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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.
It's a post about a review of a review of a review.
Look. All I want is a computer with two keys. A 1 and a 0. Preferably really, really big keys. No software. No firmware. Just me and the machine. No way to screw things up. It will do what I tell it, and no more. That way, I can keep banging away until I get either Turing's syndrome, or Tourette's.
1000 different text editors and solitaire clones
Don't forget text editors which run solitaire!
Or is that a solitaire game which permits text editing...?
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.
>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.
"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."
That most users are ignorant?
Or the Windows 8 folks could simply click the Desktop tile or install Start8 to boot directly to the desktop.
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.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
...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?
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
What if. What if Linux and Windows ARE that "multitude of options" to OS X? You know you can install GNOME in OS X and use that, right? You can drop right to a command prompt too and to the lay person it doesn't look any different than any other BSD OS.
What if. People actually like these improvements? What if you had actually liked GNOME3?
Dun Dun Dun.
> Nobody has enough time to maintain forks of everything they use, never mind the people who don't even have the knowhow.
The point is that we usually don't have to. Unless you really are a unique snowflake, you aren't the only one being abandoned. In the case of GNOME going nuts there were lots of options and more directly on point a lot of pissed off former users creating offshoot replacement projects. Most of those will fail but it doesn't matter because it will be because a couple will succeed and attract in attracting the majority of the outcast former GNOME users. You don't HAVE to create everything yourself, from scratch. You can even take the last 'good' version of a software line that goes off the deep end and use that as a starting point.
If you don't like MIcrosoft or Apple's new direction you have fewer options. You can suck it up, switch operating systems or start a cleanroom cloning effort of the entire stack from scratch. And look at ReactOS or Wine to see how impractical that last option has proven to be.
Democrat delenda est
I think you're blowing the "iOS-ness" of Mountain Lion out of proportion. I've been using the GM for a while and the DPs before that, and my core usage has remained unchanged since Lion. "Now wait," you say, "Lion also brought iOS features!" True. Of course, you don't have to use them. My Lion usage patterns are unchanged from Snow Leopard.
If you look at the main features, you'll see two things. First, it's not a big update like Leopard or Tiger (hence the $20 price tag). Second, the most iOS-like feature is Notification Center, which is basically just a better version of Growl that Macs have had for years now. Reminders and Notes are apps that appear in iOS, yes, but that's all they are--apps. Use them or don't.
There are two major features of Mountain Lion. iCloud is the most obvious user-facing one, as it is much more tightly integrated with the OS than it was in Lion. The biggest feature is probably the one least talked about, and that is Gatekeeper. It's pseudo-iOS-like, because by default it only allows apps from "identified" developers to run on your system, but when you try to run an unsigned app it lets you know how to turn it off. It should be noted that "identified" does not mean App Store only, though obviously App Store developers are "identified".
Compare this to Windows 8, which is getting a near-complete UI change. Or GNOME or Unity and possibly other DEs I haven't used, which are also heavily influenced by tablets. Apple seems to be the only one that isn't trying to completely change my workflow. I wouldn't be sure I'd call this update insanely great or anything--frankly, the iCloud features should have been present in Lion--but it's a nice update and it's cheap.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
Neil_Brown recently came out with his new #40767049 comment response to Moblaster's comment. In a surpising move, it was available for immediate reading at the time of its announcement. While missing out on some of the features we've come to love about his line of comments, I find it a refreshing level of meta-commenting that hasn't been seen in a while. Whether it's worth refreshing the browser to read responses to his comment has yet to be seen. We'll have to give it some time out in the wild to really get a feel for its general reception, but its +5 funny moderation does suggest that it will be read by many.
No it won't.
Eventually 3rd parties will begin to ignore it.
XP is interesting here only because it's successor (Vista) was so bad that Microsoft was forced to continue supporting it against it's will.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Or you could give them the one sentence worth of instructions it takes to disable Gayekeeper; or better yet, the one sentence it would take to tell them how to right-click and exempt your app only, so they can continue getting the anti-malware benefits of Gatekeeper with other apps, at least.
