“Although over 40% of Mac users have already migrated to Lion, that OS hasn’t exactly gotten the love,” Gene Steinberg writes for Tech Night Owl. “A fair number of people won’t upgrade simply because they need to run PowerPC software, and Apple removed the Rosetta translation capability from 10.7. This makes Lion a non-starter to them, and it’s clear Apple has no intention of restoring Rosetta in 10.8 Mountain Lion.”
“I also get the impression that some of you are put off by the iOS-inspired elements of Lion, particularly Launchpad, the app launch system that, of course, you never have to launch,” Steinberg writes. “A couple of interface elements, such as scrollbars that require a mouseover to appear, and reversing the direction of scrolling, are readily disabled in System Preferences. I do suppose there’s some reason to be concerned about Lion’s Auto Save system, since the cherished Save As feature was removed. But it’s restored under Mountain Lion with a new keystroke (Command-Option-Shift-S). The real issue of Auto Save is that few apps really support the feature, other than Apple’s. Eleven months after the debut of Lion, neither Microsoft nor Adobe seem to have come aboard, although a number of simpler third-party apps have gotten with the program.”
“My impression of Lion is that it was somewhat unfinished, as if Apple ran out of time to add and perfect new features, so they simply set them aside for Mountain Lion,” Steinberg writes. “The buzz from the developer community and others who have worked with the prerelease versions is extremely positive. For the most part, Mountain Lion appears to be a credible and compelling upgrade. It’s good to see the enhanced security and direct support for social networking. For any Lion user that has a compatible Mac, I don’t see any significant downsides. And, assuming the final release is stable and snappy, the $19.99 purchase price would seem to make it an upgrade that vindicates the promise of Lion and makes OS X a lot more useful.
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