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Mac OS X Mountain Lion Gets Three Million Downloads In 4 Days
hypnosec writes "Apple has announced that its latest Mac OS X version, Mountain Lion, has had three million downloads in just four days thereby making it the most successful OS in Cupertino's history. Philip Schiller, iPhone maker's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, said, 'Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever.'"
"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. :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
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.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Airplay that can mirror anything on you see on the Mac to an AppleTv was the killer feature for me. Also time machine backups can be set to rotate between different targets
Good-bye
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.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
...just poking MS with a stick to amuse yourself?
It's the simple things that make you smile.
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?
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.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
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.