OS X Mountain Lion Out Tomorrow

Apple revealed in its third quarter earnings release today that OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion will be released tomorrow, July 25th. "As a quick recap, the $19.99 software update brings a handful of iOS features to Macs, including the notes and reminders apps. It adds a few other things, like Twitter integration, Apple's Game Center and iMessage services. There's also a new security feature called Gatekeeper, designed to fend off malware by controlling what applications can and cannot be installed." The release also noted that iOS 6 will be coming out this fall, and that the company sold 17 million iPads in the third quarter, up 84% from sales in the third quarter of last year.

Comments

Wifi

[Anonymous Coward]

Will they finally fix their WiFi woes?? My brand new macbook pro drops connections more than I drop the end of

Re:Wifi

[Lumpy]

get your hardware fixed. I dont have that problem on my horribly old 2009 17" macbook pro or the out of date 2011 13" macbook pro my wife has.

The only time I experienced that ws with a piece of crap Wireless router from belkin. Ripping it off the wall and smashing it solved the problem, well after it was replaced with a netgear.

Re:Wifi

[Jeppe Salvesen]

After upgrading to Lion, my 2008 iMac suddenly started dropping the wifi connection periodically, while my 2010 MacBook Air is rock stable. Anyhow, that's my experience. Anyhow, we'll need a bigger sample in order to determine if Macs really have more wifi-issues than Windows computers. Statistics matters.

Re:Wifi

[Just Some Guy]

Are you telling me the GP paid a not-insignificant markup for a luxury, premium laptop which proponents will consistently reiterate is made of superior parts and Just Works(c), and it's flawed?

In related news, there's a BMW repair shop near my house. There's a difference between "well made" and "magically impervious to any kind of damage or defect imaginable".

Re:Wifi

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Rubbish. I've routinely been able to connect to wireless networks with my various MacBooks over the years whilst PC using friends were struggling.

I wasn't very specific in my original post, but there are known issues with Apple's 802.1x authenticator code. WPA Enterprise is less commonly used with Macs than consumer-level wifi, which is probably why our experiences are so different. For what it's worth, I've never had a problem using wifi anywhere where there was WEP/WPA-PSK security (or no security). I'm perfectly happy with the MBP I use for work, as are thousands of others who use them at my company. And the WPA supplicant in Lion works better than SL, but isn't quite 100% yet.

Mac vs. the Linux Desktop

[kthreadd]

We keep replacing our desktop environment every once in a while, now recently with Unity/GNOME3. Have we actually gone anywhere? At the same time OS X is in many ways very similar to the original Mac interface almost 30 years ago.

Can the Linux desktop survive that long?

Re:Mac vs. the Linux Desktop

[jbolden]

Have we actually gone anywhere?

Yeah. When I started using Linux in 1995 it was rather challenging to get X to run at all. To get a good functioning X people often had to buy a commercial X server. There were 0 GUIs. Microsoft announced they would not be porting their IE for Unix to Linux and people were upset. There were real questions as to why would anyone use Linux when for not much more money you could get an SGI or Sun workstation, there were also alternatives like SCO on x86 and AIX.

Today there exist 2 major GUIs with large suites of applications. There exists a full office productivity suite which is capable of stealing market share from Microsoft Office, on the Windows platform. With the exception of Trident all the major browser engines are either open source of available for LInux. The server space is dominated by Linux and Linux desktops play an important role in server development. SGI, Sun and SCO are all dead, AIX is weak. No one who primarily wants a Unix workstation goes anywhere else but Linux. The Linux kernel is arguably the most advanced kernel available.

That's real progress. Maybe not enough to beat Windows and OSX but there is no question there has been progress.

Re:Mac vs. the Linux Desktop

[DdJ]

You might be replacing your DE as often as you change your underwear, but not all of us are doing so. My favorite DE is older than OSX.

So's mine, even though it basically is OSX.

Ever since about 1989 or so, my favorite GUI environment has been NeXTstep. My employer got prerelease access (since we're Carnegie Mellon, where the Mach kernel came from), and it's essentially been my favorite desktop environment since version 0.8 or so, back when I taught myself Objective-C programming on it.

I pretty much hated "classic" MacOS and didn't like most Apple products except HyperCard and the Newton, right up until Apple required NeXT. So much of what was great back then is still here. I wish they'd managed to keep the old application remote display mechanism (NXHOST =~ DISPLAY), but the unreasonably-licensed Adobe Display PostScript pretty much put an end to that... alas.

If Apple screws it up too much (and signs are that they might, though I don't think they have yet), well, I'll probably end up switching to Ubuntu with GNUstep.

Re:Can't complain...

