Apple announces Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/

by cstuder • 14 years ago

465 348 14 years ago

apple.com

Craiggybear• 14 years ago

Already?

latch• 14 years ago

they are adopting a 1-year release cycle.

bdunbar2• 14 years ago

Fascinating. I'm still on 10.6: no compelling reason to upgrade.

By the time I _do_ upgrade I'm in for some future shock: like dropping a Victorian gentleman into Haight-Ashbury in 1968.

oomkiller2• 14 years ago

Is the messages beta download broken for anyone else? I would really like to send iMessages from my Mac.

dutchbrit• 14 years ago

Here you go... http://appldnld.apple.com/MessagesBeta/041-4274.20120216.z5k...

CJefferson• 14 years ago

Wow, that snuck out without much advanced fanfare (or I missed it).

I first glance, the main (in fact only) feature seems to be porting several iOS apps and features (notes, reminders, game center, etc.) to Mac OS X, and syncing everything together with iCloud.

There is also a Growl clone. Surprised this took so long. Then again, I personally don't like Growl, so I hope nothing depends on it being turned on.

I notice that, so far, there doesn't seem to be any new 'technologies', just (mainly) ports of iOS apps.

Looks very ho hum to me, but then again I have an android phone, so iOS syncing doesn't really interest me.

Hemospectrum• 14 years ago

Growl gets a lot of things wrong and stagnated for years with (until recently) no sign of improvement. It was ripe for disruption. Maybe Apple's implementation will be less depressing.

Timothee• 14 years ago

There is also a Growl clone. Surprised this took so long. Then again, I personally don't like Growl, so I hope nothing depends on it being turned on.

It seems that Apple adopted a similar model as Notifications Center on iOS in that you can decide on a per-app basis what they can do: banner, badge, sound… See this MacWorld's screenshot: http://images.macworld.com/images/article/2012/02/notificati...

zdw• 14 years ago

Feature rundown:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/features.html

One of the more interesting bits is at the - they're supporting a bunch of China specific services.

127001brewer• 14 years ago

Very interesting. From the features list at the bottom:

*It’s a new Mac experience in China. OS X Mountain Lion brings all-new support for many popular Chinese services. And they’re easy to set up. Mail, Contacts, and Calendar work with QQ, 163, and 126. Baidu, the leading Chinese search provider, is a built-in option in Safari. The video-sharing websites Youku and Tudou are included in the new Share Sheets, so users in China can easily post videos to the web. They can also blog with Sina weibo, the popular microblogging service. And with improved text input, typing in Chinese is easier, faster, and more accurate."

smackfu4• 14 years ago

I'm surprised there wasn't a China Twitter equivalent baked in. Or do they just use Twitter?

zrgiu_• 14 years ago

is there a specific reason they needed to update the entire OS for this ? Most of the new features are actually apps, and the rest wouldn't really justify a major version change.

Argorak2• 14 years ago

Well, Ubuntu does this every 6 months. They also pick another silly name every 12. Maybe Ubuntu is becoming the role model here?

graywh2• 14 years ago

Every 6-month Ubuntu release has a silly name.

Tichy• 14 years ago

Ubuntu updates are free, though.

bergie2• 14 years ago

The major difference is that with Ubuntu, apps and the OS/desktop share the same release cycle.

I hope that could be decoupled, making life easier for application authors: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/application_quality_assurance_in_l...

ddagradi• 14 years ago

Don't forget all the API changes that present themselves with each new major version. For example, Notifications, GameCenter and Twitter are all new core libraries on the Mac that are accessible to developers.

idspispopd• 14 years ago

In these events they talk about the new features as they're the most recognisable for press, often examples of what some of the new APIs are capable. (Features, which could of course have been programmed to run atop 10.7 Lion.)

E.g. growl does system wide notifications, but it's not built-in, and Apple like to control these things so they may more easily interface them with other Apple devices. (E.g. Apple could very easily make their Apple TV notify the user's iPhone when a new TV episode has been downloaded, or even schedule it onto their Mac.)

With that in mind Apple have a history of meshing the experiences across their devices, the messages app is a recent example.

pwthornton4• 14 years ago

This is an early preview. We don't know about all the new APIs and changes under the hood. Presumably there is a lot going on with the additional iCloud support.

One of these years Apple is going to discontinue carbon API support and go 64-bit only. I doubt this release is it, but those kinds of under-the-hood features are not the kinds of things that you would talk about at this point. We'll learn more at WWDC.

jonhendry• 14 years ago

What they cover for the general public is usually only the most visible features. There's additional new stuff under the hood, which will be available for 3rd party developers to use in their apps.

The benefits might not be apparent immediately, but they'll start showing up in apps written to take advantage of 10.8's features. Some improvements in the frameworks will effect existing apps that use those frameworks.

colonel_panic• 14 years ago

No mention of an OpenGL update. Still waiting out this stone age here...

wmf2• 14 years ago

They didn't mention any low-level API changes, which could either mean there are none or they just didn't mention them.

___Calv_Dee___• 14 years ago

Apple, as usual, really seems to be getting it right. The feature list looks super promising as a nextstep (sorry, had to) in unifying mobile with desktop. It's nice to see that the desktop OS is not being abandoned but instead updated to better reflect a consumers preference for mobile (with good reason). Microsoft has also got it right by tying their Metro interface in Windows 8 to the Windows Phone OS. The attempt, however, falls short in that it is not really unifying the two platforms but instead providing a common interface and feel. In order to truly unite desktop with mobile, I believe you need to go beyond providing a common interface and really integrate the components so they exist to the user simultaneously instead of in parellel. This is just another verification (and in my opinion, a big one) that mobile is taking the reigns and is the future.

poodougnut• 14 years ago

Right, so they've completely trashed the interface.

va_coder2• 14 years ago

It looks like an enormous distraction box. They should top it off with a widget for HN ;)

pilif5• 14 years ago

It seems like the OS is either defaulting to allowing only only App Store applications or at least only (Apple-)signed applications: http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/security.html

It's still possible to turn this off, but I have a feeling that we should enjoy our freedom to run GNU grep instead of BSD grep for as long as it lasts.

oomkiller2• 14 years ago

For some reason I doubt that this runs all the way down to the UNIX level of things. It's probably just the restriction to only run signed .app bundles, and maybe signed installer packages. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

gue5t• 14 years ago

I wonder how long it'll take crackers to get their hands on a master signing key.

sjwright2• 14 years ago

About as long as it took them to get their hands on the iPhone master signing key, I'd wager.

st3fan2• 14 years ago

Read what Gruber writes about that Gatekeep feature:

My favorite Mountain Lion feature, though, is one that hardly even has a visible interface. Apple is calling it “Gatekeeper”. It’s a system whereby developers can sign up for free-of-charge Apple developer IDs which they can then use to cryptographically sign their applications. If an app is found to be malware, Apple can revoke that developer’s certificate, rendering the app (along with any others from the same developer) inert on any Mac where it’s been installed. In effect, it offers all the security benefits of the App Store, except for the process of approving apps by Apple. Users have three choices which type of apps can run on Mountain Lion:

  * Only those from the App Store
  * Only those from the App Store or which are signed by a developer ID
  * Any app, whether signed or unsigned

The default for this setting is, I say, exactly right: the one in the middle, disallowing only unsigned apps. This default setting benefits users by increasing practical security, and also benefits developers, preserving the freedom to ship whatever software they want for the Mac, with no approval process.

pilif5• 14 years ago

Gruber was telling that the Apple ID was going to be free. It isn't. It requires a Mac Developer account as far as I could understand it.

