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Mac OS X Mountain Lion Gets Three Million Downloads In 4 Days
hypnosec writes "Apple has announced that its latest Mac OS X version, Mountain Lion, has had three million downloads in just four days thereby making it the most successful OS in Cupertino's history. Philip Schiller, iPhone maker's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, said, 'Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever.'"
Barring comparability and performance regressions, at $20 why not upgrade? From my usage, Mountain Lion doesn't offer any real drastic changes, just some polish and some optional features, some of which are welcome, some which I'll probably never use. I haven't run into any showstopper bugs, and it's generally just a run-of-the mill upgrade with some nice features. Apple always claims they've added hundreds of new features, but their threshold for a "feature" seems to be lower and lower with each release, with even the lowliest check box being counted as a "feature" right next to full applications like iMessage or Reminders or Gatekeeper. When you separate the features by magnitude, there are only really a handful that stand out. I know every release of OSX is a "point" release, but Mountain Lion really captures the meaning behind the phrase.
Airplay that can mirror anything on you see on the Mac to an AppleTv was the killer feature for me. Also time machine backups can be set to rotate between different targets
Good-bye
It was the killer feature for my son as well. But then he found out Airplay mirroring isn't supported on his 2010 MacBook Pro. He's a little pissed at Apple. I figure he's getting a lesson in tech obsolescence. I'm happy - Airplay mirroring works great on my 2012 Air. :-)
If he's techy at all, tell him why.
You can't send HD resolution video across WiFi (or even Gigabit Ethernet) uncompressed, so AirPlay mirroring requires compression. AppleTV hardware only supports the H.264 codec, so the format has to be H.264. While it's very efficient in terms of compression ratio, it's also very difficult to implement in software -- as in, it probably takes almost all of a quadcore CPU's cycles to encode 1080p in realtime. Since that would be pointless (you want to use your computer normally while mirroring, not have its fans howling just to send its display to the TV), Apple requires hardware H.264 encoding to implement AirPlay mirroring.
On Macs, that hardware is the QuickSync H.264 encoder / decoder block. QuickSync is a feature of Intel HD 3000 (or better) video, introduced in codename "Sandy Bridge" CPU models (aka "second generation Core i3/i5/i7"). Earlier Intel CPUs didn't have a hardware H.264 encoder. Sandy Bridge CPUs first shipped in 2011 Macs, so 2010 Macs cannot support AirPlay mirroring -- they do not have the required hardware.