With yesterday’s new developer preview of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Apple has showed off a lot of great new features for the Mac Operating System. While the developer preview is easily installable and usable for most who attempt the process, however, some users of 2012 iMacs (myself included) are unable to proceed with the install.
I’ve confirmed this on three late 2012 iMac systems that I have access to, and have confirmed the issue with other iMac users as well.. After downloading the Mavericks installer from the Mac App Store and launching it, the iMac reboots exactly as expected – but instead of launching into the Mavericks installer, user are instead presented with a grey “cancel” logo on a white background. Notably, this is the same error that users might encounter if they try to install an older version of OS X on a newer Mac that doesn’t have the necessary drivers to support the older OS X installer.
Even worse, the only way to bring the target partition on your Mac back to a usable state is to do a complete restore from backup – otherwise it keeps attempting and failing to boot into the Mavericks installer. It’s understandable that this is a beta, and that users accept the risks of attempting to install and use it for any purpose, but it is a disheartening situation nonetheless.
This is likely due to an early glitch in the beta that Apple will probably fix for the second developer preview – but it nevertheless remains extremely frustrating for developers who have paid $99 for access into the Mac Developer Program, only to find that they cannot install or use the new Mavericks preview. Notably, I was able to install the preview on a 2012 Mac Mini successfully.
Have any of you experienced this issue? Let us know! We’ve reached out to Apple’s Developer Support to see if they can provide a solution.
