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.'"

Comments

Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[ModernGeek]

I have to wonder how many of these are people that received a free upgrade with their new Macintoshes... /didn't rtfm

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[Baldrake]

Possibly fewer than you'd think... Apple actually made claiming the free update hard enough that I'm considering just paying the $20.

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[Dynedain]

Hard to claim?

Click on link on Apple homepage. Fill in contact info and serial number (Apple Menu->About This Mac.... copy/paste). Click submit.

A day or two later, get an email with a redemption code for the App store.

Input redemption code, click install.

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[Desler]

Yes on the day of release most people either couldn't get a code or Apple was sending out duplicate codes that other people had already redeemed.

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[Baldrake]

Don't forget the step of finding your proof of purchase, scanning it and uploading it.

I agree, it's not hard in the sense that solving global warming is hard, but given that I bought it through work and have to track down whatever purchasing drone can provide proof of purchase, and then have to find a scanner, and then have to find (again) the link to that web page (where I already filled in the whole form before getting to the point where I discovered I needed the scan of the proof of purchase), it's looking awfully tempting just to hit the "buy" button and pay the 20 bucks.

Your time-vs-bucks tradeoff may be different from mine.

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[jbolden]

Just confirming what the AC said here as another person who got the free upgrade.

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[jbolden]

I got one of those, and about 20 minutes later another email with the corrected codes.

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[PNutts]

What proof of purchase? This is the first I've heard of this. For millions it was just their serial number.

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[PNutts]

Some people did have to wait for a day or two and nothing of value was lost. The system (as expected) was overwhelmed with requests. This time it looks like there was a real problem instead of just overload.

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[Baldrake]

Lucky me, then! It definitely asked for a scanned proof of purchase. Maybe a US vs Canada difference?

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[raydobbs]

As with some online rebate redemptions - the system will pick random submissions for additional verification in order to verify that the people applying for the rebate are those intended to get said rebate. Otherwise, they would have to hire dozens of temps to go through millions of submissions of physical articles they'd have to track and ultimately dispose of to handle the rebate. 24-72 hours for the former method, 6-8 weeks (if your lucky) for the other.

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[Baldrake]

Fair enough, and as I said above, it will earn them some extra money as it looks to be too much hassle to make them happy.

I'd say it would have taken about as much time as making half a dozen posts on Slashdot about the issue.

Hmm...

Re:Sounds impressive, but how many are paid..

[exomondo]

If Apple had just noted the serial numbers of all the computers sold after June 11th

They did, that's why to redeem it you verify with your serial number.

they could have just enabled the App store to set the purchased flag to true for that apple account.

What apple account? Serial number for a computer is not tied to an Apple ID or vice versa, the app store account is though as is the license for the software.

Re:Actual title should be

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"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."

or?

We were all very eager for a path forward that offered fixes and completion for Lion's half-realized and sometimes infuriating design / implementation choices. :-)

Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[justdiver]

Waterworld grossed $21 million in its opening weekend. But that doesn't mean the film was good or that it was an overall success. Initial release numbers can be tacked up against hype. Let's wait and see how it is doing 3 months from now after the apple fan boys aren't inflating the download numbers.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[tsa]

All Apple users are fanboys/girls. You just become one after having used such marvellously perfect hardware and software for a while. Face it: there is nothing better!

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[Missing.Matter]

Waterworld is a guilty pleasure of mine. I watch it every time it's on TV. It's everything I love about bad 90s movies.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[Gaygirlie]

Actually, Waterworld-reference works exceedingly well for bringing about his point. Waterworld a lot of money in the beginning, but eventually failed to satisfy expectations.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[justdiver]

Thank you for understanding the point that I was trying to make. After the initial "look shiny and new!" phase has worn off, will Mountain Lion be a lasting success?

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[WankersRevenge]

Really mods? Obvious flamebait is being marked as +1?

The only thing slashdot has going for it is the dialoge and once you start elevating comments like this, you do a disservice to the entire community. I stopped reading Digg for this very reason.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[Gaygirlie]

That I do not know nor do I bother to guess, either. I simply do not know much about OSX or what people expect from the latest release as I don't own a single Apple-device, it would be rather presumptuous of me to make any sorts of claims regarding that. Also, how should one even define "success" in this case? The size of installation-base? End-user satisfaction? Amount of expectations fulfilled? Profit generated? Those can all be viewed as successes in their own right, and atleast installation-base-wise Mountain Lion will be a success simply because a large number of people will buy the upgrade just because it's "new."

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[justdiver]

For the record, my initial post was not flame bait. I thought, although some seem to have disagreed, that I was making a valid point. An initial release does not spell overall success. 3 months from now, if not a single Mountain Lion has been sold or downloaded (unlikely but possible) then will it still be considered "the most successful release ever"?

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[jedidiah]

Not familiar with Waterworld?

This is Slashdot, not your grandma's sewing circle.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[jbolden]

The Apple community isn't like the Windows community. A very large percentage of the userbase does every OS upgrade, and that was true even when they charged $129 for them. Developers are allowed to force the issue, for example there are many applications which require 10.7.3 Feb 1, 2012 release) or newer already. At the same time software buyers expect support very quickly. Pretty much everyone is going to 10.8 over the next few years and probably 80% of the user base this year.

I'm not sure why how many decided to do it this week rather than a month for now matters though.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[citylivin]

"Waterworld grossed $21 million in its opening weekend. But that doesn't mean the film was good or that it was an overall success."

I think it was a great movie. Mutants, boat based archipelagos, resource scarcity in post apocalyptic communities, the exon valdez, people living on oil tankers, how quickly history can be erased. Personally, I think it was decent SciFi, way better than the pro american jingoistic ID4 (independance day) which was released about the same time.

The film did end up making money (90mil after expenses), and still is one of the very few science fiction movies that depict an end of civilization caused by massive flooding / global climate change. They also built most of the sets and everything for real in the ocean (and a large tank i think), as opposed to now adays when they would just render it with computer graphics. That alone makes it worth seeing. They pretty much blow up and sink a 200 million dollar set!

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[ColdWetDog]

Waterworld is a guilty pleasure of mine. I watch it every time it's on TV. It's everything I love about bad 90s movies.

Long, boring, dull, with obvious smarmy references to current ecological catastrophes, and ending with the obliteration of Dennis Hopper?

Waterworld is important for that one character - Dennis Hopper was friggin great.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[Billly Gates]

I need to see statistics on this?

I find this difficult to believe. Flashback was successful because so many users like my aunt in the previous post had older non supported versions of MacOSX. Many Mac users who came from Windows are terrified to touch their systems as they had bad experiences messing up their PCs and bought Macs so they would not have to deal with this. Just plug it in and out of sight out of mind.

Because Macs are so much more expensive than PCs their users historically did not upgrade as often. I remember Mac users in the Mac Classic days boasting how their 10 year old computers can still run Netscape and they did not have to upgrade as often.

My opinion is Apple is providing a great value upgrading their operating systems with more features, but are being greedy at the same time. They need to support Carbon and older releases more often as the high price should cover that.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[Anonymous Coward]

This used to be true, but changed right after Jobs returned. Apple became more about consumer devices, commodity parts, and planned obsolescence.

After Mac OS X came out (and the new non-flavored iMacs), you basically couldn't count on an Apple computer lasting more than 5 years anymore.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[Billly Gates]

This used to be true, but changed right after Jobs returned. Apple became more about consumer devices, commodity parts, and planned obsolescence.

After Mac OS X came out (and the new non-flavored iMacs), you basically couldn't count on an Apple computer lasting more than 5 years anymore.

Well then. My move to Windows 7 a year and a half ago after I turned down the iMac was the right one. I was going to spend just $200 more, but the fact I couldn't upgrade the video card in 2.5 years (my 5 year timeline plan) and this planned obsolescence was too much. I could only get a warranty for 3 years for that reason and I am not spending $1699 for a machine that I throw away in 3 years. 5 years min!

Sorry Apple, you almost had a customer but XP/7 are supported for 10 years and it would be great if I can get this system to last that long with a decent video card for some MMOs.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[jbolden]

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0&qpcustomb=*1

Take a simple example: OSX share June 2012.

10.4 3%
10.5 (Oct 2007) 12%
10.6 (Aug 2009) 38%
10.7 (July 2011) 47%

Conversely on Windows
XP 47%
Vista (Jan 2007) 7%
Windows 7 (July 2009) 45%

In other words almost 1/2 of all Mac users had upgraded their OS within the last 11 mo. 10.6 and Windows 7 are about the same age 85% of Mac users were that far updates as contrasted with 45% of windows users. Almost 1/2 of Windows users use an OS older than 5 years as contrasted with 3% of mac users.

Because Macs are so much more expensive than PCs their users historically did not upgrade as often.

Not true. Mac users upgrade their hardware more often. They may brag about being able to use their old computers but in practice they don't.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[exomondo]

Really mods? Obvious flamebait is being marked as +1?

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess (Score:2, Funny)
by tsa (15680) Alter Relationship on Monday July 30, @02:56PM (#40820753)

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[tsa]

Whooooosh!

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[Macgrrl]

As far as I'm concerned, an OS that stays the hell out of my way and lets me use the tools I want to use is a success.

For me the biggest annoyance so far is that I will need to upgrade my copies of Adobe Creative Suite and MS Office if I want to keep using them. I had older copies I'd carried forward from an old machine that were carbon installs and ceased working.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[exomondo]

The Apple community isn't like the Windows community.

You do realize Macs can run Windows, and have been able to for years, so a significant portion of the 'Apple community' is also the 'Windows community'. If you want to polarize OSX and Windows you can clearly do it on the Mac platform and you would get a far more accurate result than trying to compare 2 different markets of significantly different size. Windows is used hugely in the corporate market - where OSX isn't used nearly as much - and corporate IT is well known for being slow-moving on upgrades so naturally you would expect the take-up to be slower as a percentage, which doesn't really tell you anything you couldn't already infer.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[jbolden]

The Power chip has excellent emulation. Back in the PPC days one of MS Office versions shipped with a VM and a version of windows. Not much has changed with the Intel architecture in terms of the ability to run windows, except the ability to boot to Windows.

If you want to polarize OSX and Windows you can clearly do it on the Mac platform and you would get a far more accurate result than trying to compare 2 different markets of significantly different size.

First off I'm not the one polarizing the two communities, the data is. And I could do the experiment you are talking about looking at the subgroup of Windows users on only Apple hardware. And the Windows users on Apple hardware, I have no idea what their upgrade habits, but they have no impact on the Windows eco system so they don't matter. The community I was addressing is the ones running Windows, on other vendor's hardware. You can't freely change the dependent variable and expect the independent variable to remain unchanged. And the use of percentages, which is a ratio takes care of the size thing.

and corporate IT is well known for being slow-moving on upgrades so naturally you would expect the take-up to be slower as a percentage, which doesn't really tell you anything you couldn't already infer.

That's an explanation for the data. And that does tell you something. That's there is a large group of windows systems owners who buy with the intention of not upgrading quickly, with no corresponding group on the Mac side. Were that the entire difference you would be right it is something you could infer though it would substantially change the market regardless of why. But it isn't the entire difference. The percentages are so large that even if one were to exclude corporate purchases entirely you still see a difference in behavior. Lets quote the data again:

Take a simple example: OSX share June 2012.

