Please be aware that the installer for OS X 10.9 Mavericks may silently and automatically uninstall from your computer Flash Player or Java. As many Desire2Learn courses include components that use Flash Player or Java, please check, and if necessary, re-install, these software packages after upgrading to Mavericks.

Apple have made OS X 10.9 Mavericks available as a free upgrade to all Apple computers running Mac OS X versions 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.7 Lion, or 10.8 Mountain Lion. The free Mavericks upgrade may be downloaded through the App Store.

This free upgrade to Mavericks is not a limited time offer, so you do not need to rush to take advantage of it. The free Mavericks upgrade will remain available in the App Store at least until Apple release the next version of OS X, probably late in 2014.

That said, if the operating system on your Apple computer has fallen several versions behind, upgrading to Mavericks will help to resolve security and software compatibility issues that result from running an outdated operating system. In particular, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and earlier suffer from security and software compatibility issues because these older revisions of Mac OS X cannot run up-to-date versions of Java.

Computers that run versions of Mac OS X older than 10.6 Snow Leopard must be upgraded to 10.6 Snow Leopard or newer before Mavericks may be downloaded and installed. Not all Apple computers meet the minimum system requirements of Mavericks.