When I was 15 I wrote a Taskbar dialer for Windows 9x and later NT (this was in the modem days. Of course I haven't updated it in ages and the only reason my old webpage is still there is because I found it by accident in an old backup, but here is a google search for it: https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=RasInTask).

I published that on the various download pages and it was good enough to even be featured in dead-tree publications.

Back then I had no permission to use a computer ("they make you stupid" was my parents argument) and certainly no credit card to pay anybody to do development - and even then, as a minor I would probably never have gotten that certificate.

With this rule in place I would never have been able to publish that dialer. I would never have felt how it is to make something that others can use and find useful. I would never have ended up where I am today.

Does this stop malware? Does this stop fraudulent call centers? Does this stop malicious people from telling people to turn it off and then still installing the malware? No.

Does it stop people like me from ever getting to their career of their dreams? Likely.

I might be an old fart, but this is far from acceptable.

mike-cardwell8• 14 years ago

Malware writers will just get free ids and sign their malware.

Will all of these OSX devices be regularly polling Apple to get a list of revoked certs?

I guess this would be useful to prevent malware being installed, but it's not going to be massively useful to remove already installed malware. Especially if that malware can interrupt the polling.

I wonder how difficult it will be to get developer IDs. Might be a market for them.

Will be fun to uninstall a developers software from every machine by stealing his cert, releasing some malware signed with it, and then waiting for Apple to push out a revocation cert.

josteink2• 14 years ago

Read what Gruber writes about that Gatekeep feature:

Read what the world's biggest Mac-shill has to say to defend the world's least open company and biggest patent-troll?

Thanks, but no thanks.

I'll go for something open and free, and you wont get anything like that out of Cupertino.

andyjohnson0• 14 years ago

I'm wondering if Apple have described the circumstances, apart from the malware scenario, in which they would revoke a developer ID and the associated signing certificate?

Also, do users get the choice to accept a certificate revocation?

mnutt• 14 years ago

It preserves the freedom for developers to ship whatever they want, though I wouldn't say it benefits them.

But it's within the realm of possibility for Apple to start refusing support to users who disable GateKeeper. I would disable it anyway, but how many other users would?

va_coder2• 14 years ago

Will someone from Canonical team up with someone like Samsung to create a kick-ass, no hassle Linux laptop with a decent battery life? I've got money I'm dying to give you!

herge• 14 years ago

2012 will be the year for Linux on the desktop!

batista9• 14 years ago

Apple has a top dog and a few bosses. Who exactly will co-ordinate 1,000 OSS projects to give you a hassle free experience?

There ARE ways to make a kick-ass, no hassle Linux OS, even better than OS X and more open (and still open source).

But all of them involve throwing top dollar into it, starting a few projects from scratch, forking a few existing ones and stoping the bazaar-style, design by committee, approach. You should only rely on upstream bazaar-style approach for the userland (like OS X does) and server backend stuff, not for visible UI, no core components, no libraries.

Canonical, and all other Linux companies, always just wanted to act like integrators, instead of creators. Except maybe in a few select areas.

oinksoft2• 14 years ago

This is a scary preview of Apple's vision of desktop computing (which we all anticipated with the App Store being brought over from the iPhone world to the desktop):

The safest place to find apps for your Mac is the Mac App Store. That’s because the developers who create them are known to Apple, and the apps are carefully reviewed before they’re accepted in the store.

As I've had no reason to upgrade my home PC from 10.6 to 10.7, EOL for 10.6 will probably be when I ditch the Mac and just dual-boot Linux and Windows. It's really amazing how much Apple has changed since the pre-OSX days.

krig3• 14 years ago

I hope you realize that Debian and Ubuntu and most of the large distros already have this: Known, vetted packages, signed and trusted, distributed through a central database. Frankly, I think it's a great idea. People in general shouldn't be downloading and executing random binaries on their machines. I think it would be great if the major distros also refused to install unsigned binaries without explicitly being told to allow it.

rmc6• 14 years ago

the apps are carefully reviewed

Carefully reviewed to ensure they don't upload your whole address book.

jws3• 14 years ago

That middle option, the default, is Developer Signed applications. Apple keeps the keyring and can torch the developer's key if they go rogue, but the developer does the signing.

The model essentially matches Debian package distribution.

(And as mentioned by oomkiller, this won't go down to unix, it is just the "application" launching.)

Edit: pilaf's reply got down voted into oblivion. What he suggests is flawed because applications are not in your PATH. But in the spirit, your application could write malware into somewhere on the PATH, and could find an exploit to get the setuid bit turned on. As soon as someone realizes this, Apple should kill your signing key thereby blocking the distribution vector. It will not help in cleaning up the mess. The victim is still looking at an "erase disk, reinstall, restore backup DATA ONLY!" recovery as they should anytime they lose control of a machine.

pilif5• 14 years ago

So I call my malware 'ls', set it to suid root and have my victims double click that? Fine. Thanks.

amurmann• 14 years ago

As a developer and anti-corporatist I think this is a thread to our freedom and will eventually result in the MacAppStore being a giant rip-off for developers. However, as a son of parents who don't understand the difference between their Apple account and their Google account and call him because a webpage tells them that they have a virus and should download some shady program right now, I can appreciate this security measure.

mortenjorck• 14 years ago

Nothing surprised me nearly as much as Gatekeeper. A middle ground for security, rather than attempting to further sweep every developer into the App Store? It's impressive to see Apple pursuing a pragmatic balancing act instead of simply staying a course of consolidation.

ksajadi• 14 years ago

I wish anything that uses Growl can use notifications out of the box. it's just not going to happen is it?

edu3• 14 years ago

I hope it'll be a free update.

sjwright2• 14 years ago

I hope it'll be $29, because that's near enough to free, and I like the idea that Apple has a financial incentive to continue supporting their existing customers.

edu3• 14 years ago

Then I will keep using Lion in hope they release a real OS X update sometime in the future for which I would pay play gladly as I've been doing with all the previous updated, because right now Mountain Lion is just a bunch of iOS Apps ported to OS X.

I'm sorry, but IMO the value of this update is $0.

RKearney• 14 years ago

You mean like how every other update was free?

It will cost $29

edu3• 14 years ago

Yes, with the difference that the other OS X updates were not just a bunch of iOS Apps ported to the Mac, that why I paid for them and that's why if Mountain Lion is release with a price tag over $0 I'll keep using Lion (and hopefully this will incentivize Apple to make a real OS X update somewhere in 2013-2014).

thomasjoulin• 14 years ago

He meant like every iOS updates were free. It will be free

zephyrfalcon• 14 years ago

I'm not sure if this matters or not, but the submitted title calls it "Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion", and 10.8 is indeed the version number I would expect; yet this number is nowhere to be found, neither on Apple's page nor in Gruber's announcement. Instead, it's just called "OS X Mountain Lion" everywhere. I wonder if they dropped the version number, or are downplaying it? But for what reason?

cmelbye• 14 years ago

I saw a screenshot of the "About This Mac" screen that displayed 10.8 as the version number. I believe it was on the TechCrunch article.

macuenca• 14 years ago

This is the article your talking about: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/16/os-x-mountain-lion/

graywh2• 14 years ago

But they've already had a "Puma" release. Will "Cougar" be next?

