“Apple presented last year’s release of OS X 10.7 Lion as part of a turn ‘back to the Mac.’ Ostensibly, the tagline was Apple’s promise to bring innovations from its mobile operating system back to Mac OS X. But more broadly, it also meant that the Mac would receive more of Apple’s attention,” John Siracusa writes for Ars Technica.
“Apple’s intentions were noble. Lion’s new features said all the right things: ‘Stop worrying about saving your documents; Lion’s got you covered. You don’t need to keep track of how many applications are running; let the OS handle those details for you. Don’t bother mucking around in the Finder, your applications are only a few clicks away. And scroll bars? Getting them out of your face is like a breath of fresh air. Trust me, this is going to be awesome,'” Siracusa writes. “Some longtime Mac users rejected Apple’s premise that these things needed to be fixed. I am not among them—nor, I suspect, are the many millions of people who have been introduced to Apple through an iOS device. For most people, the problems Apple tried to address in Lion were real. The solutions, however, had some rough edges.”
Siracusa writes, “Mountain Lion is not the Mac OS of the past, but it also sets a course to a destination that is quite distinct from iOS. Despite the oft-cited prediction that Mac will eventually be subsumed by iOS, that’s not what’s happening here. Apple is determined to bring the benefits of iOS to the Mac, but it’s equally determined to do so in a way that preserves the strengths of the Mac platform… This new thing that the Mac is becoming, its outlines slowly coming into focus in Mountain Lion, is meant to allow people who were previously intimidated by the Mac to use it to accomplish more than they could with a touch-based platform like iOS, but with similar ease.”
“Over the past decade, Mac users made it through the most dramatic, unlikely, and successful operating system transition in the history of the industry,” Siracusa writes. “Last year, I noted that despite its king-of-the-jungle name, Lion was not the endpoint of a decade of Mac OS X development; it was the start of a new journey. Mountain Lion makes the eventual destination a bit more clear. Just hold on, my fellow Mac devotees, and we’ll make it there together… My advice is the same has it has been for the last several major releases of OS X. Mountain Lion is a better OS than Lion. It’s also inexpensive, and you can purchase, download, and install it the second you finish reading this review.”
Tons more, as usual, in the comprehensive 24-page review here.
Related articles:
PC Magazine reviews OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: The world’s best desktop and laptop OS; Editors’ Choice – July 25, 2012
TIME Magazine reviews OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Much bang for the buck – July 25, 2012
CNET reviews OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: ‘A worthy upgrade, very affordable’ – July 25, 2012
World’s most advanced operating system: OS X Mountain Lion now available via Apple’s Mac App Store – July 25, 2012
Very efficient. A 24 page review in a matter of hours. 😉
I’m looking forward to reading it in detail later today.