[uglyduckling]

There's a simple lock and unlock function for system preferences panes. So, for instance, you could have GateKeeper turned on for the family Mac, which would give the kids the freedom to install any software that is signed, but you would need the admin password to install unsigned software. It's a step up from the admin-only software install approach.

Out of cats

[Chemisor]

What will they name releases when they run out of cats? I mean, "10.10 Housecat" just doesn't sound like a product people would be enthusiastic about...

Re:Out of cats

[prestonmichaelh]

Pick a name from this chart? http://xkcd.com/1056/

Re:Out of cats

[bill_mcgonigle]

I dunno, but for the 40th Anniversary of Apple (2016) I'm betting they put out a Cougar release.

Re:GateKeeper eh

[MoronGames]

...and that's a good thing for most users. Consider this: Most users don't care about whether or not they can run unsigned software. Many of those users don't know how to install software that they can't buy from a store, or through something like an app store (since they now know about app stores from smart phones and Apple pushing their app store on Macintoshes.) These people are not going to go poking around online to try to find software to install. Many of them wouldn't know how to install software that they did download! The walled garden is arguably better for these people. Want to extend your computer's functionality? Go on the App Store and download a new piece of software by clicking install and putting in your password.

As long as Apple keeps it simple enough for people who know what they're doing to install and use software outside of the Mac App Store, it's my opinion that an OS X "walled garden" is a hugely excellent feature for the majority of users.

MOUNTAIN LION IS OUT?!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I didn't even suspect it had teh gay!

Re:designed to fend off malware

[93 Escort Wagon]

In other words, Apple will control what third party software you're allowed to install on your own machine.

If you don't like it, uncheck the box and install anything you wish. That's what I'll be doing.

For the typical home user, though, I think it's a reasonable limitation that's not likely to impact what they can do *at all*.

Re:ML drops support for my perfectly capable Mac P

[kthreadd]

The machine is 64 bit but some components aren't.

Re:GateKeeper eh

[tlhIngan]

Sounds like the beginning of the iOS walled garden for OSX

There are three settings to Gatekeeper.

First is the walled garden - Mac App Store apps *only*.

Second is the default secure - Mac App Store apps AND verified developer ID signed apps. The latter is a program where developers buy a signing cert from Apple, then the developer can sign anything with it. Just like the current code signing certificate Microsoft has, except the OS enforces the signature.

Third is the "full open" mode - any valid executable can run. Developers probably will use this mode to avoid needing to get a signing certificate (and we'd hope developers are smart enough to not click on any random executable that comes their way...).

The second is default because there are a whole class of programs that cannot work under the Mac App Store. First - the Mac App Store has a limit of $999.99 as the maximum price - some programs cost more than that (e.g., AutoCAD 2012 vs. AutoCAD 2012LE (which IS on the Mac App Store)). Second - big names don't want to be subject to the Mac App Store terms - they want to do things their own way. You know, a little company called Adobe who makes a little-used program call Photoshop. Or a tiny Washington-based company who makes an insignificant productivity suite they called Office.

Finally, another reason is utilities - disk defragmenters, disk repair tools, data recovery suites, even things like hardware drivers cannot be done via the Mac App Store - they must be distributed separately.

Hell, developers cannot distribute a DEMO version of their app via Mac App Store - they have to host those themselves.

I think for a good 60% of users, the Mac App Store is all they need. For another 35% the default setting is perfect, and the last 5% are hopefully smart enough to be the ones to turn it off completely and not do stupid things.

As for the signing requirement - well, a developer can't sign any old binary as their name is attached to it. If they sign some malware, it won't be long until said certificate is revoked by Apple and all apps signed by that developer stop working (until overridden by the last option, or they approve the app again). So developers have an interest in not signing everything.

Heck, Firefox did the smart thing and got TWO certificates - release builds are signed with one, and nightly builds and such are auto-signed with the other. This prevents the revokation of one key from disrupting firefox development.

Re:ML drops support for my perfectly capable Mac P

[slimjim8094]

See, here's the thing you're missing. You have a fully functional machine which is running an OS more than 5 years newer than it, and it's doing it just fine. Lion will continue to work on it and be patched for the foreseeable future, and most software will run on it as well. What obligation does Apple have towards you? Did they sell you a machine that promised more than 5 years of updates? Or did they promise EFI64, which is what's needed to boot ML? (hint: they didn't). They sold you a 64-bit workstation, and you got a 64-bit workstation, and you've had no trouble upgrading the OS twice.

Via hacks and other messy stuff, you might be able to get it to work, and I expect directions will be available shortly and relatively straightforward, but it's hard to blame Apple for not wanting to mess up the experience. They seem happy to allow "hacks" to extend their product's functionality, but they're not really the kind of company to give you enough rope to hang yourself with, which is how they keep their reputation that anything "Apple-sanctioned" "just works"