Side note: panthers are technically black leopards or jaguars.

mikerg87• 14 years ago

But where is the Mac Touch hardware ? you could see for a while where touch was it and we have these nice laptops and big iMac displays but we will use a mouse ?! I really want my next imac to be a docking station with a tear away tablet

Windows 8 is definately banking having this sort of hardware in laptops and displays being available. You dont do Metro on the desktop unless you think that kind of hardware will be available in some form at launch. Metro with a mouse is hideous, even for Microsoft...

wtallis2• 14 years ago

I don't think the technology exists to make large tablets ergonomically feasible. In order for the tablet portion to be light enough to casually pick up and carry around, it would have to be not much larger than an iPad, which is to say, less than half the smallest reasonable screen size for a desktop.

rsynnott3• 14 years ago

You'd have to either make your operating system work very well with both touch and mouse/trackpad/keyboard (very difficult), treat touch as a gimmick (as with those Windows 7 HP iMac-like things with touch screens), or make touch (which is ergonomically highly problematic on anything but a smallish tablet) the first-class citizen.

saturdaysaint• 14 years ago

-I'd probably pay $30 for the Airplay feature alone. -I don't know how Apple thinks they can push these web-enabled apps that only work on their platforms. A chat app that basically only lets you interact with Apple customers is kind of comical. -Gatekeeper won't win over any Apple critics, but it's actually more flexible/open than what a lot of people feared was coming (ie "App Store apps only"). -Notifications and system-wide share buttons are nice touches. I wonder if the share button will be limited to a few Apple-approved services.

davidcollantes• 14 years ago

Related to this, all my friends and family are already using an Apple product (referring to either iPhone, iPad or a Mac, or all inclusive). Really, everyone I know is. A chat app (and any other) that let me interact with them is perfect.

jws3• 14 years ago

A chat app that basically only lets you interact with Apple customers is kind of comical. – would be. Thankfully you probably know people with AIM, XMPP, or SMS chat identities. And iChat works with those too.

From the official Apple pages: Messages supports iMessage and instant messaging services such as AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, and Yahoo! Messenger.

bergie2• 14 years ago

It would be great if they brought those other protocols to the iOS Messages app as well

phamilton• 14 years ago

What I would really like is if Google Voice could integrate with Messages so all my SMS needs could be taken care of.

gearoidoc• 14 years ago

"A chat app that basically only lets you interact with Apple customers is kind of comical"

Ehm, it's iChat linked to iMessage. It still supports chatting over gmail, yahoo etc.

furyg3• 14 years ago

You can get the Messages application in beta form here: http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/messages-beta/

brown9-2• 14 years ago

Expectedly, but somewhat of a bummer, it requires Lion :(

dfc• 14 years ago

How is the iCloud focus going to effect corporate adoption? If you are a large company can you host your own iCloud service on company resources? Does/will apple provide a sas70 for big corporate users?

ori_b4• 14 years ago

"OS X Mountain Lion arrives this summer. With all-new features inspired by iPad, the Mac just keeps getting better and better."

Am I the only person that doesn't want an ipad on the desktop?

antidaily• 14 years ago

No, no one wants that (I hope). Read the Gruber preview and you'll feel more at ease. OS X and iOS are not merging. He describes Mountain Lion as "a series of steps toward defining a set of shared concepts, styles, and principles between two fundamentally distinct OSes."

http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion

hahainternet• 14 years ago

I asked a few friends and couldn't get an answer. What features have been taken from OSX and put into iOS?

It seems to me that contrary to Gruber's claim, OSX is moving towards iOS and iOS is moving towards its competition.

toddh• 14 years ago

This strikes me as more of a transition period. Eventually mac sales will be controlled completely via the app store and its highly structured sand boxed environment. Gatekeeper allows runtime control. Icloud replaces the local file system. The style guide moves to the ipad side. And in a few years the mac just fades away...

billpatrianakos2• 14 years ago

I read the Gruber article too and I'm not totally at ease yet. In terms or UI I don't mind the new look of things but I do worry about things like iCloud. It's a really excellent idea but I'm not sure if I want my file system in the cloud. Not for security but just for control. I've been in love with the Mac for over five years now and I'm starting to worry. What if I want a different cloud file system other than iCloud? What if I want no cloud file system? Sure, right now it's no problem but what about the future?

It's no secret that Apple is basically creating a hardware software empire where everything from the physical computer to the peripherals to the software and even web services are all Apple. I've been fine with that because the Mac never tried to force things on me. I've always had the option to use a different email client, Dropbox, music player, etc. without any trouble but I'm afraid Apple will move OS X in the direction of Windows where the OS assumes you're going to use its preferred software and services and if you don't it either makes it a hassle to use alternatives or it continuously throws up those annoying notifications.

All that aside, I'm most afraid for how friendly it will be to developers. Snow Leopard was the last OS X that was perfect for me as a developer. In Lion I have to deal with things like LLVM as the default compiler outdated command line tools, some Ruby gems give me problems, the system won't allow you to save hidden files (i.e. ".htaccess") and the list goes on.

I know that developers and power users are in the minority and that for average folks who are all about media and entertainment with a little work thrown in Mountain Lion will be aweso,e out of the box. I'm glad they're making such an awesome system for those people but I feel like they're leaving developers out and not even giving us a way to switch off some of those default behaviors.

I'm only 25 but I feel like I sound like the old guy who thinks things were better "back in the old days". Maybe I am just resisting a good thing and I hope I learn to love it.

swombat• 14 years ago

"Inspired by" doesn't mean "equal to"... I don't see any evidence that those features turn your mac into an ipad.

moe4• 14 years ago

Last time they took inspiration from iOS we ended up with "Launchpad", an inverted scroll-wheel, and the god-awful "restart all applications after reboot"-nuisance that cannot be fully disabled.

Thanks but no thanks.

taylorbuley• 14 years ago

It took me a while to get used to Lion's reverse scroll, which in retrospect seems like a layup for this release, but I've come to enjoy it.

tdfx• 14 years ago

Took me about a week and a half to get over that mentally. Now I can't use my girlfriend's computer who is still on Snow Leopard.

ed2093• 14 years ago

Since os 8.something I've always felt that my mac is a workhorse. It's like I've had to have a mac, I a professional designer damnit.

But this update feels like it's creeping towards a heavily consumer facing product. My workhorse is being swapped for a show pony...

(no doubt it'll still do the job, it just a totally unfounded feeling I have)

batista9• 14 years ago

But this update feels like it's creeping towards a heavily consumer facing product.

Two questions:

1) you think you are different than a consumer how?

2) what exactly do you see this update taking away from you?

mitchellhislop• 14 years ago

Why is it that a consumer product can not also be a workhorse?

