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

So it's better than Windows 8

[cpu6502]

OS 10.8 is not trying to be a tablet OS like Windows 8. (Interesting that Apple and Microsoft have synced-up with their numbers)

old OS: Win7 and 10.7
new OS: Win8 and 10.8

BTW the review of the review was funny. But this award-nominee was even funnier: http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/04/the-shadow-war-of-the-night-dragons-book-one-the-dead-city-excerpt

Which is why I don't like Apple products

[Angst Badger]

Technology must now work for everyone, not just 'computing enthusiasts.

Not to single out Apple -- all of the major consumer tech vendors do the same thing to one degree or another -- but this is why I'm not terribly interested in their products. I am a technology enthusiast, and I do tweak settings and heavily customize my machines to suit me. As interfaces are dumbed down and the underlying feature sets are minimized, there's less and less use I have for the associated products. And to the extent that GNOME has followed suit, I find myself doing more and more at the command line because there's a real limit to what can be accomplished efficiently with a mouse or at all jabbing at a tablet with my fingers like a chimp in a lab.

But for the tendency of some major UI projects in the Open Source world to imitate corporate products, I wouldn't care. That tendency is frankly bizarre, since the average consumer doesn't care about any aspect of FOSS except free-as-in-beer, probably won't install any FOSS software anyway, and certainly won't ever crack open the hood. Meanwhile, skilled users who understand that a shallow learning curve also means a shallow power curve are increasingly out of luck.