10.4 3%
10.5 (Oct 2007) 12%
10.6 (Aug 2009) 38%
10.7 (July 2011) 47%

Conversely on Windows
XP 47%
Vista (Jan 2007) 7%
Windows 7 (July 2009) 45%

In other words almost 1/2 of all Mac users had upgraded their OS within the last 11 mo. 10.6 and Windows 7 are about the same age 85% of Mac users were that far updated as contrasted with 45% of windows users. Almost 1/2 of Windows users use an OS older than 5 years as contrasted with 3% of mac users.

As another data point. The Microsoft OS upgrading problem goes back to the DOS days long before corporate uptake. Microsoft didn't even bother to offer upgrades, until DOS 4 which was hated. DOS 5 was hugely popular, but DOS 6 didn't sell well at all.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[exomondo]

First off I'm not the one polarizing the two communities, the data is.

And that's my point, the data just says a large portion havent upgraded, and since a large portion is corporate (unlike OSX) which you don't generally expect to upgrade in any reasonable timeframe that data is pretty much exactly what you would expect.

That's there is a large group of windows systems owners who buy with the intention of not upgrading quickly, with no corresponding group on the Mac side.

And there is every chance that that group is made up predominantly of the corporate market and they have a slow upgrade cycle we already know that. If a large percentage of OSX marketshare was corporate you would see the same thing there.

The percentages are so large that even if one were to exclude corporate purchases entirely you still see a difference in behavior.

Well that's the key thing, that's what would actually make this a somewhat interesting comparison, we already know that corporate tends to have extremely slow upgrade cycles and that a large part of Windows' marketshare is corporate, slow upgrades are an attribute of the corporate sector, we already know that, if OSX was predominantly corporate you'd see the same thing there. If you want to draw an interesting comparison you have to exclude the element that obviously skews the results.

Re:Huge initial release does not mean sucess

[jbolden]

No I actually meant a virtual PC included in Microsoft office. There are still some links to version of the product on the web for example: http://www.microsoft.com/australia/office/mac/virtualpc7/default.aspx So for example Microsoft Virtual PC 6 came with Office 2004 for Mac (this was after Microsoft bought Connectix).

Anyway I've never heard people consider the experience of a PC via. Parallels to be near native. I'm not sure what that is owing to, but it doesn't seem in practice to be much different than using VirtualPC.

Ok... but why?

[Kenja]

Not seen a reason to upgrade myself. What feature is it that people are after?

Re:Ok... but why?

[localman57]

They don't really know. But whatever it is, they're pretty confident it will be FANTASTIC!

Re:Ok... but why?

[spire3661]

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

Re:Ok... but why?

[Neil_Brown]

What feature is it that people are after?

I waited a couple of days, to check that there were no obvious glitches on loading, and then went for it — I wanted it for one thing only, really, and that was a bug fix: faster logging in after opening the screen / coming out from sleep/hibernation/whatever it is.

Re:Ok... but why?

[Anubis IV]

For me, it was the AirPlay Mirroring, which lets me stream my desktop in 1080p with audio from my Mac to my Apple TV in a different room. I had in the past looked into getting a dedicated "wireless HDMI" device, but that tends to run into the hundreds very quickly.

Other than that, they added iCloud, Notification Center, Reminders, and a lot of other niceties from iOS. For the new features, Gatekeeper is getting the most press probably, and while I find the trend that it might be indicative of to be a frightening one, I do think that it, taken alone, is a great feature that helps to keep novice users much more secure while keeping hassle to a minimum, and since it can be easily circumvented without needing to be a pro user, I don't see it as problematic. Also, unlike Lion, which changed a lot of things in ways that weren't necessarily for the better, I haven't seen anything yet in Mountain Lion that I've felt was a step back. Instead, I'm finding minor, but nice, touches here and there. It makes for a pleasant experience.

So, basically, it feels faster, has a handful of new features, offers a more consistent experience across the Apple ecosystem, and clocks in at $20. I thought it was worth it, but as I'm sure anyone can see, I'm a bit of a fanboy.

Re:Ok... but why?

[dingen]

The real killer feature is that ML is faster than Lion and runs better on systems with less than 4 GB of RAM.

Re:Ok... but why?

[tlhIngan]

Gatekeeper is getting the most press probably, and while I find the trend that it might be indicative of to be a frightening one, I do think that it, taken alone, is a great feature that helps to keep novice users much more secure while keeping hassle to a minimum, and since it can be easily circumvented without needing to be a pro user, I don't see it as problematic

Well, with good reason, because people fear that the "Anywhere" optoin can be removed at any time.

Which is very unlikely for many reasons.

First, gatekeeper only applies to applications downloaded off the Internet which have been tagged as downloaded (extended attribute). "Local" applications don't have that (and the attribute can be removed). Interestingly, applications you compile don't have that attribute. This can be the makings for an OS that enforces open-source by ensuring applications are distributed open-source...

Second, various policies make the Mac App Store unsuitable. E.g., a maximum price of $1000 for an app may be far too low for more specialized apps (E.g., AutoCAD 2012. The LE version is on the MAS, but the full package is not because it costs a lot more than the limit). Plus, apps have to be self-contained (no utilities, exnteions, or other stuff - so menubar things, drivers and the like have to be distributed elsewhere. Also, no demo apps.

Finally - well, there's Adobe and Microsoft, who have shown very little interest in the MAS and are unlikely to do so for various reasons.

The only reason to use MAS is access to iCloud, which also enforces sandboxing. Why regular apps can't is probably easy to see from a security perspective - if an app gets infected through some mechanism, that app can infect its own iCloud documents (reminicient of Word infections). If iCloud was available to all apps, it can result in basically a Mac that can never be cleaned of malware since a vulnerable app (without sandboxing) would read the infected iCloud document, get infected and infect the rest of the Mac (assuming the developer doesn't update the app and the user didn't download an updated version - with boxed software, this is common). With MAS sandboxing, the infection stays with the app alone. I suppose you can ask why not sandboxed apps - well, sandboxed apps can easily request every permission because the developer is lazy, and Apple can verify MAS apps for excessive permission usage.

As for the enforcing open-source, well, like I said, Gatekeeper doesn't apply to non-internet sourced apps. So if you compile it yourself, gatekeeper should be out of your way. If you use open-source, skip the binary and build from source....

Re:Ok... but why?

[jedidiah]

"runs better on systems with less than 4G of RAM"

Tempted to add my own remarks but this kind of speaks for itself.

Re:Ok... but why?

[jbolden]

For me. I usually like to wait about 3 months for upgrades. But will do this one very soon. The feature I want is the enhanced video drivers for rMBP.

Other stuff I like:

1) iMessage
2) Share / autosave / iCloud tightly wound together.
3) Launchpad search (for my parent's computers)
4) Fine control over mail notifications
5) iCloud tabs
6) X11 install on demand (for distribution)
7) Expanding scroll bars

And powernap might be cool.

Re:Ok... but why?

[jbolden]

Great point about the importance of iCloud and Sandboxing.

Re:Ok... but why?

[Huge_UID]

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. :-)

Re:Ok... but why?

[jo_ham]

"runs better on systems with less than 4G of RAM"

Tempted to add my own remarks but this kind of speaks for itself.

So which is it? Bash Apple for leaving usable hardware behind with forced obsolescence, or bash Apple for improving performance on older machines?

You have to pick one troll direction and stick to it or you look wishy washy. I've seen you do better.

Re:Ok... but why?

[SplashMyBandit]

Stink that Airplay won't work. If you can cope with a cable then screen extension will work fine to huge TV (I use this will a late 2009 MacBook Pro).

Re:Ok... but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ok... but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

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. :-)

One Word: AirParrot.

Re:Ok... but why?

[drsmithy]

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.

This would be a decent reason if the source material was uncompressed HD video.

However, it almost certainly is not. It's ridiculous (for multiple reasons) that if you have an existing H.264 encoded file, you need a Mac capable of realtime H.264 encoding to stream it to an AppleTV.

Re:Ok... but why?

[teg]

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.

This would be a decent reason if the source material was uncompressed HD video.

However, it almost certainly is not. It's ridiculous (for multiple reasons) that if you have an existing H.264 encoded file, you need a Mac capable of realtime H.264 encoding to stream it to an AppleTV.

If it is a H.264 encoded file, you can stream it directly from iTunes already. The new feature does full screen mirroring - perfect for streaming those services who are desktop only (Hulu and other flash players). There is a non-apple solution with some some technical trade offs if you have an older Mac or a Windows system.

Re:Ok... but why?

[teg]

For me. I usually like to wait about 3 months for upgrades. But will do this one very soon. The feature I want is the enhanced video drivers for rMBP.

Other stuff I like:

1) iMessage 2) Share / autosave / iCloud tightly wound together. 3) Launchpad search (for my parent's computers) 4) Fine control over mail notifications 5) iCloud tabs 6) X11 install on demand (for distribution) 7) Expanding scroll bars

And powernap might be cool.

Another very useful parent feature is automatic download and install of software and OS updates. Saves time when I go home.

Re:Ok... but why?

[jbolden]

That one in terms of parents might make things worse because stuff moves and changes. I'm not sure.

Re:Ok... but why?

[AmiMoJo]

First, gatekeeper only applies to applications downloaded off the Internet which have been tagged as downloaded (extended attribute). "Local" applications don't have that (and the attribute can be removed). Interestingly, applications you compile don't have that attribute. This can be the makings for an OS that enforces open-source by ensuring applications are distributed open-source...

Sounds exactly the same as the Windows mechanism which relies on NTFS ADS data to flag downloaded applications. Windows is smart enough to flag files extracted from downloaded archives too.

Surely there is a lawsuit being prepared, this being blatant copying of an incredible and unique innovation by Microsoft...

Re:Ok... but why?

[Anubis IV]

It only "sounds exactly the same" because you didn't bother to read up on what it is. The flag on download has been in Macs for quite some time. What's new is how it responds to them. Previously, it would simply remove the download flag when the user said it was okay. Now, it checks for certificates for the developer or from the Mac App Store before it removes the flag if you have the default Gatekeeper setting enabled.

Re:Ok... but why?

[AmiMoJo]

No, that is exactly what Windows does. If the file has a valid security certificate when the user confirms it the file stays confirmed. If it doesn't then Windows asks every time.

Apple must owe MS several billion $ for this feature.

Re:Ok... but why?

[Anubis IV]

Can you point to or provide some examples or point me to something regarding this? That's a genuine request, not an attempt to argue, since I'm actually curious. I recall Windows' UAC prompting me regarding whether I want to allow something to make changes to the system, and I also recall Windows asking if I trust an installer from X publisher, but both of those are different than what Apple is doing with Gatekeeper, which makes me think that I'm forgetting something else that Windows does.

Re:Ok... but why?

[AmiMoJo]

Just download a random executable with Internet Explorer (IIRC Firefox does it as well, not sure about Chrome). When you open it the prompt will be there. If the file has a valid certificate there will be an option to always allow it, otherwise you will have to accept it every single time.

I'm sure there is loads of stuff on Google about it.

Re:Ok... but why?

[Anubis IV]

Yeah, that's the prompt I was talking about to trust a publisher, but that's different than what Gatekeeper does. With Gatekeeper, there is no prompt by default. Apps that are downloaded via browser and have a valid developer certificate, as well as apps downloaded from the Mac App Store, simply run without any prompting when the user has the default settings enabled. If the app lacks a certificate, that's when a warning appears.

The other major difference is that the Microsoft certificates are signed by third-party CAs (which seem to occasionally get compromised), whereas the ones used by Gatekeeper are Apple-issued for either individual apps in the Mac App Store or for developers to use across all of their apps. As a result of controlling the certificates, Apple is thus able to revoke them immediately in cases where a developer uses their software for malicious purposes. That said, Apple has had similar "kill-switch" abilities on iOS for years, and they have yet to exercise them.