I have been running Lion and do not feel that it makes my computer less of a workhorse. I dont think that ML will make it less of a workhorse. I see this update as adding a bunch of stuff, some of which will be useful to developers, and not removing anything that made me fall in love with my Mac as a dev platform.

freehunter• 14 years ago

As a non-Mac-user, I've always had the impression (from Apple and the general public) that Macs are consumer-oriented devices (or at least non-corporate machines). The only significant impact they've had in business in my view is for creative professionals like yourself, and only because for a while Adobe tools worked better on Mac (which may or may not be the case anymore).

Schools used Macs because they were cheap (for the schools). Creatives used Macs because the tools were better. 99% of the other Mac users used Macs because it was more consumer friendly than the business-oriented Windows. Apple has never been in the business of catering to business.

tristan_louis• 14 years ago

You're not. The continuing IOSification of OSX is something that has been bugging me too and part of why, to date, I've yet to upgrade to Lion. It looks like Apple wants to create a more iOS-like approach across all its products, which is fine if you buy into the whole ecosystem.

It also seems there's a trend here, with Apple bringing iOS increasingly into OSX and Microsoft bringing Windows Phone into Windows 8, the only operating systems which still are aimed primarily at computer users are Unix or Linux based.

randomdata• 14 years ago

I have yet to use Lion, so I cannot comment if the iOS metaphor suits the personal computer, but I am all for the vendors trying something new. The desktop metaphor has been used for multiple decades now, with very little variation. While it has proven to work well, is it the best we can do, or are we stuck with baby duck syndrome?

pivo• 14 years ago

This worries me too, and I hope it doesn't go too far. However I am using Lion and in general I don't really notice it in this OS.

In fact, other than the reverse scrolling behaviour (which would be easy to revert if I cared) I rarely notice any difference in behaviour between my Lion laptop and my girlfriend's Snow Leopard laptop.

rayiner2• 14 years ago

At the end of the day, the Mac is still the developer platform for iOS Apple has been really good to Mac developers, and I don't see them stopping anytime soon (it is totally against their interest in having a great apps ecosystem on iOS).

Lion is great. Swiping between full-screen desktops is a huge productivity boost. Touchpad gestures instead of hotkeys to bring up Expose is awesome. Yes it's iOS-ified, but it takes the good things from iOS that fit naturally with the touchpad.

At the same time, the UNIX guts of OS X keep getting better. Grand Central is an awesome API that you can use from C. 64-bit support is almost seamless. You can swipe just fine between full-screen terminal windows. Xcode keeps getting less shitty, LLVM and LLDB keep getting better. Objective-C keeps seeing feature and performance improvements. The API's keep being improved.

People are afraid that the gains for iOS means losses for OS X, but all I've seen so far are gains for OS X, largely focused on revamping the UI to take full advantage of the multi-touch capabilities of modern Mac hardware.

brackin• 14 years ago

Tim Cook said the other day that the iPad is helping the Mac gain marketshare. That tagline is telling all of the iOS users. You liked your phone? Why not try a computer that integrates with it perfectly.

wpeterson• 14 years ago

Seriously. The last thing I want is my Macbook Pro to behave like my iPhone.

I love them both, but they are drastically different products and uses.

roc2• 14 years ago

I feel the same way. But what in Mountain Lion sounds anything like that?

All I see is popular out-of-the-box iOS apps/features being brought to the out-of-the-box OS X experience.

What power users don't already have growl, dropbox, a dedicated notes app, a dedicated reminders app, an integrated chat client, etc?

These Mountain Lion features are only iOS-like inasmuch as iOS had them out-of-the_box, while OS X users looked to third parties to provide them. If you ask me, Mountain Lion sounds like a more reasoned approach to "bring what works about iOS to OS X" than misfires like "Mission Control".

pwelch2• 14 years ago

No your not. I want my stuff to sync without issues like my notes, contacts, mail but I don't want my laptop/desktop to feel like my phone. Example: Launch pad, is anyone really using this?

calloc3• 14 years ago

Nope, and you don't have to. But for those users that are new to the platform (and I have watched quite a few) it makes them feel at home. They instantly know where to look for their apps, they can re-arrange them however they like. It is not for those of us who grew up on Mac OS, then Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, it is for those that have had an iPad or an iPhone and know there is a single location (home) where all your apps are. Launchpad fits that bill nicely.

aiscott2• 14 years ago

I've been using OS X for years as my main OS, and I do occasionally use launchpad. I've got a boatload of stuff installed and I don't always remember what I have. Launchpad provides a nice way of viewing all the apps.

I don't use it everytime I launch somthing (I use alfred for that), but to refresh my memory every now and then.

It doesn't work exactly like I would like it too, but it's not bad, and it's very out of the way if you don't like it.

jsz05• 14 years ago

I use it. Sometimes I actually forgot what apps I have installed or forget the names of them if I don't use them frequently. If my hand is already on the trackpad I just have to pinch in and there they are. Quicker than going to the Applications folder.

kalleboo• 14 years ago

I never use Launchpad, but I'm glad it's there since I've always had trouble explaining the Applications folder vs the Dock to people, and Launchpad solves that very nicely for non-technical people (especially ones with iPhones/iPads).

ImprovedSilence3• 14 years ago

I actually like the idea of it being both (and and ipad becoming a desktop) Launchpad for ipad like utility, the normal desktop for desktop things, have both on both systems. Lets be honest here, we are moving away from a central computing device model, to a model with many peripheral devices. I'd like it if they all acted the same, and were capable of displaying the same content, as well as providing the same ability to create.

sliverstorm• 14 years ago

Apparently those of us who feel this way are dwindling in number.

jsz05• 14 years ago

Is there any specific reasons you wouldn't want AirPlay, Notes/Reminders/Messages, notifications, etc? It seems to me those are all very good features to add to OSX that happened to debut on iOS first.

SODaniel3• 14 years ago

You might want to move away from Mac's then. For some reason that's where it's all heading. By the end of 2012 you will be squeezing and swyping all over your 27" screen.

easp• 14 years ago

Which, of course, is BS

AznHisoka• 14 years ago

Am I the only one afraid of upgrading my Mac in fear of breaking my Ruby gems, MySQL drivers, C libraries, ImageMagick, environment variables, iOS libraries, provisioning certificates, etc?

mbesto• 14 years ago

The walls are slowly going up around the garden...

jpravetz• 14 years ago

I'm most alarmed with this restriction:

iCloud document storage and Notification Center. Both of these are slated only for third-party apps from the Mac App Store. Many developers, though, have been maintaining non-Mac App Store versions of their apps. If this continues, such apps are going to lose feature parity between the App Store and non-App Store versions.

This will affect software from companies such as Adobe where custom installers are necessary and/or the economics of taking a 30% App Store hit is not necessary when they can already reach their customer base. The move strikes me as anti competitive.

Gring• 14 years ago

According to the screenshots, the spotlight icon is no longer on the top right, getting shuffled over to the left by presumably a new icon to invoke notification center.

That's a really bad choice. The corners are the click targets fastest to reach (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law ), and demoting searching in favor of 'reading messages that have popped up before' doesn't strike me as quite well-balanced.

