The nightmare of downloading OS X Mavericks

I’ve been running OS X Mavericks on both my home and work laptops since beta 3 or so. And when Apple released it to the public of course I wanted to upgrade both my computers as soon as possible. Sadly you can’t simply upgrade from GM, you have to download the entire 5.3 GB installer file and go through the entire 45 minute install process. Not a huge problem, so I went ahead and did all this at home without running into any problems.

Since I didn’t really want to download the entire 5.3 gigabytes again at work, I wanted to create an USB installer at home. Problem number one: the Mavericks installer removed itself from my drive after the upgrade was complete. Without ever asking me anything.

Well, crap. So I had to download the installer at work after all. Problem number two: the download simply didn’t want to start, no matter how many times I tried, restarted the App Store or even OS X. In the mean time one of my colleagues downloaded the installer again for me and created an USB disk using DiskMaker X. Problem number three: the Mavericks installer always gave an “unknown error” as soon as it wanted to start the install process. Probably a problem with DiskMaker X, so I focused again on trying to download the installer from the App Store myself.

Eventually I came across the fix and the download started. Problem number four: when it got to 99%, it told me there was an error with the download and simply stopped. You would think that perhaps I could resume the download, finish the last 1% but nope.. had to start all over again.

After cursing a bit, I started the download and once it got to 90% I plugged in my USB drive (which contains the non-working Mavericks installer). And behold problems number five: the App Store decided it no longer needed to download the Mavericks installer and stopped it.

So after downloading Mavericks for the fourth time the installer popped up. I still wanted to create an USB install disk, so I closed to installer. And guess what? Problem number six: the installer was nowhere to be found on my drive. It’s supposed to be in the /Application folder, but nope, nothing.

So here I am, deciding if I should download from scratch, again. If it simply never deleted the installer from my home computer in the first place I would never have been in this position. Instead I’ve now downloaded the installer four times and wasted more than 20 GB. Apple might have unlimited bandwidth, but it’s a very different story here in Iceland where everything has monthly download caps.

Crap.