There are also more and less restrictive options available in Gatekeeper. The former restricts the system to only running Mac App Store apps, while the latter will simply prompt the user to make sure that they want to run something downloaded from the Internet when it's executed for the very first time. That's also how it's been in OS X for a few years already.

Re:Ok... but why?

[AmiMoJo]

Yeah, that's the prompt I was talking about to trust a publisher, but that's different than what Gatekeeper does. With Gatekeeper, there is no prompt by default. Apps that are downloaded via browser and have a valid developer certificate, as well as apps downloaded from the Mac App Store, simply run without any prompting when the user has the default settings enabled. If the app lacks a certificate, that's when a warning appears.

MS can sign apps to prevent the warning appearing, but naturally they don't sign anything other than critical ones. If they signed every random app then any vulnerability in that app could be exploited to bypass the security warning, so Apple is taking a risk here.

The other major difference is that the Microsoft certificates are signed by third-party CAs (which seem to occasionally get compromised), whereas the ones used by Gatekeeper are Apple-issued for either individual apps in the Mac App Store or for developers to use across all of their apps. As a result of controlling the certificates, Apple is thus able to revoke them immediately in cases where a developer uses their software for malicious purposes. That said, Apple has had similar "kill-switch" abilities on iOS for years, and they have yet to exercise them.

Actually no, Microsoft signs certificates for certified developers just like Apple does. It is that you can use any cert you want from any source, just like on a Mac, and it will generate a warning just as it should. Microsoft recently demonstrated its ability to revoke certificates due to the US and/or Israeli government(s) stealing them to sign viruses targeted at Iran.

There are also more and less restrictive options available in Gatekeeper. The former restricts the system to only running Mac App Store apps, while the latter will simply prompt the user to make sure that they want to run something downloaded from the Internet when it's executed for the very first time. That's also how it's been in OS X for a few years already.

That is also possible on Windows. It can be set per machine, per account or network wide via Group Policies. Windows had that ability going back to at least Windows 2000, not sure about NT.

Re:Ok... but why?

[Anubis IV]

Yep, they're taking a risk, but they're also requiring it of everyone who wants to install software on a default setup of Mountain Lion, whereas the certification is entirely optional for Windows with a default installation. As you said, on Windows they'll be presented with a warning most of the time anyway, which is training users to simply ignore them, regardless of if they are signed or not.

Microsoft does issue their own certificates for developers, as you said, but it also certifies CAs for issuing certificates and Windows recognizes certificates from them. Because of that, Microsoft has to deal with the possibility of the third-party CAs being compromised.

Gatekeeper does not allow certs from any source, as you seem to suggest, and the revocation you're talking about only worked because the certs were forged ones from Microsoft. Had it been a third-party certificate, Microsoft either would have had to have revoked the CA's certificate, thus breaking certification for any other apps using that third-party CA, or else do nothing at all. That problem doesn't exist with Gatekeeper, since each app or developer must have an Apple-issued certificate if they want to run in the default setup.

That said, you have convinced me that a lot of it is very similar as far as the technology goes, and that this is mostly an implementation difference. The way I see it now, it looks like Apple has chosen to take their standard "we control all aspects of everything" stance, whereas Microsoft has chosen its usual "we'll take things as they are" stance. As a result, each has weaknesses (e.g. Apple has a single point of failure with dire consequences, while Microsoft has many point of failure with lesser consequences) and advantages (e.g. Apple can revoke individual certificates in every case, while Microsoft's solution is more granular in what it can allow or deny).

Re:Ok... but why?

[highphilosopher]

Smart enough? don't you mean dumb enough?

Seriously, it can't tell if I got a file off a network share on my intranet or via a download from a browser. To make it worse, it propagates this flag to all files created from this file too.

So, if I download an installer that copies 60 files to various parts of my drive, and try to run the program it bombs. Why? because all 60 of those files are flagged. Finding and removing the flag from all of them is impossible, so I'm left with uninstalling and re-installing the application to make things work (hoping that it's uninstaller doesn't leave behind a settings file somewhere that's still flagged).

All of them

[Theaetetus]

I have to wonder how many of these are people that received a free upgrade with their new Macintoshes... /didn't rtfm

Maybe you should have:

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.”

Re:All of them

[vux984]

Yes, and everyone who bought mac in the last few months had it ship with lion, but was entitled to upgrade and download mountain lion for FREE.

Re:All of them

[Theaetetus]

Yes, and everyone who bought mac in the last few months had it ship with lion, but was entitled to upgrade and download mountain lion for FREE.

You're right. I withdraw my previous objection.

Re:All of them

[mattack2]

I'm not sure how your quote confirms or refutes what he said. It sounds like you think he thinks there was a DVD in a package of recent purchases.

Purchasers of a new machine on or after June 11 do get a free upgrade to Mountain Lion. I don't know if those are counted in these numbers.

Re:All of them

[SomePgmr]

Well and, it's $20 for those three machines, right? I'll say this for Apple... the OS upgrades are reasonably priced, given the margins they get elsewhere.

Re:All of them

[alices ice]

out of curiosity why didn't you just put it on a usb? or even better, isn't there some apple tool to create a usb installer?

Re:All of them

[PNutts]

isn't there some apple tool to create a usb installer?

Yes.

Re:All of them

[jbolden]

Since that was an AC... I'll answer for him. His rMBP means the $20 was waived. He got the license for $0 but that license applies to any machine he logs into with his App store account.

Re:All of them

[jbolden]

You don't need a tool. If you open up the package that comes with mountain lion there is a file which is mountable / burnable as a stand alone installer. Very typical of Apple: hard enough to stop people who don't know what they are doing from shooting themselves in the foot, easy enough that if you do know what you are doing you can make your install media.

Re:All of them

[exomondo]

Not to mention that everyone who downloaded it either by purchasing it or by getting a free copy through the up-to-date program is entitled to download it multiple times on any of their personal machines. I'm in the category of having bought a new retina MBP and having downloaded and installed it on all 3 of my other Macs, so I may represent 4 downloads of the software.

I bought the upgrade and installed it on all 4 of my macs, so there's one license but 4 downloads.

Depends on Why...

[localman57]

Remember that Windows 7 was Microsoft's most successful OS ever, in terms of adoption speed. Part of it had to do with the new features that 7 introduced, but part of it also had to do with how incredibly craptacular Vista was. Not saying that's neccesarily the case here; just saying you have to think a bit past the marketing hype.

Re:Depends on Why...

[Ucklak]

There are also more people alive in the world since XP.

I hope Windows 8 isn't as bad as Vista was.

Re:Depends on Why...

[Dynedain]

You're absolutely correct. And I think the fact that it was a painless upgrade through their App store made it so quick for adoption.

Compare to Microsoft's download options for Win7 where you had to find which online store you could actually purchase a download from, then download the disc image, find and download another app to turn that into something you could boot from, reboot the machine, and pray things would choke during the reformat. Not to mention the multiple price points and versions.

The Mountain Lion upgrade on the other hand was:
1) Open App store.
2) Click install next the Mountain Lion.
3) Pay $20 (or redeem an install code between steps 1 and 2)
4) After download completes, launch the App from you Applications Folder
5) Click ok, ok, agree, ok
6) Wait for restart.

Easiest OS upgrade I have ever seen. Even Windows service packs are more complicated.

Re:Depends on Why...

[ninjacut]

the data shows Windows 7 is most successful, 3 times all of OSX, iOS put together http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsofts-massive-windows-sales-compared-to-apple-2010-7

Re:Depends on Why...

[nine-times]

As someone who uses both Mac OS and Windows, I'd say it was for very different reasons. People updated to Windows 7 so quickly because Windows XP was showing its age, while Vista was pretty unusable. In this case, Lion (10.7) was released a year ago and it's totally fine.

However, if you want to kill some of the marketing hype, the deal is that the upgrade cost $20, and it can be downloaded and installed very easily with very little user interaction. Compatibility with Lion isn't an issue, so there's nothing to bar you from upgrading or to make anyone nervous about the upgrade.

So upgrading is cheap, easy, trouble-free, and seamless. Of course lots of people upgraded. On the other hand, it's a very incremental upgrade. There are a few added features and a few refinements, but anyone on Lion who doesn't want to spare the $20 can easily stick with Lion and not miss a lot. The biggest benefit of upgrading IMO is increased interoperability with iOS devices, but if you don't have an iPhone or iPad, those won't help you much.

Re:Depends on Why...

[Billly Gates]

Remember that Windows 7 was Microsoft's most successful OS ever, in terms of adoption speed. Part of it had to do with the new features that 7 introduced, but part of it also had to do with how incredibly craptacular Vista was. Not saying that's neccesarily the case here; just saying you have to think a bit past the marketing hype.

Not really. Adoption is very lagging with Windows 7. While Windows 7 is a fine desktop OS if you are stuck in the Windows ecosystem, the sales of Windows 7 counted include XP users who downgraded. MS used this as a marketing stunt just like Vista saying it was the most sccessful OS EVER!! So it is false as you couldn't buy anything but a Windows Vista/7 license even to run XP after 2007/2008.

The real marketshare numbers show Windows 7 as a mediocre player in the hearts and minds of consumers who still prefer and use XP and wont upgrade. In non tech forums and even on slashdot you will find people clining to XP to life feeling Windows 7 is just a fancy gui and XP is the end all of all that is holy etc. Windows 7 just hit the 50% marketshare a few months ago almost 3 years after it came out! That is terrible historically. By this time in 2004 3 years after Xp/Windows 2000 came out, 80% of Windows users already migrated with 20% still using ME and 98.

MS needs to do more in its Windows product line to convince people to upgrade. I am not a Mac user but www.arstechnica.com has a great review of Mountain Lion and Apple is updating its core OS much more to entice its users to upgrade. In many ways Windows 7 is behind desktop wise. Windows 7 is just a bug fix to Vista which was a poorly implemented clone of MacOSX tiger in which Apple Spotlight was everything winfs was supposed to be. MS is still playing catchup from that and XP users noticed that and find little reason to upgrade besides a fancier gui and instant search.

Re:Depends on Why...

[Billly Gates]

I really hate that registry. It is why you can't upgrade Windows as cleanly. Infact, as an IT profession I would never recommend an upgrade. You have no idea what in hell would happen with some no name app or setting the user did 3 years earlier on his pc that would mess up Windows 7 in some way.

I always use the Easy Transfer Wizard and use thumb drives to move settings and user files and do a fresh format and installation. Apple has Windows smoked in this regard, not to mention one of XPs weaknesses is that its registry can be damaged and fragmented leading to Windows rot. A problem Mac users never have to worry about.

Re:Depends on Why...

[El_Oscuro]

In Linux, the equivilent of the registery is stored in the users $HOME under hidden directories. I haven't got into that level with OS/X on my new Mac yet, but since it is Unix, it is probably done the same way.

So when I got tired of messing with Unity on Ubunu, I deleted the O/S partition and installed Linux Mint. Imagine my suprise when after booting it for the first time, not only did I have my desktop settings and icons, but Firefox even remembered my last opened tabs!

Re:Depends on Why...

[MachineShedFred]

Mac OS X uses a concept called "preference domains" for all of it's settings, and it's also how every application that has been written after the developer read the platform documentation stores their settings.