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

It gets worse; can also call it up with a two-finger swipe to the left. Not sure why they're so intent on overloading that gesture.

Two fingers in SL:

* Scroll.

Two fingers in ML:

* Scroll

* or back/forward

* or Notification Center

cpr2• 14 years ago

It looks like the two fingers have to come in from the right side of the scroll area (like pulling down on the top of the screen--the right side in this case), so it's distinct from the other meanings.

jedberg• 14 years ago

Command-Space opens spotlight, and if you're gonna search, you might as well already have your hand on they keyboard.

I actually like it better -- I'm much more likely to activate notifications with a mouse, so I'd much rather have that be the "bigger" target.

mmuro• 14 years ago

I'm looking forward to the day when I don't have to worry about my file system and apps just know what files it needs or can view.

iCloud seems to be moving things in that direction.

pwthornton4• 14 years ago

The thing I'm by far the most excited about is AirPlay Mirroring. If I'm reading this correctly, I'll be able to mirror anything from my Mac to my TV using an Apple TV. This will be great for watching Internet videos, going through my iPhoto library with my wife, looking at home videos, etc. All without needing a stupid cable from my couch to my TV.

The deeper iCloud integration is also intriguing. I assume this means proper syncing between documents on a Mac, iPad and iPhone. This will be a huge feature, and is currently a major stumbling block with iCloud. I want my documents to sync to my mobile devices.

Those two features alone are pretty big. Beyond that, I'm interested to here about the new APIs and anything else that has been changed under the hood.

OS X Lion has always been a little bit buggy (the latest release is pretty solid, however). I wonder if Mountain Lion will be like Snow Leopard where it tightens up a lot of things under the hood and gives us a better realization of the OS.

I'm excited for Gatekeeper for my parents and other people I know that aren't that tech savvy. This could save me a lot of headaches.

orionlogic3• 14 years ago

I am excited as well in AirPlay Mirroring so i watched several times in the demo. It seems video plays with Quicktime. So lot's of video formats are not compatible like mkv's, iso's etc...

If somehow i am able to mirror VLC i will run and buy Apple TV at once.

janus• 14 years ago

If you install Perian, Quicktime supports expands to include many more formats http://perian.org/

But I agree and would welcome the support for VLC too!

Tyrannosaurs7• 14 years ago

From what I can see it's just screen sharing isn't it? Play something in VLC in fullscreen and you're fine. They use Quicktime for the demo because it's an Apple product but I don't believe it's a limitation.

If Apple have to throw Quicktime under the bus to sell more Apple TVs and Macs I think they'll happily do it.

emehrkay• 14 years ago

This says it will display whatever is on your screen, but if you're using itunes, drm will kick in.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/16/2801047/mac-os-x-10-8-moun...

moe4• 14 years ago

lot's of video formats are not compatible

This will airplay pretty much everything you throw at it: http://beamer-app.com

LokiSnake• 14 years ago

Looking at Apple's page, it seems like it doesn't only mirror output of apps such as Quicktime, but is able to do desktop mirroring, so you can play videos in VLC and mirror the entire screen.

Tyrannosaurs7• 14 years ago

And that's the point the Apple TV goes from a hobby to a major product.

Spending a £1000 on a Mac - I reckon another £100 for an Apple TV with that functionality as the hook is a pretty easy up sell.

toni• 14 years ago

It is unfortunate that AppleTV's video output (out-of-the-box) still does not support true 1080p resolutions and everything is upscaled from 720p.

smackfu4• 14 years ago

I don't know how many purchases it will really drive. You can do all those those things with an Apple TV and an iPhone today, and almost all of them with just an Apple TV.

roc2• 14 years ago

I would disagree. Neat as Airplay is, it isn't going to move Apple TVs.

Apps and/or Content deals with video distributors (Comcast/Verizon/etc) are going to be where it turns the corner. I suspect the whole hobby has been in a holding pattern while Apple has tried to line up the content deals and that the fallback plan is to just enable Apps and let the chips fall where they may. [1]

That's probably even the stick they'll use to get the cable companies to the table: Either they sign up and get preferential treatment in the interface, or they get shoved into being a dumb IP pipe that much faster.

[1] Delaying as the internals for an Apple-quality, app-running, 1080p set-top box get cheaper and cheaper hasn't hurt, I'm sure.

sigjuice• 14 years ago

I am most excited about AirPlay Mirroring as well. However, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple pulls some BS like it only works with 2012 Macs.

nilsbunger2• 14 years ago

I would like AirPlay mirroring the other way around too -- let my iPad / iPhone cast to my Mac. Very useful for presentations and iOS product demos.

anthonys• 14 years ago

From a work perspective, this will be an awesome feature. We currently have a heap of screens with "Wireless Presenter" software running on them which isn't that easy to get going.

AirPlay Mirroring sounds like it could be a solution for that provided you could choose the Apple TV you wanted to connect to (There'd be at least 200 screens in my office).

phodo• 14 years ago

Just last night I found a post on TUAW about something called AirParrot (http://www.airparrot.com), which provides similar functionality. I've been looking for something like that for a while, so jumped at the chance to download it (cost me $9.99). It's in beta, and the developer makes no secret of that. It does not pipe audio, and has a few other quirks but I managed to: run a powerpoint presentation, run civilization v, and play some youtube videos from my machine to my appletv. I have no affiliation with the developer, but i must say - to pwthornton's point above, it's pretty effing cool to airplay out of your mac. I bet the official release from apple will be that much better too.

mark_l_watson2• 14 years ago

A minor warning: I installed Mountain Lion yesterday on my 1+ year MacBook Pro (core 2 duo, not i5 or i7) and Air Play doesn't seem to work - no icon on menu bar. This makes sense because i5 has some instructions for better video compression. Hopefully older Macs will be supported as the software is tweaked. Otherwise, I like Mountain Lion.

josteink2• 14 years ago

Accidentally bans ultrabooks in the process.

http://mashable.com/2012/02/15/apple-patents-macbook-air/

jws3• 14 years ago

Just a design patent [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent], nothing to see here. Don't make your ultra book look like an air and you are fine. (Hint: pay attention to materials, radiuses, colors, and angles.)

How close you can get involves how much tolerance you have for litigation and risking a loss.

wmf2• 14 years ago

That's no accident. And why should somebody be allowed to make a laptop that looks exactly like an Air?

feralchimp• 14 years ago

I for one welcome our new OS-level code signature verification overlords. May they smite evil and incompetence swiftly and brutally...except when 'evil' is defined by foreign governments, domestic law enforcement, or fair competition with built-in features.

With great power comes great "you guys better not fuck this up."

yequalsx• 14 years ago

"If an app is found to be malware, Apple can revoke that developer’s certificate, rendering the app (along with any others from the same developer) inert on any Mac where it’s been installed. "

Yeah, it's not a great reach to think that in five years there will be no Option 3 and malware will include any program that the government of the nation that your computer is in deems undesirable. Apple and Microsoft will likely be forced to have such capabilities by various national governments.

maercsrats• 14 years ago

If you think it's that possible then why not contact your congress person/senator and have them look into this? In fact, talk to them about drafting a law against not being able to install software of your choosing on a machine you buy. Or, at the very least, a law for being able to take your data with you when you decide to leave a platform. This wouldn't help China, Iran, Syria, etc. but it would at least give US citizens some protections.

