“Predictably, you’ll read lots of articles over the next few days about the proper Mountain Lion installation strategy,” Gene Steinberg writes for Tech Night Owl.
“While I will always urge caution about any OS upgrade, even on a Mac where the process is supposed to ‘just work,’ my own upgrade strategy tends to be more casual,” Steinberg writes. “Since I have a clone backup of my iMac’s startup drive — a complete duplicate — I would not lose anything but a few hours of time should the upgrade not go smoothly. I also expect that a fair number of the people who install OS X upgrades don’t follow any precautions at all. They just run the installer and let it do its thing. They trust Apple to figure out how to handle the entire installation process without requiring any extra intervention after the few initial setup screens.”
“For recent OS X upgrades, you haven’t even had the options of a typical clean installation, which placed your original OS in a “previous” folder, so you can check over files you might want to bring over. That’s over and done with, and the installer ought to be smart enough to sort things out and make sure that only the right files are upgraded, removed, and replaced,” Steinberg writes. “Sure, Mountain Lion’s installer handles hundreds of thousands of files, totaling several gigabytes in size. That everything will work successfully for most of you must be a miracle. Or just the work of a development team of brilliant engineers who have labored extremely hard to make the difficult seem simple.”
Steinberg writes, “But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take a few precautions, and I’ll mention the usual.”
Read more in the full article here.
Yes. Next question.
I’ve upgraded from Panther to Tiger to Leopard to Snow Leopard to Lion without any problem and without doing anything to “prepare.” I didn’t even back up first.
Probably the people who have problems upgrading are the ones that customize the operating system, usually to mimic the previous release or add features Apple considered and rejected, modifying system files to do it. On one occasion there was a company that sold modified system files for that purpose, and–no surprise–all their customers had problems upgrading.
The only preparation you need is to undo all that stuff first. (Setting hidden preferences on the Terminal’s command line is probably harmless, because that only modifies a preference file.)
Nope! My iMac doesn’t meet ML requirements.
It’s why I’m waiting for an updated iMac!!! Hello, Apple? Are you listening??? 447 days and counting!…
Not likely to get Mountain Lion anytime soon.
The Lion upgrade was as easy as Apple said, and then I paid the real price. I’ll always look back fondly at Snow Leopard, because that was the last time my 2gb Macbook ran fast.
The Lion upgrade was like pouring molasses into the keyboard. Sluggish unless I shut down applications, and spinning beach balls all the time. Safari plus its Web Content application run 400 megabytes, maybe 500. Not even Firefox got that fat.
Apple must use their OS upgrades to sell more hardware. Fill the memory with bloated software, and the customer has two choices. Spend money on extra memory or get the latest Apple product. Either increases the real cost of the OS X upgrade.
Should have stayed put with Snow Leopard. No interest in Mountain Lion.
But the Lion upgrade ran perfectly and quickly.
It seems that Tiger perfected Panther, that Snow Leopard perfected Leopard, and I’m willing to bet that Mountain Lion will perfect Lion.
Meanwhile, check with Other World Computing. Many Mac models can take twice as much memory as Apple says. I have Late 2008 MacBook Pro. Apple never advertised that it could take more than 4GB, but 8GB works just fine. OWC memory is cheap, but keep the old memory so you can swap it back so the Apple Store Genius won’t blame your problem on third-party memory.
That sluggishness doesn’t sound like it is standard. I had a 4 year old MBP that worked fine with Lion. Yes there were some spinning beach balls but I was also running parallels at the same time.
A clean reinstall would probably improve the performance. But of course that takes time and you need to makes sure everything is backed up.
I was due for an upgrade so went for the retina MBP. The performance with the improved CPU, SSD drive, memory etc is amazing. 4 years per upgrade is reasonable and it is always a good feeling to have a faster more responsive machine to use.
For this purchase I used the migration assistant to copy over the data. It took overnight but in the morning I had the same set up as my old machine. Saved me hours to setting up and a lll I really had to do was install windows again for parallels.