You have the following folders, in order of supercedence (there are some settings that have to be in specific places, but they are rare exceptions, and usually have to do with system daemons):

1. ~/Library/Preferences
2. /Library/Preferences
3. /Network/Library/Preferences*
4. /System/Library/Preferences

Number 1 is for user-specific preferences and settings, and is stored in the user's home folder (/Users/user_short_name).
Number 2 is for machine-wide preferences, which act on system-level services and also act as defaults for users that don't have their own preferences in #1.
Number 3 is an optional domain, which can be used by administrators to provide workgroup-level defaults through the use of an auto-mounting share. #2 and #1 override #3.
Number 4 is the Apple-provided defaults, and should never be changed since they can be overrided by numbers 3, 2, and 1. This is a failsafe so that core system frameworks always have a known-good configuration.

All property list files (plist) use a reverse-DNS style notation to prevent collisions between software vendors. Example: com.adobe.InDesign.plist has the settings for Adobe InDesign. com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist has the settings for Apple Software Update. These files are either in text, or binary. There are lots of tools you can use to read and change these files - there is nothing secret or encoded about them.

Hope that helps.

Re:Depends on Why...

[AmiMoJo]

You are comparing Apples and Oranges. Microsoft offers Service Packs for free, they download and install automatically, even simpler than a Mac OS update. For major OS updates MS provide a simple tool that gives you the options and takes you to the right purchase page, and while installation does require a blank DVD or USB flash drive it can be started from within Windows.

MacOS on the other hand offers incremental updates that are somewhere between a service pack and a full OS update. You can't really compare the two.

The difference is due to how Microsoft supports older versions of the OS for a long, long time and likes to keep corporate customers happy. Apple can be a bit more flexible and drop support for older versions of the OS much faster.

Re:Depends on Why...

[MachineShedFred]

I know that reading is hard, but Phil Schiller 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."

No one made a direct comparison between Mountain Lion's sales and Windows 7's sales, until you just did right before disproving it. This is what we call a classic straw man argument.

Re:Depends on Why...

[Inda]

1) Notification saying "Software upgrade"
2) Click through, clicking all OK buttons
3) Wait for restart.

That was the easiest OS upgrade I've ever seen.

This OS is Android.

Re:Actual title should be

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Haterade Addicts get Another Opportunity to Bitch About Apple!

.. in other news ...

[JWSmythe]

.. in other news, Apple's new bot downloading cluster works perfectly. 2.8 million test downloads in 4 days.

Re:.. in other news ...

[ktappe]

.. in other news, Apple's new bot downloading cluster works perfectly. 2.8 million test downloads in 4 days.

Cute.

Whether it was being downloaded by bots or humans, this story was interesting to me from a distributed payload distribution angle. At 4.1Gb a copy, that many Mountain Lions comes out to over 12 petabytes transferred in under four days. That had potential to clog up Ted Stevens' series of tubes, but I've not heard of any problems.

Re:.. in other news ...

[JWSmythe]

Well, if you do the math....

4 days = 345600 seconds
4,100 MB * 4 million = 16,400,000,000 MB
Converting to Mb for bandwidth purposes = 131,200,000,000 Mb
That would average to 379,629 Mb/s, or 370Gb/s

Well, that is still impressive. I'm sure they were serving it off of tens of thousands of machines, spread across many CDN nodes, which would have lowered the impact on the Internet at large.

I just wouldn't want to see their data services bill. :) I'm sure a few someones got filthy rich off of that.

Re:.. in other news ...

[inKubus]

Either your math is true and they impressively did this or you found a hole in the ever present reality distortion field where everything is the best ever and we're all doing just great.

Re:.. in other news ...

[JWSmythe]

    Well, they did move the Slashdot servers over to Cardiff. That damned rift does all kinds of weird things.

what no official torrent???

[advocate_one]

would have saved them quite a bit of bandwidth... and given another legitimate use for torrents...

Re:Actual title should be

[localman57]

We were all very eager for a path forward that offered fixes and completion for Lion's half-realized and sometimes infuriating design / implementation choices. :-)

Ah, yes. Going forward, I propose that we call this the "Windows Vista Hangover effect."

Why not?

[Missing.Matter]

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.

Re:Why not?

[repetty]

Why not? Because Mountain Lion 1) won't run on almost all my Macs, 2) it removed the SAVE AS choice, 3) the main goal of Mountain Lion appears to be to corral software developers into using Apple's App Store for all sales.

Not quite right... it was Lion 10.7 that removed "Save As..."

Other people have listed some compelling reasons that they installed Mountain Lion but you list two, including grousing about your archaic Macs.

If you are going to take the time to type, giving something worthwhile to think about, eh.

Anonymous Cowards is funny peoples.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, 10.8 adds "Save As..." back, by holding the option key down the "Duplicate" option is now replaced with "Save As..."

Re:Why not?

[Darinbob]

Mountain Lion is breaking some apps according to our IT so we can't upgrade. But that's ok we are still working out all the kinks in Lion and hopefully sometimes next year we may be back up to pre-Lion productivity levels.

Maybe it's ok for consumer level iCandy apps, people who think the cloud is something kewl, but for actual use a production unix developer laptop it's been very painful. Support via third party forums is a very bad support model. (hey guess what, using gdb still pops up a security screen asking my permission to run it, something I thought I had fixed months ago)

Re:Why not?

[gman003]

Why not? Maybe because I can't.

I've got a Mac Pro. 2006 issue. Still runs fine, it's still more than powerful enough for anything I actually do. Sucks a good amount of juice, but I don't pay the power bill so what do I care?

I put a Windows partition on it (many of my machines dual-boot either Windows/Mac or Windows/Linux). Runs fine using Windows 7. It meets all the specs for Windows 8 as well, but I'm not upgrading.

But OS X, I can only go up to Lion (10.7). This is supposedly because they dropped a lot of 32-bit support, and the 64-bit support on this Mac is kind of crap. It's supposedly possible if I hack some shit to get 64-bit EFI and get a new graphics card with 64-bit drivers, but come on, Apple. Six years isn't that old, especially when it's that powerful for six years old.

Re:Why not?

[muecksteiner]

If that is true, I am upgrading my box tomorrow. For me personally, the whole "duplicate" crap was, and still is, the single most annoying thing about Lion, hands down (who the hell within Apple signed off on that UI Chernobyl, anyway?).

And it's not even like I got a choice - I got a new work machine with Lion pre-installed, and downgrading that... well, that was not really an option, either. I did not feel like trying out how backward compatible the newer Macbook Pro would be with Snow Leopard.

Re:Why not?

[R3d M3rcury]

Hurrdurrr, old operating system was broken, so that's a reason NOT to upgrade to a new one that includes bug fixes [...]

...and pay $20 for the privilege, no less!

Re:Why not?

[rsborg]

Barring comparability and performance regressions, at $20 why not upgrade?

One reason - printer drivers - yes the old canard still has a bite - my Canon multifunction doesn't have 10.8 drivers yet - and may never get them - it took Canon several months to make their drivers Lion compatible last year, and I expect the same if not longer for this release.

I don't use SSL-VPN anymore, but that's another case where unless you're lucky, if you have older kit, you will experience lack of driver availability - took 8 months for my SSL VPN provider to support Snow Leopard.

Re:Why not?

[jasonditz]

Yeah I was content with 10.6.8 but a new version of Xcode was worth $20 by itself.

Re:Why not?

[Volguus Zildrohar]

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

My very favourite one, browsing the new features page to figure out if the upgrade is worth it, was how they've added a sidebar to Calendar so you can always see your various calendars.

IOW, it's exactly how it was in Snow Leopard, but now it's one of "200+ new features". I certainly appreciate it, but it sounds like they were really stretching for new features this time.

Re:Why not?

[Macgrrl]

I lost AppleTalk support with 10.6 and had to pension off a perfectly good LW4/600PS. Bought a new Xerox laser printer (which I must test when I get home now) but I fully expect it to work with Mountain Lion.

Re:Why not?

[suprem1ty]

To be fair, most of the machines that ML drops I'd hardly call archaic

Re:Actual title should be

[Anonymous Coward]

This discussion thread brought to you by Slashdot, proud sponsor of the 2012 Smartphone OS Flame War.

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[jellomizer]

The average Sales Man often gets the title of VP of sales. Because they need to work with the other companies higher ups, having a VP in their title makes them seem important, not just a normal sales guy.

Re:Actual title should be

[Anonymous Coward]

I sent it from my *rad* free Linux distribution of the month. If only I could find that config file that moves from distro to distro to change it.

But the big question...

[camperslo]

Who'll be first to get it to run on an x86 Surface tablet?

At $99 fire sale prices, those would be pretty decent with Lion added.
Zoom the menus for touch with the magnify routines the dock uses?

Re:But the big question...

[Missing.Matter]

I thought we all agreed that a desktop OS was a terrible idea on a tablet. OSX doesn't even have the touch amenities that Windows 7 does.

Re:But the big question...

[camperslo]

I thought we all agreed that a desktop OS was a terrible idea on a tablet. OSX doesn't even have the touch amenities that Windows 7 does.

I'm not talking a commercial product, just a hack that would be interesting to see. Certainly the desktop OSes won't scale down to smartphones well. But I suspect that whatever experiments Steve passed over in the labs would still be interesting, and probably more fun/functional than what the other guys will ship. Access to OS X apps on something that wouldn't get used otherwise would be a fun twist.
Apple has done quite a bit with multi-touch. They could likely apply it in new places, maybe toggling it on for sections of the screen or a flat KB.

Re:But the big question...

[Pieroxy]

You must be joking... Steve Jobs spent more than half a decade to design an OS from the ground up (UI wise) to make it useable on a tablet, and you think, citing Jobs, it would be a good idea to bring Jobs's other OS to a tablet?

I honestly cannot think of anything more ridiculous. That's basically what Microsoft tried before the iPad which failed so miserably that everyone forgot tablets existed before the iPad.

You're looking for a job? Try applying to the CEO position of Miscrosoft. You seem to be as smart as he is.

Re:But the big question...

[Targon]

And that is where many people fail to understand some real basics when it comes to design. The CORE OS should be UI agnostic, and as such, should allow for multiple UIs to be run on top of it. The UI then is just that, how you use the device, and you should be able to pick and choose which UI best suits the device you are using.

Now, success or failure are as much about marketing as it is about the quality and features of a product, and we can see that happens to many products that are far more innovative than the iPhone. Innovation is about trying NEW things, and Apple is about finding something that works, and sticking with it while others are experimenting with things that really ARE new and in many cases better. When it comes to tablets, the technology just wasn't there before the iPad to make a tablet that people would want to use, and that is something many people fail to understand. We are FINALLY at the point where low power processors don't suck, and that is why this area is drawing so much attention these days.

Re:But the big question...

[narcc]

I think we can all agree that iOS, while designed for a touch-only interface, hasn't held up well. Just take a look at how may functions are crammed in to the home button! Hardly the intuitive! The same can be said for their ridiculous suite of gestures. (Five-finger swipe? Really?) Even RIM got the basic gestures right, with a rather nice set of simple and intuitive gestures which, for the most part, require but a single finger. It's hard to imagine for some, but RIM has crushed Apple in tablet UI design. How sad is that for Apple?

To defend the parent, with the ridiculous mess that the iOS UI is now, a straight MacOS interface would be an improvement.

Re:But the big question...

[Anonymous Coward]

The CORE OS should be UI agnostic, and as such, should allow for multiple UIs to be run on top of it. The UI then is just that, how you use the device, and you should be able to pick and choose which UI best suits the device you are using.

