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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.
And yet my Windows 7 will have better gaming and application support than your Loonix desktop for the next decade well after mainstream support is dropped. Have fun with your distro that loses support anywhere from 6 months to 3 years later and has a dearth of application choice in comparison (no the 1000 different text editors and solitaire clones don't count).
If Apple were still just a PC company they would be either dead or terribly obscure by this point.
Or they would be the #3 largest computer manufacturer in the United States. Gee I wonder how "terribly obscure" that makes Lenovo (#4) or Acer (#5)
http://www.myfoxal.com/story/19103453/top-5-manufacturers-of-personal-computers-in-2q
Of course you could argue their PC success benefits from their iPhone/iPad successes, but that's kind of the whole vision of the company and not really an argument against.