Or best of all, you could take the hour or so to download a free signing certificate from Apple and recompile your app... But that would actually be useful to your loyal customers who want to take advantage of Gatekeeper, and you wouldn't want that because how then would you grind your axe?
I can dismantle your whole pro-Linux argument with one sentence:
- Show me how to run Microsoft Visio on Gnome, KDE, or any other distribution so I can open, edit, and then save *.vsd files on my company's network drive.
I don't use MS-Windows because I like it. Anymore than I drive through interstate jams for fun. I do it because it's the defacto standard that everyone uses. I avoid Microsoft as much as possible but using alternatives (LibreOffice, VLC Player, Winamp, Mozilla seaMonkey, etc). But at the end of the day I still need to use Windows as my base because that's where the office & engineering tools run.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Come on.. Jesus D has had a hard on for Apple for a while now. He is as biased against Apple and Gruber is for Apple. I wouldn't consider either one of them a source to trust in this case. In aggregate the reviews are generally positive.
So many injustices..so little time..
Or Carpal Tunnel
the changes OSX is making and the dumb moves that ubuntu did.
Removal of scroll bars on OSX is not a big deal, Apple hardware had scrolling devices (magic mouse and multitouch pad) for a long time. so scrolling is not affected on that platform. Removal of scroll bars on Ubuntu was the stupidest move ever. I dont have a multitouch device to scroll with, so now I have to hit a 2 pixel bar on a window. WTF is that??!?!?! ROWARRGH!
Ubuntu needs to stop everything they are doing right now and support apple multitouch hardware and tell everyone to use X,Y or Z and suck it up. OR they need to stop chasing a UI that requires special hardware to make it useable.
Now the "single window" mode is retarded. on a 27" mac it is utterly stupid to do this. on a 11" macbook air? ok, I can see that. Dumbification of the UI needs to be optional. Let me have a "professional mode" to switch to a power users multiple window setup.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
As long as you do not mind having a botnet zombie.
Botnet malware doesn't just pop in out of nowhere. It's gets in when the user does something careless. It's gotten much easier to avoid issues without being excessively paranoid. If you like torrents or porn, quarantine them in a Linux VM. I believe Chrome (and maybe Firefox) now sandboxes websites as well. (of course, VM works here too) Change the moronic default settings to various programs so executables don't get launched without your direct action. (I blame software developers, including Microsoft, in the early 00's for this) There are other things to do as well, but you still get to enjoy your Windows gaming.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Ah, the old astroturfing: a "dearth of applications for Linux" and "great backwards support for Windows". Give it up, man, you'll never hype your stock up again.
For now, I know firefox was talking at one point of dropping XP support and we aren't far from the rest of the current software developers doing the same. A 12 year old Linux system is still just as usable, but you would be a fool to think any 12 year old system with no updates is in any way secure. As Microsoft is soon to phase out all updates for XP, you'll find that your 12 year old OS is no longer really usable.
You'll also find that your not getting the performance if your running that 12 year old OS on newer hardware since you have a lack of 64 bit support, lower memory allowances, and worse video performance capabilities.
You'll also find you still have to reboot on a frequent basis, a Linux system can go years without a reboot (and our Linux based phone systems do go 2+ years without frequently)
Mountain Lion might be the thing that tips me over. The retina Macbook Pro is becoming hard to resist and there is no comparable Windows laptop on the horizon. I like Windows 7, I am comfortable with it, but if I am going to relearn stuff from scratch, I would pick ML over the travesty that is Windows 8. I'll pick something that doesn't show me a blocky touch based interface on a goddamn laptop. I never wish to use a touch screen on a laptop or a desktop, it's the most uncomfortable thing ever, I don't know why Microsoft and everyone forgot about Gorilla Arm. OSX doesn't look like it's going to anything that crazy, some of the things copied over from iOS, like notifications, are actually worth copying over. At least for now, Mac OS still doesn't put restrictions on anyone who wants to do stuff from the command line or install unapproved apps. App support in Macs has improved with growing market share. The only thing I will miss about Windows is games, but for the few times I do play games, dual booting with Boot Camp will do.