Note that iOS and OS X do in fact share the same "CORE OS". Even the UI layers share a lot of common software underpinnings.

Innovation is about trying NEW things, and Apple is about finding something that works, and sticking with it while others are experimenting with things that really ARE new and in many cases better.

I think you're fooling yourself here. Apple was in fact experimenting with something truly new while developing what we now know as iOS. They completely ditched the traditional windows/icons/mouse/pointer GUI and went all-in on trying to use fingers on a capacitive multitouch touchscreen as the one and only required input device. Even the best of the previous attempts at doing something similar (such as Apple's own Newton, or PalmOS) relied quite heavily on a stylus and resistive touchscreens. Others (e.g. the "slate" versions of Windows) kept a normal desktop UI and tried to graft touch on top of it.

What Apple does differently is (on most projects) to not release anything to the public until they know it really works. It turns out that Apple had functional prototypes of iPads as far back as 2004 or 2005. They decided to make the first shipping product based on the technology a phone rather than a fullsize tablet, and at the time (in 2007) lots of stuff in the iPhone was genuinely groundbreaking.

Re:But the big question...

[jeremyp]

The same can be said for their ridiculous suite of gestures. (Five-finger swipe? Really?) Even RIM got the basic gestures right, with a rather nice set of simple and intuitive gestures which, for the most part, require but a single finger.

Unless you have suffered some horrible industrial accident, you most likely have got four fingers and a thumb on each hand. Why not use them?

Re:But the big question...

[narcc]

Because it's awkward and unnecessary? Because it makes one-handed use impossible?

It's pretty obvious at this point that Apple dropped the ball. Their UI just couldn't keep up with the times.

They need to make some dramatic changes if they want to continue to compete in the mobile space. I'm confident that they're all-too-painfully aware of the current problems and are planning to fix them in future releases. That doesn't change the state of things now, however.

Re:But the big question...

[Divebus]

OSX doesn't even have the touch amenities that Windows 7 does.

Haven't tried using multiple fingers on a MBP, Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad yet?

Re:Actual title should be

[Torp]

I don't know about the 2999999 other sheep, but i will be upgrading my laptop from snow leopard to mountain lion indeed. I liked some features in Lion, but they sounded like they needed improvement. Mountain Lion may be it.
Also, it's cheap.

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I work people can enter their own job titles on the internal 'phone book' on the intranet.

As you can imagine everyone is senior this, senior that etc ... except for one of the sysadmins in India who is the 'Most Senior Systems Administrator'

Re:Actual title should be

[DJRumpy]

Can't agree more. /. is becoming a joke as a 'news for nerds' site. They turn into the trollfest we see above. Every single post above is flamebait.

The fact that OS X broke out of the marginal OS arena is good news for any non-windows platform, regardless of who makes it. It's also of interest to the enterprise crowd looking for alternatives to Windows 8, and not only due to the fact that this happens to be OS X but also because they may look at other alternatives if Windows grip on the computer market isn't rock solid.

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[dingen]

He answers only to the CEO, as do all senior VP's. There are just nine of these guys and they're each responsible for a fundamental aspect of Apple's operation.

I agree most corporate titles are complete bullshit, and I'm sure there are also lots of these folks running around at Apple Inc. But imho Apple's Senior VPs aren't really part of that nonsense as their titles actually show their responsibility and function pretty well.

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[Quiet_Desperation]

I wish we had that. I'd be High Potentate And Head Muckety Muck.

No, wait... SENIOR High Potentate And Head Muckety Muck.

Re:Actual title should be

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

FileVault2 is worthwhile.

So is multi-destination Time Machine.

There's a bunch of better integrations to iCloud - which are interesting - and make Time Machine less valuable, at the same time. ;-)

The other cloud/SaaS plugin services are no use to me, as I don't Twit, etc.

I like airplay mirroring. It makes my 1080p TV a big display via Apple TV - without cabling.

Re:Can't justify the price of hardware to run it

[maccodemonkey]

Breaking news: Tech blogs covering release of operating system that every single member of their readership may not be using. "Industry relevance" cited.

Re:Actual title should be

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because it's always hilarious to mock people who believe they 'Think Different' by buying mass-produced consumer electronics from one multibillion dollar multinational vs another.

Re:Actual title should be

[adlib24]

Mod up parent. The main reason I moved to Lion was to FINALLY be able to resize windows by selecting anywhere on the frames. This was an obvious and long overdue feature, but they changed many things that didn't need changing. I can think of no reasons to stay on Lion as the grass certainly looks greener on the Mountain, but maybe that's just because my boots are covered in mud.

Re:Actual title should be

[rsborg]

"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."

or?

We were all very eager for a path forward that offered fixes and completion for Lion's half-realized and sometimes infuriating design / implementation choices. :-)

I'll take that over Microsoft's Vista, which took 5 years to arrive after XP landed. Even at its longest, Apple has never left their users without an OS update for more than 2.5 years (Tiger - during which they added support for Intel processors).

Other ways than torrents to save bandwidth

[SuperKendall]

would have saved them quite a bit of bandwidth

So does Akamai, which is what Apple uses.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[Wain13001]

If you are a typical professional software developer and your OSX machine saves you five minutes every day in time and frustration compared to a similar Windows system, then the added price of the OSX machine will pay for itself in less than a year.

If you are a typical software developer the above doesn't happen because why would you develop on an OSX machine when you're not developing for the OSX platform?

Re:Actual title should be

[FreshlyShornBalls]

Indeed. It boggles the mind as to why they finally fixed that feature, but still have not enabled simple file operations (copy / paste / rename / etc.) in the File Open and File Save dialogs. I can't tell you how pissed I get when I have to stop what I'm doing, open a Finder window and then navigate all over again to a location just to rename a folder, for example.

2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[mpetch]

Yesterday I went to the App Store, only to learn that my 2007 Mac Mini (Purchased in 2008) didn't have the hardware requirements to run OS/X Mountain Lion. I have a 64bit CPU, 2GB ram, but only have 32bit EFI. Apparently the video in this unit isn't supported. I was a bit surprised that 5 year old equipment just isn't worth it to Apple to support. If someone asks why I needed to upgrade - it was required to build and test some open source projects I work on.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[repetty]

I was a bit surprised that 5 year old equipment just isn't worth it to Apple to support.

Why were you surprised? They don't support my G4 PowerMac anymore, either.

At what point, exactly, might you cease to be surprised?

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[Dynedain]

So the entry-point machine from 5 years ago doesn't run the latest and greatest? Big surprise.
My 2007 Macbook Pro will run Mountain Lion just fine.

I challenge you to find a $600 PC from 2004 that would run Windows7 when it launched in 2009. You can even ignore 64bit Win7 and just focus on Win7 32bit Home Basic if you want. (As you yourself said, Mountain Lion is exclusively 64bit).

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[GrumpyOldMan]

If you really want to upgrade, you should be able to "hackintosh" your mac. I did this to test 64bit drivers on a macpro1,1. It worked well enough for what I needed it (running 64b kernel), however, I would not use this setup for a daily use machine, as the video card acceleration went away, the power usage increased, etc. I'd keep a separate partition for daily use, and only boot into the "hackintosh" 10.8 setup when you need to work on your project.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[mpetch]

PPC was a major architecture change when they shifted to Intel. I could understand that they didn't support the PPC systems through all of their future OS'es. The I64 bit Intel Mac Mini won't work for 2 reasons. 32Bit EFI (Although there is a work around for that). Not supporting a 5 year old video card is harder to swallow. Boot loading and video just seems to be a poor excuse for not being able to us Mountain Lion. At least the Mac Pro's prior to 2008 that Mountain Lion won't run on can be hacked to get around the 32bit EFI issue (although it isn't guaranteed to work), and the video card can be upgraded. If I were an pre-2008 Intel Mac Pro user who invested thousands of dollars only to find out that 4 years later I can't run (out of the box) a new OS - I wouldn't be happy.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[Charliemopps]

Never? Windows 8 will run on a 10yr old computer. It might not run the best... but it'll run. Linux will run on just about anything as long as you get the correct drivers for it. Maybe you'll need to use an older GUI... or none at all... but it'll run.

Apple is the poster child for locked in environments, less user choice, aggressive tactics to get users to upgrade as often and as frequently as possible... etc...

Because Apple profits off of both the OS and the hardware, they have a very strong incentive to make new OS's require new hardware... as well has New hardware that requires new OSs.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[the_humeister]

I have a Sempron 2600+ (64-bit too!) machine I assembled back in 2004. It runs Windows 7 just fine.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[Billly Gates]

You think that is bad My aunt's 2009 imac stopped running her very expensive Adobe software suite after upgrading to LION. She was fuming.

Apple did a F-U to their core market by ditching carbon. She ended up rebuying like $2300 for CS 6 and throwing out her perfecting working 2009 mac for a new one she didn't need.

She was very close to considering a PC instead after hearing XP is still supported and how Win 7 will last until 2020 if she opts for a Windows workstation instead. If Apple pulls similar things again this will be her last mac.

Apple has to be more careful and less greedy.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[SuperKendall]

Why did she not simply re-install Snow Leopard?

There's no reason she had to upgrade any of that...

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[CrashNBrn]

I know. Windows 8 will be $40.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[SplashMyBandit]

Actually, Linux generally does really good support of middle-aged gear. Better than Windows and better than Apple. Unfortuntately what gets most of the press is when Linux doesn't support brand new stuff for months (since it takes a while for the contributors to figure out how to wrangle new devices).

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[TJamieson]

Even some 64-bit EFI machines won't run it, because they have Intel graphics. Anything with the 965 series (such as X3100) is unsupported for one reason - there was never a 64-bit kext for it. This is also what kept these machines from booting a 64-bit kernel in 10.7. So if Apple and/or Intel would actually create a 64-bit kext for the 965 series, a whole bunch more machines would run it just fine.

FWIW, this might also get your Mini up and running, as there are definitely ways to get around the 32-bit EFI problem. But until they create that kext (read: never), it's not gonna happen.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[antdude]

Apple does this often. It's normal. :(

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[gmhowell]

Adobe was warned a decade before. They dragged their feet getting off of Carbon. If users read patch notes before, they would have known.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[Telvin_3d]

Never? Windows 8 will run on a 10yr old computer.

Only (some) 10 year old computers that have since had upgrades. The oldest Intel processors that W8 will support had just come out and the earliest AMD processors were 2003. And it would be a damn rare thing to find a 2002 graphics card that meets W8 support requirements.

So, yes, if you bought the most expensive computer possible a decade ago and continued to upgrade its RAM and Video Card it would now run W8 at a minimal level.

If you bought anything but the very cheapest models OSX 10.8 is good back to 2007. Which considering that Apple only started switching to Intel in 2006 is pretty good.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[Billly Gates]

So it is her fault Apple decided to make her spend several thousand dollars?

She doesn't care about technicalities. The fact is Apple planned to make her expensive software not run for no reason and she is pissed.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[Billly Gates]

She had leopard which received no security updates anymore forcing her to buy lion which then bricked her photoshop installation and suite. Again planned obscolence.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[SuperKendall]

She had leopard which received no security updates anymore forcing her to buy lion

That's utter bullshit. The OS was receiving security updates for some time, or she could have installed Snow Leopard (which I am still getting security updates for BTW). Or she could have just installed firefox. A system that old, that she's just using for photoshop mostly - there's really no need to be concerned about updates. Attackers target newer systems, not older ones...

My mother had an older Powermac as well. I let her use it as long as the software she needed to use still worked, and it did what she required. NINE years later, long after Apple stopped supporting it I got her a new one.

