OS X Mountain Lion Review

John Siracusa at Ars Technica has published a lengthy and detailed review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. (Lengthy enough that the review garnered a review of its own.) Siracusa methodically goes through all of the changes in the new version, covering everything from the minor new features to the overarching goals. Quoting: "Despite the oft-cited prediction that Mac will eventually be subsumed by iOS, that's not what's happening here. Apple is determined to bring the benefits of iOS to the Mac, but it's equally determined to do so in a way that preserves the strengths of the Mac platform. Where we Mac nerds go wrong is in mistaking traditions for strengths. Loss aversion is alive and well in the Mac community; with each 'feature' removed and each decision point eliminated from our favorite OS, our tendency is to focus heavily on what's been lost, sometimes blinding ourselves to the gains. But the larger problem is that losses and gains are context-dependent. A person who never uses a feature will not miss it when it's gone. We all pay lip service to the idea that most users never change the default settings in software, but we rarely follow this through to its logical conclusion. The fact is, we are not the center of the market, and haven't been for a long time. Three decades ago, the personal computer industry was built on the backs of technology enthusiasts. Every product, every ad was created to please us. No longer. Technology must now work for everyone, not just 'computing enthusiasts.'" A somewhat briefer review is available at ComputerWorld, and there's a quick one from John Gruber.

Comments

There's some madness here, for sure

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I left the commercial software behind so many years ago. Let us contrast OS X, Windows and Linux+GNOME. All have recently succumbed, or will soon, to tablet madness.

I'd buy that in the case of Win8, and maybe Gnome 3, but not OS X. Apple already owns the most successful tablet OS in the business. OS X has borrowed a few iOS touches, mostly aesthetic [eg superficial and easily ignored] ones, but has not succumbed to "tablet madness" the way Microsoft did. Probably because Apple was the only OS vendor that didn't have an "Oh-shit-we-need-our-own-iPad-thing" reaction.

OS X still has a Desktop metaphor.
Still has a user-accessible filesystem.
Still has windows and a menu bar.
Doesn't even have native touch-screen support at all

And these are not accidents, or features that Apple forgot to cover up or replace with tablet-like equivalents. They're there because Apple was smart enough to understand the differences between tablets and traditional PCs, and had enough foresight to come up with a separate OS for the former five years ago.

Re:There's some madness here, for sure

[Anonymous Coward]

For all the arguing we do about Apple, there are a few things I think we can agree on with regard to their last decade:

They plan ahead.

Everything they do is for a reason consistent with that plan.

So they're all shiny and finished on the outside, like every little product just pops out effortlessly, but that place is like a well oiled machine on the inside. You don't hear a lot about half-hearted tinkering at Apple. That's not to say they don't have flops, but still, they're on-mission every. single. day. And it's working for them.

Re:Here we see the difference between Free and Sla

[ashpool7]

>Free means never being at the mercy of someone else's business plan.

It just means being at the mercy of a bunch of random developers instead.

Nobody has enough time to maintain forks of everything they use, never mind the people who don't even have the knowhow.

Re:Here we see the difference between Free and Sla

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I'm sure you're trying to make a point in there somewhere, but it's pretty evident that you haven't used OS X Lion or the new Mountain Lion. With a few tweaks, my desktop looks the same in Mountain Lion as it does on my older machine running Leopard. I just don't see what you are talking about. A single application named "Launchpad" doesn't mean that OS X has abandoned the desktop and gone tablet crazy.

Congrats on your effort to somehow include Gnome 3 and your free software slogan in your diatribe.

Is it really all life and death?

[uptownguy]

...um... And here I thought I was just upgrading to a newer release, not drinking Kool-Aid or proving I am a slave or whatever.

10.8 is a nice dot release. I am VERY happy to have AirPlay mirroring to my AppleTV. I travel and give presentations to small groups and in meetings, knowing that I just lost my tether and will be able to sit anywhere around the table instead of right next to wherever the monitor cable happened to be is kind of nice. I also appreciate the integration with my reminders app on my iPhone.

