Daring Fireball reviews OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: Apple’s attention to detail is evident

14 years ago

Apple’s new OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion costs just $19.99. “That’s great,” John Gruber writes for Daring Fireball. “It encourages users to get on board with the latest and greatest, and I expect the result of this pricing (and the ease of doing so through the App Store) will result in a record-breaking (which is to say, faster than Lion) adoption rate.”

“But what exactly do users get for their twenty bucks? In short: a nicer, more polished version of Lion. There’s definitely new stuff: iCloud document storage (more on that in a bit), Messages (which is more than just a renamed version of iChat — it supports iMessage), Notification Center (which I really like on the Mac; it’s perhaps the feature I’ve missed the most over the last few months testing the Mountain Lion betas when going back to my main machine running Lion),” Gruber writes. “More back-to-the-Mac stuff from iOS, like standalone apps for Notes and Reminders, and convenient system-wide ‘share sheets’ for sending content via email or messages and to websites like Flickr, Twitter, Vimeo, and, soon Facebook. (Facebook integration is not included in OS X 10.8; Apple says it will come in a software update “this fall”.) AirPlay Mirroring is a gem of a feature — a shining example of Apple’s ‘all our stuff works together seamlessly’ philosophy. The new voice dictation feature is accurate, simple, and convenient — a huge accessibility win for anyone who has trouble typing.”

Gruber writes, “But Mountain Lion isn’t billed as a blockbuster release, and it isn’t priced like one. It’s just nicer. And it’s the little things, the attention to detail, that show it best.”

Read more in the full article here.