I think the problem was YOU talking her into an upgrade she plainly did not NEED.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[gmhowell]

They announced their plans 6 years earlier. People shouldn't buy expensive things unless they know how to use them. $3000 worth of computer and software or $3000 worth of rifle or $3000 worth of car.

BTW, I bet if she still had that computer and still has that software, they work just fine together. Might require her to reinstall from the media that came with the computer, but if she has backups, that's a piece of cake. Nobody held a gun to her head and made her upgrade.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[AzN1337c0d3r]

I have a Pentium 4 circa 2001 that runs Windows 7 just fine. GPU runs with only Aero Basic, but otherwise it's an ok machine. It's not like a computer that just sits in the corner and idles all day either, my mother uses it.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[Macgrrl]

My CS2 install had big crosses over each of the apps after the Mountain Lion upgrade.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[anerki]

I completely understand your frustration, a machine 5 years old should run anything. Especially considering the average lifespan of my Mac laptops is about 7 years. (Hell, all of them still work, even the Powerbook which ended up having the screen torn (metal hinges, not a good idea Apple, not a good idea ...)).

Anywho, the point being, I understand your frustration, and it's quite valid as well. But I do get Apple's argument. I'm not too savvy on the OS technical parts, but parts of what made Mountain Lion so nice for me, is the performance. Basically it's just Lion, but done right. Like 7 is basically Vista, but done right. Everything feels 20% faster, and for me, it's what it needed badly ... But doing that probably required them to drop support for those old 32bit components (correct me if I'm wrong). So at some point you have to make a choice.

But don't worry, you're not missing much by not upgrading to Mountain Lion, my 8 yr old white Macbook with a Core Duo 2 still runs Snow Leopard for exactly that reason ... (and runs it just fine)

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[suprem1ty]

Most machines from 2007 will support Win8. Hell my desktop is 5 years old, I'd be pretty pissed if Microsoft considered my quad-core desktop w/ 4Gb of RAM not good enough to run their latest OS. Yes I understand it's hardly an entry-point machine, but ML does drop support for any Mac pro from before *2008*, which (if you got a higher-end machine) does include some very decent quad-core hardware. I do think Apple needs to be a little kinder to people with older hardware, especially considering how meager some of their improvements are in ML.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[reidconti]

That is true, that apple has an incentive to make the new OS not work on old hardware. I have a 2006 Mac Pro (first model with Intel chips) that ran me ~$2800 back in August 2006. It's still chugging along great, doing my video transcoding work when I ask it to do so -- albeit not as quickly as a brand new machine, of course.

I don't use it much anymore, but it still works fine, as does my Dell monitor I bought at the same time.

The Mac Pro is not capable of running Mountain Lion. That's a bit of a bummer, as I like having all of my machines on the same OS. However, I don't use the system a lot, and Lion will work fine on it. It's 6 years old. I'm sure in another 2 years I'll stop using it entirely, but 8 years is a pretty good run.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[IKnwThePiecesFt]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think the video card requirement is about OpenCL. AFAIK the video card cutoff is at the OpenCL compatibility line.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[IKnwThePiecesFt]

Also, I fail to understand why upgrading to Lion (which worked on the existing hardware) forced her to buy new hardware (which came with Lion)?

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[IKnwThePiecesFt]

Nah, it's Adobe's fault that Adobe made he spend several thousand dollars. Apple said "hey this is going away" a long time ago, and Adobe said "well when it does, people will just buy the new one!"

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[AK Marc]

But that's not even the cutoff. My wife's MacBookPro is older than his mini, and it'll run Mountain Lion. The cheapest possible Apples from 5 years ago are out, but the top of the line from a few years older than that are fine.

Re:Actual title should be

[Anonymous Coward]

I like airplay mirroring. It makes my 1080p TV a big display via Apple TV - without cabling.

That feature alone is worth the $20 to quite a few people. This is no service pack.

Re:Actual title should be

[jedidiah]

Why Apple? This has very little to do with Apple actually. This is more about a lame tech press that treats every Apple press release like something that's going to win them a Pulizter.

"Apple sees record downloads after it pushes users to downloads"

That's not news, that's the kind of math that PolySci professors think you don't need to learn.

Re:Actual title should be

[Skarecrow77]

you are aware -why- there was such a gap between xp and vista, right?

or are you just poking MS with a stick to amuse yourself?

Re:icrap

[TimHunter]

Troll score: 1/10. You can do better.

Re:Actual title should be

[Skarecrow77]

I would have tried OSX ages ago, if only Apple let me install it on hardware I already owned instead of purchasing new hardware which is spec'd damn near the same as what I've already got.

yes I'm aware of hackintosh'ing your machine. just seems like too much of a hassle.

I did try the OS in a VM. it was alright, but you can only learn so much about an OS from a VM. you've got to actually live with it a few months to really know what it's like.

Re:icrap

[gnasher719]

Who cares about Apple OS's? The whole company sucks and so do their overpriced products. I hear it sucks ass to work at Apple. Its very cutthroat and the company that makes their hardware, Foxconn, literally has nets outside the windows to save would-be jumpers from committing suicide.

The jealousy. The utter jealousy.

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[ilsaloving]

They probably just ran out of new terms to use, so they strung more and more existing ones together till it sounded good.

Reminds me of way back when, ATI (pre-AMD) released the following series of video cards:
Graphics Ultra
Graphics Ultra Pro
Graphics Ultra Pro Turbo

I was really hoping they would release a Graphics Ultra Pro Turbo Pro Pro Ultra (maybe with 'Mongoose' thrown in somewhere), but they ended up releasing a new processor and the names went a different direction.

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[Skarecrow77]

could be that the guy has a dozen people working under him with titles like VP of north american marketing, VP of central american marketing, VP of defending our IP from the chinese, VP of middle eastern marketing, etc.

he's "worldwide" cause he's in charge of all the smaller "wides"?

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[John Bokma]

Uhm, because you develop *nix software?

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[jedidiah]

Five whole minutes eh? That's like change in the couch cushions. There are so many other things that could waste 5 minutes (or even longer) in your average work day that it hardly seems worthwhile to bother with.

Re:Actual title should be

[Yvan256]

Multi-destination Time Machine?

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[Skarecrow77]

Reminds me of Super Street Fighter II, Turbo Champion Hyper Fighting Edition madness from the 90s.

pretty sure at least one of those editions only added extra colorshift palates.

Re:Can't justify the price of hardware to run it

[repetty]

Good on you, Apple and all those who live in glass and stainless steel houses who can afford to keep buying the beautiful and sleek Apple hardware on which to run Mountain Lion....

Hmmm. I'm reading your gibberish on a used $400 iMac that can certainly run Mountain Lion.

Re:Actual title should be

[Sponge Bath]

...just poking MS with a stick to amuse yourself?

It's the simple things that make you smile.

Re:icrap

[repetty]

Who cares about Apple OS's? The whole company sucks and so do their overpriced products.

Quantify this, please.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[Wain13001]

of course I'm not addressing where the magical five minutes is coming from either, just making a point about 'typical' developers

Re:Actual title should be

[VGPowerlord]

I'll take that over Microsoft's Vista, which took 5 years to arrive after XP landed.

To be fair, XP did have two service packs in the interim, the second of which added a few new things: Windows Firewall (as crappy as it is), support for the NX bit, limiting raw sockets, WPA support for WiFi, and Bluetooth support (although I heard it was kinda flaky). Oh and a popup blocker for IE6 (this was back when people still used IE).

Re:Actual title should be

[Skarecrow77]

I think you mean OSX is not for people who are good with money.

Because people who continually purchase and re-purchase goods at artifically inflated prices that are pretty much the same as the goods they already own, simply for the cachet of having the label, well generally those people are what we call "bad at managing money".

Re:Actual title should be

[Sponge Bath]

That's an awesome turn of phrase, I'm surprised Apple did not trademark it.

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[Ed_1024]

"There are just nine of these guys"

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne...

Ooooerrrr! Jony Ive must have made them out of Aluminium, maybe Titanium for the Tim Cook's One!

Re:Actual title should be

[PeanutButterBreath]

Ok. Your point? OSX is not for the poor?

Not for people who care about any definition of "free".

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[mfnickster]

I'd be Part-Time Ultimate Goombah of the Known Universe.

Re:Actual title should be

[i kan reed]

I hear there's actually a few competing products for your operating system money that do just that. In fact, it's safe to say that limited power user oriented features have been one of the chief complaints with apple operating systems for years.

Re:icrap

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Who cares about Apple OS's?

139 comments and counting.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[jbolden]

I've never written for OSX and I've been on OSX since 10.1. And the reason is that OSX is a pretty good Unix while having good business productivity software. As a Unix / development environment it is not as good as Linux, but certainly more than consistent enough with most server environments to make it possible to develop. In Windows everything is handled differently. The networking stack on windows is totally different: better in some respects, worse in others, but so different that developing on windows is pointless. And frankly the quartz based X11 ain't half bad so you can run most Linux dev tools and integrate them into your OS X workflow.

Re:Actual title should be

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

tracks multiple backup images.

Re:Actual title should be

[PNutts]

Agreed, but you aren't talking about Apple hardware. The 2012 MacBook Pro (forget Retina) is tremendously more than the 2008 MacBook Pro. And the 2008 MacBook Pro still has a decent resell value.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[Darinbob]

Because it's unix. I'd personally prefer a bland beige Linux box myself. But for a mixture of being able to do real work and at the same time have enterprise apps, it does the job (pre-Lion anyway). Using Cygwin under Windows is doable but oh so painful at times. VMware is far too slow and a massive memory hog to suffice as a real development station.

If you could ever get a version of Outlook on Linux then I think hordes of developers would abandon Windows. Sure they have email and calendar but not the same as being fully Exchange Server compatible, and in any case IT goons will eventually put something in place to break anything that's not Office. (oops, firefox not working, well too bad since the goons only support IE)

Re:Actual title should be

[jbolden]

I would have tried OSX ages ago, if only Apple let me install it on hardware I already owned instead of purchasing new hardware which is spec'd damn near the same as what I've already got.

I would have tried Black Berry OS 10 if only RIM would let me use it on iPhone. Huh?
Apple is not Microsoft, they do not sell operating systems. If you are unwilling to buy an Apple then why would they care if you try OSX?

Re:Actual title should be

[Guy Harris]

FileVault2 is worthwhile.

...and was introduced in Lion.

Re:Actual title should be

[TheRaven64]

I didn't understand this in the marketing material. Time Machine has allowed you to back up to different devices for ages (since its introduction?). What is the new bit?

Re:Actual title should be

[jbolden]

I would bet that OSX users use far more free software than Windows users.

1) OSX users were early users of Camino (a gecko based browser) and had a much higher Gecko adoption rate than Firefox on Windows during those crucial years.
2) In 2003 Apple released webcore and created the open engine that became the basis for Safari, Chrome and fed back into Konq.
3) Ruby is on its way into deep integration into Apple.
4) Darwin is free in both senses
5) A huge percentage of Apple users use Open/Libre/Neo Office.
etc..

Re:Actual title should be

[jo_ham]

I think you mean OSX is not for people who are good with money.

Because people who continually purchase and re-purchase goods at artifically inflated prices that are pretty much the same as the goods they already own, simply for the cachet of having the label, well generally those people are what we call "bad at managing money".

Well hello there Captain Generalisation, how are the waters around The Isle of Stereotypes.