Personally, I'm not very afraid of option 3 ever going away but I also am ready with a FreeBSD VM instance.

rbanffy• 14 years ago

"Log out, stage left!"

Sorry folks, Couldn't resist.

dedene• 14 years ago

Is it just me or is the iMessage Beta icon very very similar to the HipChat icon? :)

http://cl.ly/3m060G3x1o2X3I1u3I1D

ceejayoz8• 14 years ago

Messages (iChat) has been around far longer than HipChat.

antirez2• 14 years ago

Messages is great, but is there a way to get every iMessage duplicated across iPhone / Mac? Otherwise you send an iMessage, close the mac, grap the iPhone and go away, but never get the reply back. And so forth.

yankcrime• 14 years ago

It's duplicated for me. A conversation I had with a friend via iMessage and his iPhone sync'd up on my phone a few minutes later.

antirez2• 14 years ago

Ok so I guess it's just the "beta" part of the issue ;) Thank you.

a2tech• 14 years ago

Thats the way it works. My iPad, iPhone and now Messages Beta display every message

Arelius3• 14 years ago

At least 2 weeks ago I also was not seeing that behaivor. I had to unpaid my iPad because I was missing vital messages on my iPhone. Its possible that my iPhone was out of service at the time. But that shouldnt matternn

ashleyw• 14 years ago

The worrying thing about Apple's Gatekeeper feature isn't that they may impose their moral opinions on apps, but that governments and corporate entities will have the ability to pressure Apple into disabling apps which aren't actually malicious, i.e. Tor & BitCoin.

Whether or not it can be disabled is irrelevant. I don't want to have to instruct my customers about how to essentially jailbreak their Mac just to use my app.

And will it just be .app applications which need to be signed, or will it be all binaries, e.g. Vim and Apache?

Worrying times indeed. I don't particularly want to use Linux, cause I really love OS X's elegance, but I can see switching being a real possibility over the next few years if Apple continues the trend of forcing iOS's walled-garden on OS X.

xster2• 14 years ago

notes and reminders are features?? sigh... I miss steve...

j45• 14 years ago

I hope it doesn't turn out to be Mountain Goat. Lion broke my external displays working properly while in clamshell (closed laptop) mode.

Conveniently, if I connect it to an Apple display, it's magic, but somehow not.

jakemcgraw• 14 years ago

Wow. It's the reverse digital hub strategy. The peripheral devices (iPod, iPhone, iPad) are now more popular than the Mac. So, rather than sunset the Mac, Apple makes it so that if you own own of these devices, a Mac will be the default choice.

xster2• 14 years ago

how much you think you should pay? 1000$????? 500$????? nooooooo!! only 99$, you get a clock, paint and even reversi! for only 99$!!

2mur• 14 years ago

The only thing that I really dislike about iCloud is sharing a computer (with your wife/family).

Our family room computer is a mac mini that is logged into one user account all of the time. It is shared by myself, my wife and my kids. The iPhoto on that account is set up to use my iCloud account. If my wife wants to get her photos (iPhone) downloaded from iCloud she has to log over to an account that only exists for this purpose.

So I'm sure the whole documents, todos, calendar and everything else on 10.8 is going to be a similar pain in the ass for people sharing one computer.

We have to manage three AppleIDs. My iCloud account, her iCloud account and we share an AppleID for purchases from the App Store. They need to fix this for multi-Apple families.

Aloisius• 14 years ago

Why don't you use multiple user accounts on your Mac Mini? That's pretty much what it is designed for.

pwelch2• 14 years ago

I agree. For those who want one account for everyone then just register all your devices. If you want everyone in your household to have separate accounts then just have different logins...

rads2• 14 years ago

Does Mountain Lion allow you to make apps full-screen on non-primary displays? This is the main problem I have with Lion.

lunchladydoris• 14 years ago

Agreed. I was more than a little annoyed to discover that I couldn't watch iTunes Store movies full-screen on my HD TV through an displayport-to-HDMI adapter after upgrading to Lion. I actually gave some thought to going back to Snow Leopard but that seemed more bother than it was worth so I started renting movies on the Xbox 360 instead.

rads2• 14 years ago

I just installed the preview myself, and the answer is yes! It still gives the other displays a linen background and renders them useless, though.

miles_matthias• 14 years ago

I'm all for OS X adopting more and more of iOS because it's great for the user experience. However as a hacker it feels wrong to have a computer that is as locked down as iOS devices. BUT Apple showed me that they are listening and still want to cater to developers when they announced GateKeeper (http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/security.html).

I have a few friends who are switching to Unix instead of Mac OS X because of the direction it's going. For me, it's going to be all about how much Apple allows developers to innovate on their platform. We'll see what happens, but GateKeeper is a good sign.

un1xl0ser• 14 years ago

I agree that I don't like where it is going, but we aren't really the target audience.

I was looking to get CrunchBang Linux running on my MBP, but realistically the battery life change will make the device hard to justify. If I am going to go back to 2-3 hours of battery life, I'm probably going to have to change my hardware setup to get a Thinkpad with a pair of nine cells.

That said, I can't even flip my virtualization set-up, because I doubt that it is going to be smooth sailing (license-wise and technically) running a copy of OS X in VirtualBox or VMware.

dgallagher• 14 years ago

Can anyone comment on any differences in Mission Control (e.g. Spaces) between 10.7 and 10.8 beta?

cpr2• 14 years ago

Sigh.

Others have hinted at this, but I'll say it outright: I've been a pretty solid Mac user/developer for 25 years (with a 3-year interlude on Windows + ThinkPad towards the end of classic MacOS, when the lack of true multitasking and a "real" operating system just got unbearable).

I suppose it's inevitable, but I really hate to see the Mac become just another part of the whole iOS ecosystem.

There's nothing specific I can point to, but it does feel like the end of general-purpose computing for those of us who really like Apple hardware.

Edit: Perhaps I'm wrong, and the cloudification is happening everywhere: with Chromebooks/Chrome OS, with Win8, etc. So maybe this is the inevitable regardless of which platform(s) one enjoys.

Linux, here we come? ;-)

callahad• 14 years ago

I'm feeling the same malaise. I want to blame it on the Mac App Store, XCode dropping GNU GCC, Gatekeeper, etc. feeling like a slowly tightening noose, but honestly, I don't think that's it. After all, I'm willing to put up with the same sort of signed software model on Android.

Still, if someone can point me to a hassle-free Linux laptop in a MacBook Air form factor, I'll jump ship in a heartbeat.

seurahepo• 14 years ago

Going to LLVM and dropping GCC is the best single Dev Tools related choice Apple has done since acquiring NeXT.

bwarp7• 14 years ago

Nothing exciting. Let me quantify this before I get shot by the Apple fanboys. I'm not a Microsoft fanboy either but I am not buying the hype and feature sheet.

Example:

1. iCloud. Have Windows Live ID and Live Mesh integration in windows for nearly 3 years now. Works across mobile devices already.