If you can consider a new or refurbished prev gen machine. The saving in productivity can be worth it.
My MacBook Pro was running super sluggish. Turns out one of my RAM chips was loose and my hard drive was dying. Replaced the old platter with a hybrid platter/SSD and now it screams.
WHy prepare for an OS launch that doesn’t seem to be coming for real? Its the of July, I know there is still 7 days left but this was a disappointment. We should of been told the launch was in August, and *IF* my miracle it comes at the *END* of July, then what a great surprise… but now I don’t even care about OS X ML, I’ve been eagerly anticipating it for 23 days, hoping, thinking it would be released, and still no real word.
When Apple released Lion, their servers nearly crashed. It took me hours to download Apple, then I found out that everyone else on the planet was trying to do it, too. If I were Apple, I wouldn’t announce Mountain Lion in advance. People won’t necessarily know it is available right away, and that would spread out the load on the servers.
Apple already released the Gold Master to developers to give them the head start they need. It’s ready. It will come. Maybe morning, maybe noon, maybe evening, maybe soon, but Mountain Lion is coming for sure.
Yeah, god forbid they take a little extra time to iron out late found issues. If they had released it buggy 23 days ago you would be complaining about bugs.
Get a grip and a little perspective. The only reason you are disappointed is you set unrealistic expectations. It is still July…
Yeah, god forbid they take a little extra time to iron out late found issues.
I reported two issues in the ML GM myself. Be glad Apple are taking their time. Hope that this isn’t the final ‘GM’. Otherwise, be glad that 10.8.1 will be released in a hurry, as I expect it will be.
Mountain Lion installed without a hitch on my mid-2007 and early 2008 iMacs, each having plenty of free hard disk space and 4GB of RAM. It runs fluidly on the 2008 iMac, and is a joy to use. My 2007 iMac is our main home server, so is running iTunes, iPhoto, and home automation server software in the background. It’s not quite as smooth on that machine, either because more stuff is constantly running on the network, or because the 2008 model has a faster bus/memory.
I too am hoping for a newer, faster iMac to replace the 2007 machine. I’d like to turn My Living Desktop back on.
I did a clean Lion install on each of our Macs.
I upgraded three Core2 Duo MacBook Pro’s (2009 and 2010 models) with 8GB of RAM and 7200RPM, 2.5-inch hard drives in each (1- 500GB and 1-750GB). I also installed a new, 2TB 7200RPM hard drive and a Radeon 5770HD video card in a 2007 Mac Pro for Lion. This one isn’t upgradable to Mountain Lion, but the improvements will all me to keep the machine in service until a redesigned Mac Pro is released, hopefully in late 2013.
It runs well on all machines.
I have no need to upgrade to ML. Perhaps if I get a new MacBook Pro I will but until then I am completely fine without.
Slow news days when everyone seems to think that it’s time to write about how to prepare for the next OS upgrade as if these are Windoze machines. [yawn]
To me, they read like “how to prepare your lawn for mowing.”
Like others have said above, I’ve just gone ahead and done it. With Lion and now Mt. Lion I’ve simply used the App Store and let these things install themselves. When I come back, it’s finished and life goes on. The only people who have cause for concern are those very few who tinker and hack things, but for 99% of us, it just works. I doubt if your mileage will vary.
I’m willing to bet that Mountain Lion will perfect Lion.
Without giving much away, I can say that is certainly the case.
My plans:
• Clean install Mountain Lion on my new Mac Mini server.
• Go back to Snow Leopard on my ye olde MacBook from 2006. The Lion Finder is horror shite for the work I do. Good riddance, welcome back Snow Leopard.
I have been using the ML betas. I copy all my docs (home folder) and files to an external drive. I wipe the Mac drive, do the install and restore my home folder. I install all my App Store apps then the apps straight from the net. Easy.