This machine is coming up on 6 years old, and has run every version of OS X available since it's release date. If it weren't for the fact that I'd like an updated GPU, this machine would last much longer. Bonus, it also runs Windows for those last couple of apps that don't have Mac versions (ACD, some Steam games, one or two others), so I saved money and space by only having one computer instead of two.

Oh wait, sorry. I forgot. "I've bought every computer Apple have released in the past 6 years purely because they released one. My need to buy the newest hardware just because its been released is insatiable". Better?

Re:Actual title should be

[Skarecrow77]

no, of course not. I was refering to my original post, where I stated that I see no need to purchase a new machine that is spec'd nearly identically to a machine I already own, simply to run a different OS. I furthermore stated that anybody who does so is poor at managing money in response to the guy who insinuated that I didn't purchase a mac because I was "poor".

If you're buying a new machine because you either don't have one, or have something very old, and you want a mac? hey, fine, whatever. it's your dollar. you could have gotten more hardware for less money with a different manufacturer and OS combo, but I'm not going to shit all over your decision.

Yawn

[franblets]

... Where is the news...

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[John Bokma]

I currently develop on Linux, but going to switch to OS X soonish. I hope that those magical five minutes come from no longer having to deal with all the shit that Ubuntu has become. Wouldn't surprise me if those magical five minutes will stretch in 10 minutes in this (Ubuntu) case ;-).

Re:Can't justify the price of hardware to run it

[jo_ham]

6 year old Mac here. Might upgrade later this year, might not.

I think you're under the impression that because Apple releases new machines every year that automatically means everyone using a Mac simply must buy one. I'm not sure where you get that ridiculous idea. Do you think everyone who owns a Toyota buys a new one every year too?

Re:Actual title should be

[Skarecrow77]

Apple is not Microsoft, they do not sell operating systems.

they most assuredly DO sell operating systems.

they just will only sell it to people who have already purchased "their"(*) hardware. Which, hey, is their choice. I'm just pointing out that it limits their OS sales. I guess they figure they make more than that back on overpricing the hardware.

*insinuating everything electronic isn't all made by the same 3 or 4 manufactuers in china now anyway.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[Billly Gates]

I am learning some web development for a site I am creating. OSX is better than Linux if you use programs like Photoshop and Dreamweaver and other graphical design software. Its screens, color calibration, and other stuff which make it a choice for creative professionals that Windows is lacking. Windows Vista finally caught up with enhanced color if you have a high end monitor for example.

You can run Word and Excel so you can communicate to Windows users with documents that are not malformed due to bugs only available to office users that LibraOffice can't often duplicate exactly.

I wish I could afford afford a mac but the ones I have used are superior to anything out there. Of course if you make server software like your post suggests you do not need these things.

Re:Blatant cash grab, or understanding your consum

[jbolden]

Seems kind of obvious that on the same day as a financial report that saw Apple miss their targets, wow, Mountain Lion is released with its low, low, low price.

I think you might want to turn down the paranoia. The Mountain Lion previews have been out for about 6 months when Apple was setting records.

The $3000+ TCO you pay for the pleasure of owning an iPhone is a different story.

First off it ain't $3000. Second if you are going to count the total cost of a smartphone plan, the there is nothing special about iPhone. iPhone vs. the cheapest options is like a 5% difference.

and there is no denying it because there is no rational argument that can be made for Apple charging for trivial OS X upgrades when they have offered free substantial iOS upgrades in the past

10.0 - $129, 10.1 - $129 (free for 10.0), 10.2 - $129, 10.3 - $129, 10.4 - $129, 10.5 - $129, 10.6 - $29, 10.7 - $29, 10.8 - $19. Long before there was an iOS apple charged for upgrades.

Re:Actual title should be

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

A lot of the house-keeping of multiple destination was left to the user. If you want round-robin or first available, etc.? You'd make this manually. But HEY! Time Machine is automatic, right? There is a plethora of AppleScript and even Cocoa Apps to manage this. These are pretty much obsoleted.

I'll defer to the Ars Technica description:

Time Machine can now back up to multiple volumes. When more than one volume is selected, Time Machine will do a full backup to each selected volume, taking turns each time it runs.

Re:Actual title should be

[Moofie]

So, I'm confused. Whose decision are you shitting on, and why?

Should we check with you before we buy new hardware just to see if we're making decisions you approve of or not?

Re:Actual title should be

[NatasRevol]

Concurrently?

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html#timemachine

Re:Actual title should be

[Skarecrow77]

i'm shitting on the decisions of the guy who told me that the only reason I don't replace perfectly good hardware is just because i'm too poor.

how he got access to my financial records is beyond me.

Re:Actual title should be

[jbolden]

I don't know if it does limit their OS sales. Lots of people do sell operating systems only. And OpenStep which was essentially an earlier version of OS X was available. People didn't buy OpenStep. Mac OS X Server 1.0 was the first version of OSX available only for Apple hardware and sales have been much much better since they stopped selling OSes.

Re:Actual title should be

[jo_ham]

You suck at recognizing sarcasm on the internet.

That wasn't sarcasm.

You also forgot to log in, kid.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[jbolden]

I agree with them being wonderful. I'm on my new rMBP. I can't get get myself to go back to my 27" screen I'm loving the retina experience so much. And I'm not even an aesthetics guy. The only thing that makes me ever question my move to Mac has been Microsoft One Note. I've had far fewer problems than I ever expected and the number of things that "just work" has been huge. Stuff I never would have expected I'd enjoy like iDVD I love.

Re:Apple

[Phrogman]

I was *so* impressed with Apple years ago. My wife had an older OS/X laptop and had just bought a new one. The old one was running when she booted up the new one and during the setup process (all of about 3 minutes to be on the web), it popped up a dialog stating it noticed another laptop was running nearby and would we like to transfer the user settings and data from that machine to this one? Click yes and it was done in no time.
After years of fucking around with Windows systems, it was a joy to see something like that done right. Actually, thats the way I think of OS/X mostly - it works the way I want it to most of the time, and the rest of the time I pay it no attention because its not malfunctioning. I readily admit MS has made great leaps and bounds between Win7 and WinXP, but its still not as polished.

Re:Actual title should be

[LuckyLuke58]

Given that Vista was clearly beta software, and Win7 was basically what Vista 'should have been', I'd say it took closer to 8 or 9 years to deliver a new working OS after XP. But rest assured Win8 will be a Great Leap Forward.

The Goal

[SuperKendall]

The main goal of Mountain Lion appears to be to corral software developers into using Apple's App Store for all sales.

No, the goal is for OS-X to keep ahead of the malware writers, and this is how you do it - a default setting that every app needs to be signed to run (which you can work around by right-clicking on an app to tell it to run, or turning the setting off globally).

Lax security has been screwing over non-technical users for decades, so we need to move forward on that.

Re:Actual title should be

[cyber-vandal]

Before I bought my iMac I did look at Windows machines, and a similarly specced Dell XPS with an IPS 2048x1536 screen would've cost a whopping 25GBP less, would have had a much more annoying OS on it and would not have been so easy to carry up and down stairs. So I wasted the extra 25GBP on an iMac. You only find a similar specced machine for less if you have a shit screen. I quite fancied not having a shit screen for a change.

Re:Actual title should be

[marcello_dl]

> you are aware -why- there was such a gap between xp and vista, right?

You should measure gaps between final releases, not a release and a beta.

Re:Actual title should be

[SplashMyBandit]

Truly Powerful Users have the Terminal, BASH and Apple scripting, C/C++ and Java compilers, etc etc. I often rename files in my ever-open iTerm, since it is often much faster than using a GUI - the real beauty of a 17" MacBook Pro is the resolution (and multi-monitors) allow you to have so many xterms open at once :)

The Mac is at least as good as Linux for almost all of this (I say this after starting to use Linux a little in 1992 onward and heavily in 1996 to present). Hence, our office of Java developers have mostly migrated from Ubuntu (after the loss of focus on workstation practicalities to chase tablet dreams) to Mac.

Apart from removing the OpenGL pbuffer (which some libraries require) Mountain Lion has been a noticeable improvement over Lion for the guys at our development office.

They didn't own Rosetta

[bussdriver]

They have to pay somebody for it if I recall correctly. They didn't want to continue to pay for it and their stats show a small number of users need it; those that do are keeping the old machines around longer -- they do not care about people who want to run old stuff for so long (long to them is in consumer electronic time scales not small business time scales.) Instead they probably are cutting budget or paying for something else instead; I would figure the dictionary they use costs something and maybe they've added something to the OS that costs something to use. DVD playback probably still costs them something??

Re:Actual title should be

[MrHanky]

Very funny. Last time I wanted a computer, I specced one that was capable of doing what I wanted. After that, I checked the price of the cheapest Mac that could meet the spec, and saved $1000 by not buying from Apple. You see, a sane person will spec his computers himself, not force others to meet Apple's specs.

You're thinking like someone who first wants to buy a Mac, and then wants to gloat about it.

Re:Actual title should be

[cyber-vandal]

No I'm thinking that you're an arse with an immense chip on your shoulder. I don't gloat about having a Mac to anyone but I do recommend them to people who can afford them because the alternatives are shit.

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[iluvcapra]

why does the title need to mention "worldwide"?

Many manufacturers sell items to foreign markets, but only wholesale, and leave the marketing to the retailers or importers, in which case a "Marketing" guy is actually going to have a very different job description than a "worldwide marketing" guy.

Also Phil probably has the title in his contract.

I gots mine

[Adam Appel]

I had Lion on three machine because 2 new and one replaced HDD. Lion was so-so so new features but nothing I would have gone out to get. I am quite happy with Mountain Lion some of the features required me, a long time IT person to go and read/learn not just learn by fiddling around.

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[KhabaLox]

VP of middle eastern marketing,

Read this as "VP of middle earth marketing."

One veep to rule them all,
One veep to find them,
One veep to sell them all and with an iPad blind them,

Re:Actual title should be

[namgge]

I can't tell you how pissed I get when I have to stop what I'm doing, open a Finder window and then navigate all over again to a location just to rename a folder, for example.

No need to 'get pissed': the Command-R shortcut will reveal the selected file in a Finder window.

Re:Actual title should be

[Moofie]

Cool, thanks for clearing that up!

Re:Actual title should be

[jbolden]

True one of the huge advantages of the system. I'm not sure what the percentage of Fink/Macports/Homebrew users are though. But if you want to weigh people who use dozens of open source packages...

Re:Actual title should be

[Sigg3.net]

You have to pay for it? Srsly?

Re:Actual title should be

[Sigg3.net]

But PearOS can run on any plattform!

Re:Apple

[Sigg3.net]

So you are a consumer thriving in the walled garden. Good for you!

Others enjoy greater freedom, at the price of customizations. We have GNU/Linux. Good for us!

Re:Actual title should be

[jbolden]

Well yes. But

PearOS may look a bit like a Mac but doesn't act anything like a Mac.
Gnu Step acts a bit like a Mac but doesn't look like one.
Mix the two, and there might be an alternative.

Re:Actual title should be

[CrackedButter]

Dude, you just have to accept that this isn't going to happen. Just buy a Mac and get on with life. People have had this issue since licensing an OS was worth doing.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[Ash-Fox]

XNU is Not UNIX.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[Ash-Fox]

Cygwin is more POSIX compliant than OS X. I don't have to worry about forking without exec on cygwin, since it's not thread safe on OS X, nor do I need to worry about a half passed pthreads implementation. You should however get a Mac if you want your code to run on OS X. Having POSIX compliant code is not enough and may need to workaround some issues with OS X specific APIs.

Moving on...