2. Messages. Windows Live Messenger has social integration already which is on par with this.

3. Reminders. Windows Live calendar does this and gives you alerts through windows live messenger and email.

4. Notes. NOTHING on this planet compares to Microsoft's OneNote.

5. Notification center. Windows live has one built in that you can integrate with. Oh and you also have the system tray.

6. Share sheets. Windows has had "sent to" since about 1996.

7. Twitter. Windows live integration.

8. Game center. We have shops for that and Steam and all sorts. It's an open market.

9. Airplay mirroring. Woo yay etc. Windows media player (!) does this with my Sony Bravia with no complaints. I can right click a video file and select "play on Bravia" and it appears on it straight away. This required NO CONFIGURATION and no special boxes. Both have wireless cards in them. No store or DRM available or required.

10. Gatekeeper. Windows firewall is actually on par with this and is an application AND/OR system level firewall. Microsoft security essentials is the rest.

11. Chinese features. Windows is the mainstream OS in china for a reason (i.e. excellent language support).

The only thing above that cost anything is Windows (which cost effectively nothing as it came with the PC) and OneNote (which cost me 200GBP) and included Word, Excel and Outlook as well. Oh and the nice Acer TimelineX machine only cost me 400GBP, TV cost 300GBP so total 900GBP

Compare that to a MacBook which cost more than that to start with at 999GBP.

Oh and I don't have to pay 99GBP to write software that works on it. Visual Studio is free.

Doesn't add up.

Hmm.

gurkendoktor4• 14 years ago

Re: iCloud, Messages, Notes, Reminders: Apple has technically had all that for years too, these are all renamed apps. The thing is, now they have a massive mobile presence and they are working on integrating that with the desktop. That is the news. Feel free to compare when Windows grows a comparable mobile presence again, if ever. (Sadly, imho)

> 10. Gatekeeper. Windows firewall is actually on par with this and is an application AND/OR system level firewall. Microsoft security essentials is the rest.

Gatekeeper and the App Store is not about firewalling, but sandboxing.

> 11. Chinese features. Windows is the mainstream OS in china for a reason (i.e. excellent language support).

Maybe, in any case, that doesn't make catching up less interesting. I would also wager that most people in China use Windows for the same reasons for which they use IE6. I only know about Taiwan, but when your bank's customer support site only offers an ActiveX-powered video chat, then you have little choice.

> Oh and I don't have to pay 99GBP to write software that works on it. Visual Studio is free.

No, you can download Xcode for free, write unsigned apps and other people can choose to run unsigned apps.

ceejayoz8• 14 years ago

According to Gruber, signing apps will be free.

http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion

"It’s a system whereby developers can sign up for free-of-charge Apple developer IDs which they can then use to cryptographically sign their applications."

evan_• 14 years ago

> Oh and I don't have to pay 99GBP to write software that works on it. Visual Studio is free.

Not sure what you're talking about, XCode is free. Visual Studio is $799.

sid05• 14 years ago

He's referring to the fact you have to pay $99.00 to distribute your apps on the App Store.

The IDE's on both OS's are irrelevant arguments. There are free versions of Visual Studio as well that work just as nice as the Professional editions. Those editions are for corporate enterprise architect roles etc.

joejohnson3• 14 years ago

I don't have time to refute all of your claims, but:

>>> 1. iCloud. Have Windows Live ID and Live Mesh integration in windows for nearly 3 years now. Works across mobile devices already.

It works across mobile devices, poorly. I think iCloud is a much better user experience, and has better app support even being the newer product.

>>> 2. Messages. Windows Live Messenger has social integration already which is on par with this.

Windows Live Messenger is not on par with this. iMessage will work across many platforms. Using Messenges you can chat with someone who thinks you are texting them.

The list goes on... The point is, yes, Calendar applications have been around for a while. Reminder apps have too. All of these things are offered in lots of ways on lots of platforms. What Apple is succeeding at doing (albeit slowly) is simplifying and improving software offerings in all of these existing domains.

Someone2• 14 years ago

I think iMessage on Mac will be somewhat crippled relative to on an iPhone, ss there is no fallback to SMS. That makes sense, and also is what Apple says on its site:

    "it lets you send unlimited messages to anyone on
     a Mac or an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running
     iOS 5."

ntkachov2• 14 years ago

You have to remember, Windows Live Essentials (what they call it) doesn't come standard with windows. You need to download it. That said, Apple has long been aiming at standard users and not power users. Apple knows that everything that power users need power users will make themselves or they will find.

i/OS/X is geared toward the average consumer. ie. someone who knows nothing about how it works and probably won't find a feature if it isn't on the desktop.

Don't confuse "features" with selling points.

wolfgke• 14 years ago

I believe Microsoft doesn't add this by default, because otherwise it would get into trouble with cartel authorities.

k-mcgrady5• 14 years ago

I think you need to do a bit more research. I haven't used Live in a while so I'll only answer some of your points:

2. Messages integrates with iMessage which allows any iOS device (over 100mil) and now any Mac to message each other free. WLM is IM. There is a subtle but important difference I think.

4. I agree, OneNote is fantastic. But the Apple Notes app is not designed to complete with OneNote.

5. Don't put the system tray forward as a positive thing. System tray is terrible. 8. A better comparison would be Xbox Live (which is better than Game Center).

9. Airplay mirroring allows you to mirror the entire screen not just video. You can do games, apps etc.

You don't have to pay 99GBP to write iOS/Mac apps. It's 59GBP for a developer membership. And the IDE Xcode is 100% free to anyone. Visual Studio is not free. It's several thousand dollars. Visual Studio Express is free.

http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msstore/en_US/list/size....

philwelch6• 14 years ago

Airplay mirroring. Woo yay etc. Windows media player (!) does this with my Sony Bravia with no complaints.

Cool story bro, mind sharing how you can use WMP to mirror your whole display? You know, for things like presentations, VLC, games?

ceejayoz8• 14 years ago

This post reads a little like saying about the iPhone release "my phone already can make calls, run apps, I can type notes and e-mails, add to my calendar, check the weather, etc."

It totally misses the point.

illumin82• 14 years ago

OneNote only comes with Microsoft Office. Which you can also purchase for Mac. Xcode is free. A developer code signing certificate costs money whether you buy it through Apple or Verisign. Want to release trusted apps on Windows that don't throw up scary looking security warnings to your users that download them? Guess you'll need to pay $299 a year to Verisign or some other CA for that privilege.

Gatekeeper is actually a cool feature because now any developer will be able to release signed applications without going through the app store approval process. If they do nasty things, their certificate gets revoked. You get the benefits to the user of running signed/trusted code, and the benefits to the developer of deploying for free, without app store approval.

hmottestad• 14 years ago

Mind you though, to spare some confusion, there is no OneNote for mac, even though mac has a special edition of Word that implements a few of the features of OneNote.

masklinn• 14 years ago

> A developer code signing certificate costs money whether you buy it through Apple or Verisign.

According to Gruber, signing OSX apps will be free (which is sensible: it's really a service to Apple)

jaylevitt2• 14 years ago

FYI, Office for Mac doesn't include OneNote, which isn't available on Mac.

mrshoe• 14 years ago

Don't fall into the trap of comparing Apple's feature list with that of other vendors. Apple makes these lists of new features to compare one version of OS X to the last, but they don't make those grids full of green check marks and red X's to compare their products to competitors'.

