrome on your laptop while the menu bar on the external monitor will simultaneously offer choices for Finder. Apple’s also decided to duplicate the dock on the secondary monitor. It’s hidden, however, and you’ll have to hit the bottom of the screen with your cursor to make it appear. Unfortunately, this rarely works, and I had to tap at least twice to make it appear. More importantly, I’m not convinced that there’s a good reason to have two docks.

If you just can’t get enough displays, Mavericks lets you use a television connected to an Apple TV or another AirPlay device as an external monitor rather than just a mirrored version of the primary display. It works impressively well, though you’ll need a newer Mac (from 2011 or later) to use the feature.