I dislike the fact that they removed Podcast Publisher. This means I am going to have to find a workaround for what (had been) an easy workflow for me. I'm sure I'll find other little annoyances over the coming days and weeks. And I'll adjust.

All things considered, I'm pleased. More than that, though, I guess I'm just really confused by the us-vs.-them mentality in the above post. I happen to use the OS I do because it seems to be the right tool for the job. I also run Windows 7 (via Parallels) so that I can run Visio and MS Project and a few other programs that I need. Sometimes my smartphone is the right tool (happens to be an iPhone but I've seen similar functionality on Android phones and Windows phones) sometimes my tablet... I don't feel "locked in" to any of it any more than I feel locked in by the choices a television network makes for their fall lineup or the choices my state has made for when and where road construction will occur. There are projects in life that are bigger than one person and choices are made we don't always agree with.

Jeepers. I had no idea I was drinking Kool Aid or stifling dissenting thoughts so as to stave off madness. I've been coming to Slashdot for over 14 years. I appreciate a low 4 digit UID. But really, does a content free screed about how open source is the only right path posted minutes after the article hits the front page really further the discussion about the OS X Mountain Lion review?

Re:Is it really all life and death?

[Phrogman]

Precisely. I used PCs running various flavours of DOS and Windows for years. I was constantly upgrading drivers, fixing problems, updating my components etc. I liked being in control of my hardware, but the net result was a lot of time spent making the computer work.
Eventually I decided to try an iMac desktop. I love it. yes, I give up the ability to upgrade components, but on the plus side I have had this desktop for 5 years or so and it still meets all my computing needs including gaming. I no longer spend 10-20% of my time fixing something that broke mysteriously. It just works and I can get on with doing what I want to do.

I also ran various distros of Linux, FreeBSD, even tried out Solaris briefly. When the need could be met by FOSS, I used it, and still do. When the need could be met by commercial software, I used that if I thought it worked better. Eventually I switched to running an iMac that runs OS/X and I am happy with that. I bought an Apple TV, my wife has an iPad, we are happy with those.

That however is apparently "drinking the koolaid" and I must be put down for enjoying the product I paid for. What fucking bullshit. You know, sometimes when companies really work hard to develop a decent product, it turns out to be decent, and worth the money they charge. Apple is doing that for me, and so long as they continue to do that I will likely buy their products, but when that is no longer true, or something better comes along I will buy that instead. For me, nothing has so far.

Re:Here we see the difference between Free and Sla

[jmorris42]

> The problem is that I can't run Visio or ModelSim or other worktools...

Dunno about you but I'd run Visio in a VM the few times a typical person needs it and download the Linux tarball for ModelSim. It ain't the 1990s anymore, dude! Professional tools tend to be available on professional workstations and Sun and SGI are long since out of that space, replaced with high end hardware running Linux, usually RHEL. That means any serious software runs there now. Sure they have a Windows exectuable and since Mac is POSIX they will often do one of those too, but real work happens on real workstations and more importantly, real compute heavy stuff happens on clusters. In case you have been in a cave the last few years, Linux pretty much owns clusters.

Re:Hmmm...

[wfolta]

If by "technology enthusiasts" it means hobbiests who want to overclock their CPU and add a steam-powered cassette storage mechanism, Apple hasn't been the place for those enthusiasts since the Mac came out. If it means people who compile programs from source code, Mountain Lion has better compilers than GNU and tools for things like process monitoring (DTrace) and multi-threading (Grand Central Dispatch, blocks, etc) that are better than just about anything else out there.

Those who play with computers to play with computers are a dying breed. Those who play with computers to accomplish something else (including very techie things like statistics) can do so under Mountain Lion as easily as ever, without being subjected to designs created by "enthusiasts" without design skills.