OS X Mavericks comes out today—and it’s free

Hang ten and get gnarly, dudes. OS X 10.9 Mavericks is here. Named for a totally tubular surf spot in California, the latest Apple desktop operating system will be thundering our way today. Like Lion and Mountain Lion before it, it will be available in the Mac App Store. Upgraders can download the software for no cost.

The release was announced as part of Apple's October 22 press event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California. The new operating system brings a lot of under the hood changes, including a fix for OS X multi-monitor support. Another hotly anticipated feature is Finder Tabs, which takes a page from tabbed Web browser behavior and should allow users more flexibility when managing files. Visually, the new operating system has banished some of the more despised skeuomorphic elements that have crept onto the desktop over time. Apple's PR images show that things like iCal's leather stitching have been excised, leaving many applications less "touchable" but also less visually cluttered.

Efficient resource usage is also a major theme in the updated operating system. Apple's computer sales are dominated by portables, and Mavericks includes a great number of named features built to reduce the amount of power a Mac consumes and keep it running longer. In fact, Apple says that merely by installing Mavericks, Haswell-equipped Mac portables like the Macbook Air will gain at least an extra hour of battery life. Additionally, Mavericks gets a little smarter about memory management, compressing applications in memory and dynamically allocating memory to the GPU based on performance requirements.

It's not spoiling anything to say that our own John Siracusa has also been hard at work on the latest in his long string of highly anticipated, novel-length operating system reviews. You can read his epic thoughts on OS X Mavericks right here.

Mavericks is available right now—the download appears to have gone live at about 12:00 PT, though it might not be showing up as a featured item yet. You can get your electronic fingers on it by opening the Mac App Store application and searching for "Mavericks."