I can't think of a reason why I shouldn't 'learn' ML rather than learning Windows 8.
Pick up Parallels or VMWare Fusion. Both will allow you to run an instance of 10.6 within Lion or Mountain Lion.
I wish my lawn was emo, so it would cut itself.
12 year old linux system just as usable? seriously? would you be able to find _any_ recent binaries that ran fine on it? which was the point about windows stability.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Ridiculous. Microsoft may have "succumbed to tablet madness", but the review made clear that Mac OS X has not. Mountain Lion has borrowed things from (tablet) iOS, but many of these ideas are not tablet-specific at all. The review specifically states that OS X has not been subsumed by iOS, and has a distinct trajectory.
Do iOS 6 and Mountain Lion converge a bit? Yes. Is there "madness" to it? Not even a taste. You should actually read the article instead of using it as a jump-off point to grind your Linux axe.
The guy's argument was that we should all stop using OS X or Windows. I dismantled the argument by showing that I can't run Visio or ModelSim or other worktools on Linux, because they are only available on Windows.
Therefore his advice to abandon Windows is an automatic deadend, and as brain-numbingly stupid as the Libertarians' advice to get rid of government-built roads. Clear?
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Apple blacklisted Gizmodo after they bought a stolen iPhone prototype a few years ago and refused to give it back before doing a full disassemble and report on every little detail. Since then, they've been left as the only major blog or news outlet that can't do firsthand reporting on the keynotes and product announcements, which has left them a little bitter. Small wonder that Gizmodo (Jesus Diaz in particular, of recent) has been saying all sorts of nonsense about Apple ever since.
Even if we ignore the chip on their shoulder, their reporting is shoddy and slimy, with them sometimes substantially altering their articles after they're posted. For instance, Briam Lam's account of returning the iPhone makes it sound like they got a letter from Apple's legal team and they sent it right back. What you don't see in that version of his account is that Brian received a personal phone call from Steve Jobs, asking for it. Brian responded with an e-mail in which he refused to return it until Apple went on record, then altered the online version of the e-mail he sent to Apple's legal department, since the original version made him look like an ass. The original reporting also contained a rosy accounting of a lot of those facts, but even that was later edited out in an effort to sweep it under the table as the original text of his correspondences leaked from other sources.
And that's far from being the only incident, though it is the most famous. RoosterTeeth lampooned Gizmodo and their "reporting" a few years back. They're a bunch of classless jackasses who treat facts as malleable ideas for their own benefit and cannot be trusted.
If "and yet I don't have to upgrade my OS at all" means no longer being updated with security patches, then that probably qualifies as "the user does something careless".
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
The guy's argument is that we should all stop using OS X or Windows. The problem is that I can't run Visio or ModelSim or other worktools on Linux, because they are only available on Windows. Therefore his advice to abandon Windows is an automatic deadend, and as brain-numbingly stupid as the anarcho-capitalist's advice to get rid of government-built roads. (IMHO)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Um, my "dumbed down laptop" has the latest generation of Intel chips, a dedicated graphics processor, the best display on any laptop anywhere, truly high-speed connectivity (Thunderbolt), and all kinds of goodies in the OS including a free IDE and tools for multithreading, process monitoring, etc, and I regularly do video editing, statistical analysis, 3D, and all kinds of other technical pursuits on it.
Yes, it's troubling that Apple has neglected their towers for a while. But very few industries require a tower instead of a well-designed laptop at this point. With a Thunderbolt disk array, I can edit 5 HD sources in real-time on the Retina MacBook Pro that shows a full HD video in a window. You don't need a tower to edit video, or to do a whole bunch of other things anymore.
> 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.
Democrat delenda est
If you are a Mac user, as a drinker of the Kool-Aid you have no choice.
I have been using Mac computers since 1989 and to this date I have found the OS to consistently improve over time. The only exception being OS 9, which kinda sucked. I'm speaking about my perception of their software of course, and implying others should share my opinion.
