At today’s Apple event, the company shared an update on the new Mac OS X Mavericks. The new operating system was first introduced back in June, and Apple has remained largely quiet about it since. Now it’s ready to share more about its latest desktop operating system.

Apple started out with a look at how Mavericks will help Mac users get more out of their hardware. For example, Mavericks will reportedly increase power efficiency by helping your computer get up to an hour more battery life when browsing the Web. A more impressive feature is called “Compressed Memory” which allows Mavericks to fit up to 6GB of active memory into 4GB of RAM.

Unless you have a MacBook or Mac Pro with a discrete graphics chip, you will have an Intel CPU with integrated graphics. Intel’s integrated graphics aren’t that great, but Mavericks allows the OS to get more performance out of it. It does this through a system that will automatically allocate the needed VRAM required for graphic intensive tasks. Mavericks will also utilize OpenCL to increase the graphics speed.

In terms of general software, Mavericks also has a number of new features, including file tags. These tags will allow you to create custom color-coded tags for files. For example, you can mark school project files with tags like “Mars” or “Space” to know which files correlate to which part of the project it belongs to.

Other software improvements and additions include better support for multiple displays, Apple’s infamous Maps app, iBooks including iBooks Textbooks.

On a final note, Apple announced that Mavericks will be a free download for any iMac and MacBook Pro made in 2007 onward. It will also be made available today.

[Image: Apple]