[andrewa]

I've been using OS X as my primary OS for the last five years, with a lightweight VM for XP and more recently Windows 7 to satisfy my employers dependency on MS Exchange and various Visio/MS Project/Internet Explorer-only applications. This worked pretty well for me, and I was happy and enthusiastic about my setup, about 90% of my work was done using OS X and it was a pleasure working in the environment.
Since Lion though, I've grown increasingly concerned about the direction of the O/S and Apple's tightening grip and control. Gatekeeper is the last straw for me - sure, you can disable it (for now) I'm sure (haven't bothered to check), but it's just the first step in a path I don't want to walk down. I'm moving more and more towards Linux as my primary OS over the last year - CentOS for my server-based stuff, and either Linux Mint/Ubuntu or Fedora (17 is nice, but still a bit unstable - though better than any recent version).
Anyway, this comment isn't here to provoke discussion, all the fanboys of {insert OS here} can chime in and provide their opinion - more just a comment to convince myself that it's really time to retire my nice shiny MacBook Pro (my wife or son will be grateful) and just start to move away completely from Mac OS.

Re:Moving on...

[andrewa]

Hell, I even bought a Nexus 7 today. My wife/son are going to be even happier when they get my iPad... ;-)

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[Darinbob]

I'm not developing mac or unix code, but using open source tool chains.

Demonstration of successful anti-piracy business m

[metalmonkey]

This is the business model shows how to beat priacy.
Really for $20 why bother to pirate it.

lemmings

[pbjones]

3 million Lemmings marching towards locked software, and I liked Apple...once. The shame is that there is little alternative, Win8, yer that'll be great, Linux?, only if they ever get their act together.

Re:Actual title should be

[Hes Nikke]

http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/ fixes all of the above complaints, and then some.

Re:Actual title should be

[inKubus]

Too bad Time Machine has been broken on Extended Permissions on AFP shares since like Snow Leopard. I've noticed that the most arrogant fanbois don't actually use Macs so it's "fine for them". A typical reply to my first sentence would be "Well, why don't you just not use Extended Permissions?" AS IF I HADN'T THOUGHT OF THAT! Going to any Mac/Apple forum is like walking into a room of zombies and asking if anyone has the time: "What do you need time for?" "Time works fine for me, I know what time it is already." "Dude, can't you afford a watch". Meanwhile Apple is walking away with record profits. Profits and monopoly power that Microsoft could only DREAM of back in the years when they were labelled a monopoly and everyone hated them. They are fleecing you and taking your money but you're too snowed by a computer that kinda works to realize that they only want your money, that is their goal, that was Steve's goal, and you should not forget it. I like the fact that part of that goal was to push the limits but at the same time we are alienating millions of people who can't afford the better technology because we're (mostly) white, (mostly) rich, and we deserve it and others don't.

And that's the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple is like Mercedes Benz, you'll turn your head while they help Nazis kill Jews because most people can't afford one and it gives you status and it's of course a good product, because you're paying for it, and they are taking as much of your money as you are willing to spend and thus are willing to sell less quantity. Microsoft and Bill wanted to make money a different way: put a useful, cheap computer in front of as many bodies as possible, and then sell them software, the car analogue probably being Ford or something.

I have to admit that as I get older and richer, and my game grows bigger, and you get busy with kids and work and all that... you don't want to spend your sunday fixing your computer. And I'm glad that Apple has proven that it's mostly possible to do that fairly well and have a kindof useful computer. But if you go a little deeper you will find 2 frustrating FACTS: 1. Shit is hacked and a lot of their Core UNIX OS crew left after Snow Leopard leaving mainly IOS people 2. When you find stuff that is broken, and you will--all the time--they will never admit it, never offer a solution and you will just have to wait for it to be important to someone or the feature removed or no longer in style. The two of these things working together mean lots of shrugging your shoulders when your boss asks questions about something not working. It also means you spend a lot more time on the Unix side, where you can actually make stuff work. But then they release an update, move Java, remove important or at least fairly universal UNIX tools, and you're left having to redo or patch the work all over again. Take a few years of this and you're about to have a nervous breakdown.

Finally, and thanks for letting me vent, but the fucking window close button is on the WRONG SIDE if you are one of the 75% of humanity that is RIGHT HANDED, and that's a fact.

Re:Actual title should be

[inKubus]

You can drag a file from your File Open box to the new finder window and it'll go to it's location. Also, you can drag the little icon at the top of an open document (provided it's fully saved) to any finder window, or to file fields in the web browser. You are forced to get into this mentality of not worrying about where shit is while you're moving it around, just about where it's going. Which can be nice sometimes and frustrating other times.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[Ash-Fox]

Which makes me wonder why you use OS X, since tools like LyX have an assortment of issues with OS X only due to improper POSIX implementation.

Re:Apple

[AmiMoJo]

I had to re-install some older Macs running Tiger and a couple of Leopard a couple of years ago. After installation they needed to install updates. After four or five restarts I noticed that the only update left was for Java. It downloaded, installed and restarted. Then it wanted to do another Java update which incremented the version number by 0.0.1. This went on for a while before I got bored and downloaded the latest Java runtime, but even then it wanted to keep updating the old one.

Happened on every machine. Macs are not magically brilliant.

Re:Actual title should be

[icebraining]

Not true, as far as I remember service packs never disabled functionality and locked you out of you own data like ML does with the RSS reader in Mail.app.

Re:Actual title should be

[icebraining]

Slashdot isn't "becoming" anything, it's just your rose colored glasses. The MacOSX stories from 2001/2002 have plenty of flamebait too.

Re:Apple

[Phrogman]

No, I am someone who was very impressed with an Apple product - actually all of them so far that I have tried, after years of having to fuck around with PC systems and Microsoft Windows/DOS. I hate the way people have to slam anyone who is happy with Apple, just because they are using an Apple product.
On my iMac desktop I can run FOSS, I can run a lot of Linux utilities etc. It is a *nix based system even if it has a pretty front end. I can also dual boot into Win7 when I need to - mostly for games mind you.
Whats wrong with stating that OS/X did something right that was impressive? Is it perfect? no, but it meets my needs. I have been using the same iMac for the last 5 years. In the same time period I would have quite likely spent the difference in buying a PC system in terms of replaced/upgraded motherboards, powersupplies, CPUs etc. The only thing I have had to replace is the HD.
I have used Linux in various ilks in the past, FreeBSD, Apache, PHP, Java, etc. I use the right tool for the job whenever I can. In my case, using an iMac desktop that freed me up to actually work on the computer, rather than a PC running MS windows or a Linux machine (that didn't support some things I wanted) was the right way to go because I got more done in the end, with less configuring and repairing along the way.

Re:Actual title should be

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

CMD-W :-)

Re:Actual title should be

[MrHanky]

As I said, you're someone who lets Apple spec your computer for you, so that you can gloat about it when others don't meet the same spec. You're an idiot fanboi, and no one should bother listening to you.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[reidconti]

well then it also means that $cost for a Mac is change-between-the-couch-cushions trivial.

Actually, I agree with that, in the sense that, when I need a new machine, I buy one without any deliberation.

But it's NOT true in the sense that I can buy a new one every day.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[reidconti]

Cygwin is also more Pile-Of-Shit compliant than OS X too. You are probably correct when it comes to proper behavior of Unix code; all I know is that, in day-to-day use, Cygwin sucks ass and has countless problems.

And yes, I've used it on and off on the rare miserable occasions where I was not able to have a Linux or OS X system provided by my employer -- a couple of years in 06-07 standing out in my mind the most.

Re:Apple

[Sigg3.net]

I'm not saying you're not getting what you want, or that it's anything bad with it. I'm just saying that you agree to the terms of the OSX operating system. It is locked down, you don't have access to its hardware, and will probably become even more locked down as Apple proceeds down the approved-stuff-only road. It's a trade off.

It is fast becoming a television type of utility, though. In a while, you might have to change OS to do the work you do. Then I hope you'll want to take a look at *nix again. GNU/Linux provides all the freedom you could want. It means more customization, fragmentation, and acquiring knowledge and skills. But it lets you do what you want to do not just now, but 10 years down the road. That's not because of the code, but due to the code being open.

It is more user-friendly than both OSX and Windows. I am supporting a locked down device with proprietary software on all platforms, and where both windooze and OSX fail, Linux just works with the opensource driver and built-in tools. It's a breeze!

Gaming is the only missing piece of the puzzle. Hopefully, Valve's recent move will invite more gaming companies to consider *nix migration. The future is bright!

Re:Actual title should be

[cyber-vandal]

You're a whiny little dork with a small dick and a huge chip on your shoulder about something that really doesn't matter. Now fuck off there's a good lad.

Re:Actual title should be

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

No....

There are Aluminum-skinned replacements, 'tho.

Goodbye, "Leather look"!

Re:Actual title should be

[Espectr0]

He could always buy OSX legally and tried on his PC. Sure, the EULA doesn't allow that, but EULA's aren't law.

Re:Actual title should be

[MrHanky]

But consider this: even if all of what you say were true, I would still be right.

Re:Mac is the cheaper alternative

[Darinbob]

Not my choice, it's the computer they gave me on my first day of work.

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[CheshireDragon]

Just like Secretary has been renamed to Administrative Assistant in the last 10yrs.
When was the last time you heard the job title: Secretary? I think its been since 2003 when I last heard it.

Re:Actual title should be

[cyber-vandal]

Nope you don't even have that you whiny smelly child. Do you go on car forums and hassle Mercedes owners? "I got a toyota camry for half what you paid you're such a fanboi". Now as I requested before kindly take your pathetic envy and your chip on your shoulder the size of Jupiter and stick them both up your fat arse.

Re:Huh? What?

[Macgrrl]

How were people forced to download it? You had to launch the App Store application and locate the App and tell it to download, and (depending how long since you last entered your AppleID and password) validate your identity to confirm the 'purchase' (you have to do this for free downloads too).

Doesn't sound very forced to me...

Re:Actual title should be

[MrHanky]

LOL, you own a Mercedes too? Your parents must be so proud.

Re:Actual title should be

[Macgrrl]

Apple are not a Hardware or a Software company, they are a Systems company - you know, like Amiga and Sun used to be.

They sell upgrades for the OS, generally at quite reasonable prices, because you get a license for the OS bundled with the hardware when you buy a system. It's the reason you don't have to dick around with license keys when you install.

One of the reasons their systems have a reputation for just working is that the OS is running on a limited set of known hardware platforms and can be tested on all supported variants.

I'm not saying this is a perfect solution for everyone, it certainly isn't the answer for people who want to build their own boxen from scratch. But for those of us who like the reassurance of working with this ecosystem of tested and stable Hardware plus Software Systems we are prepared to pay the premium for the system integration.

Re:Can't justify the price of hardware to run it

[IKnwThePiecesFt]

+1. I put Mountain Lion on both my Macbook Pro and iMac, both mid 2007 models. That's 5 years old. I spent under $1000 for both of them combined.

Re:Actual title should be

[jbolden]

There is no way to buy OSX legally. Apple doesn't sell OS X. You can only buy:

a) A computer which includes installation media (or now virtual installation media)
b) An upgrade.

Re:Actual title should be

[cyber-vandal]

My parents are very proud of me. Are yours? I bet not.

Re:icrap

[AK Marc]

The suicide rate a Foxconn is less than the average US high school. The difference is, China cares more about human life than the US does. And yes, in the '90s, we had someone try suicide out of the window at my school. The only reason there aren't more jumping deaths is that the schools in the US are too short.