It makes no sense for me to believe it's better to switch to Linux out of fear of being let down in the future. I really have no reason to believe it will happen. Even if it did, moving my files to some other PC would not really be an issue for me.
My experiences with Linux weren't very happy ones either. I'm not trying to generalize but I've more than once found myself in a situation in which I've been told to fix something myself - which really is not something I'm interested in doing at all. I've got my dev projects and work, and I don't really care about improving the OS I use at home. Some of those issues were things that I know I can get working much easier in windows or mac (maybe due to experience on the OSes, that's not really important to me). My personal opinion on the subject is that Linux is not for me.
Going back to your idea about Mac users drinking Kool-Aid, I think you're failing to put yourself in other people's shoes. Maybe your principles regarding open source/free software vs commercial software are not as important to others as they are to you?
diegoT
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.
Your analysis is like an analogy of an airline passenger. You can choose to be a consumer and fly one of the major airlines. You get the seats the give you and the snacks they serve. You don't get to pick the flight path to your destination, and you don't get to pick your own schedule. To "best the system", you went to get your own pilot's license. You can fly where you want, when you want and choose the path. You're part of an elite bunch alright.
From up that high, you might not be able to see it, but not everyone has the ability/time/desire to be a pilot. An overwhelming majority of the people who use planes to get from A to B are content with that choice. And frankly, I don't really hear a lot of private pilots droning on about how much better they are that they can fly themselves to somewhere when they want to.
And btw, nobody is free. Don't pretend to be free just because you're a computer enthusiast. You're still a slave to the farmers, the electric company, the sanitation and water sources that feed your house and every other item in your world that you pay for. For you, this may be about freedom and choice and all that other jazz that 90% of the world doesn't care about when it comes to an operating system. If you sleep better at night, then cookie for you. The "Aura of Rightness" that you're projecting just comes off as a bit juvenile, though.
Free software doesn't exist in industries that does not involve computers itself. This is the fundamental limitation of the free-software model, since it relies on its own industry to support it - you need other software engineers to make it happen.
But, most people don't use computers to use computers, they use them to do something else that DOESN'T involve computers. People are only interested in what gets that job done.
For example, there is no better tool than Apple's Aperture in cataloging and publishing photos within an hour of doing a photoshoot for a fashion magazine or newspaper. Free software doesn't even exist in that industry. (Lightroom isn't as good...) So, what are you going to use to code a free-software version of Aperture? A bunch of eager fashion models and stylists? =^D Who's going to code the controls of your kitchen's microwave ovens? A bunch of chefs?
Nobody else really cares about software. You still have to pay to play in these industries. If you can't pay, you don't play. Go do something else.
You will likely need to do the same for a dozen dependencies before that works, since it won't compile against 12 year old libraries. And then some of those dependencies will need their own dependencies, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if you end up effectively upgrading half of your Linux install that way, if you actually started with a 12 year old distro - I mean, we're talking Gtk 1.2 and Qt 2.x in that time frame.
It's gets in when the user does something careless.
This myth really has GOT to die.
I direct you to exhibit A:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn2Own
6+ years of Windows and OSX being utterly Pwned through nothing more than a link click. Ill note that OSX was the first one owned for the majority of the time, but really the OS and browser dont matter that much. Chrome's upped ante and subsequent pwning this year shows that if you give hackers an incentive and enough time, they will 0-day remote-code-execution exploit any machine out there.
The VAST majority of infections out there have NOTHING TO DO with Windows "exe" files, and everything to do with Flash, Acrobat, or Java plugins being exploited to run arbitrary code. Oh, and exploits run against older versions of Windows and IE, for those folks who never got the memo that upgrading is important.
You can go ahead and assume that nothing can get thru your smug barrier, but Im going to go out on a limb here and say you might already be infected.
Metro's getting flak because its a legitimately bad idea to make that the desktop paradigm.
As long as Apple steers clear of anything in the vein of "Screw business users, we're competing with iPad!", they should be fine.