There's a reason for that. New features might provide a reason to buy a $29 OS X upgrade, but they don't represent the reason people choose Mac over Windows. I choose Mac over Windows because the entire user experience is friendlier, more polished, and better integrated. It's the details of how the features are implemented and the way they work together that make for a superior product.

bwarp7• 14 years ago

It's only integrated if you use it in the way that Apple expect you to. Otherwise, the coupling and integration between the applications is horrible. And yes I know about Automator.

aaronblohowiak• 14 years ago

>4. Notes. NOTHING on this planet compares to Microsoft's OneNote.

Scrivner and Evernote do compare, actually. That being said, OneNote is one of the least appreciated MS products.

dasil003• 14 years ago

I'm not particularly excited about this release, but I gotta think you'd have been better off not calling out the word fanboy here at all, because you really really come off as a Windows fanboy, much more so than any of the responses to you come off as any kind of fanboy, and frankly more than I've seen anywhere in quite some time.

bwarp7• 14 years ago

Sorry that was a "sarcastic" intent of the post i.e. to do the comparison as per Mac users do usually on here.

In actual fact I sit in front of a Linux machine neatly occupying the neutral zone :-)

riobard• 14 years ago

1. iCloud. Have Windows Live ID and Live Mesh integration in windows for nearly 3 years now. Works across mobile devices already.

So you have a Windows Phone for 3 years? Impressed. Must be a hard time.

2. Messages. Windows Live Messenger has social integration already which is on par with this.

Like chatting with Jabber/Gtalk buddies?

4. Notes. NOTHING on this planet compares to Microsoft's OneNote.

Bloat-wise, sure. For the rest of us who prefer simplicity, SimpleNote/Notation Velocity wins. But I still envy Notes. Why? Because it is synced automatically across all your iOS/OS X devices. You don't even have to keep any app open.

What about showing your working desktop fullscreen to do a demo on your Bravia?

11. Chinese features. Windows is the mainstream OS in china for a reason (i.e. excellent language support).

Don't get me started on this. It has nothing to do with language support.

ImprovedSilence3• 14 years ago

I'm not an apple fanboi, and all those new osx 8 features don't really vibe with my needs. but osx=> unix (more or less), windows ~= unix. That's game over in my book.

kalid• 14 years ago

12. iPad. Windows has had tablets since 2001.

The focus on feature-by-feature comparisons is why Apple is cleaning everyone's clock. I wrote this 2 years ago when the iPad came out (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025200):

-------

In my head, I call this the "blender" comparison that many technophiles seem to use.

Want to compare two meals? Put them in the blender and analyze the nutritional content of the resulting goop.

What? You don't compare food by spec sheets? (Calories, vitamins, carbs, proteins). What are these subjective "texture, taste, style, temperature, presentation" variables you care about? They offer little or no nutritional difference!

coob• 14 years ago

The next time Apple does this style of announcement, I'm inclined to believe that they may release the info themselves half an hour or so before their embargo ends. The first I heard about this, before there were any changes to the Apple site, was a tweet.

huskyr• 14 years ago

So i need to reboot my Mac after installing the Messages demo? Can't remember ever seeing that with an Apple product other than Xcode.

286c8cb04bda• 14 years ago

iTunes updates often require a reboot. Previous iWork installs have also.

Most of the time, an actual restart is not required, just logging out and then back in.

alexanderberman• 14 years ago

Does anyone else see Notes as an Evernote killer?

Lewisham3• 14 years ago

I know it's not a popular opinion, but yet again I feel like Apple has decided to simply keep status quo with Mac OS X, which is very much the same Mac OS X we got from about 10.3 onwards (Panther, wasn't it)?

Think about how different Ubuntu is now since then. Windows 8 is a real risk-take from a company that does not take risks (whether they were forced to do so or not is another argument). Mac OS X is... Mac OS X again.

I've been using Mac OS X since 10.2, and I will get another Apple machine for my next one, but I really don't know why they bother putting anything out if they're just going to phone it in each time. Pretty much everything added to Lion I really don't care for, and what they did add was minimal anyway.

I wonder if they really have the vision and the tenacity to actually move things forward, or whether iOS and Mac OS X are going to remain the way they are until the company can't take it anymore. They need a software person like hardware needs Johnny Ive. Someone to put their foot down, say "we're doing this" and follow through.

The next 10 years of Mac OS X cannot be the same as the last 10 years, can it?

glhaynes2• 14 years ago

What is it you're wanting?

Lewisham3• 14 years ago

A feeling that I'm not buying the same OS each year.

Personally, I think Microsoft's strategy of bringing back the hybrid desktop/tablet, where you can do tablet-type things on the road/in bed, then drop it into a dock and go back to mouse and keyboard for work, is pretty sound now. I like what they've done with Windows 8. I like that they're trying.

What do I want from Apple? Probably something I don't know I want. I want to be able to drop an iPad into an iMac enclosure and have a hybrid work area. I want iCloud to be more than some weird, feature-free Dropbox (the new organization structure sounds like a misery for anyone with more than a handful of files). I want them to fix Finder and rethink the Dock.

But this is like asking what I want from an iPhone before I ever saw one, and I think most people's ideas of what they wanted were so wildly off, and then Steve comes out and says "You want this" and he's right. That's what I want from them, to know me better than myself.

nchlswu• 14 years ago

Mac OS is at a point where they simply can't take these drastic jumps that you may see in the competition. For one, they're now at a yearly cycle. Two, the audience has expanded and continues to expand it's user base.

OS X's yearly cycles allows them to take a loyal user base who will upgrade and gradually introduce them to paradigm shifts, like cloud storage. Apple is taking calculated steps to make sure any of their risk taking features are done right and presented to the consumer correctly so they're adopted. I think they definitely have the vision. Something they do even better is have the patience to make sure their vision comes to fruition (mostly) correctly.

I can understand your point, but I'm not sure what progress you want. I'm more inclined to say that you're a segment that Apple doesn't quite need.

Lewisham3• 14 years ago

It seems to me that Apple doesn't think that the Mac is a segment it needs at all.

I would place money on Apple killing the Mac within 10 years, moving all consumers to iOS (which, let's face it, they're doing all by themselves), and releasing Xcode onto a Linux distro and wash their hands of desktop computing once and for all.

Apple clearly doesn't see a lot of future in the desktop, and that may well be right.

kule• 14 years ago

I'm surprised that there's still no mention of a Mac version of iBooks...

r00fus• 14 years ago

It's amusing that Gatekeeper's icon looks a lot like Microsoft Security Essentials, but that (and Messages) is probably my main draw - gotta keep the parents safe on their respective all-important iOS and OSX life-centers.

crag• 14 years ago

I wished they'd fix bugs in lion before releasing the next version. Bluetooth problems, wireless connection (mostly with new MBA's, etc ) - there are huge threads on both these issues in the Apple forums. Among many others.

nilsbunger2• 14 years ago

The magic of Mac is that it's BOTH a great developer / hacker machine (POSIX/BSD + GNU tools with great hardware, power mgmt, etc), and a great machine for people who don't know how to use computers.

It's inevitable that the layer for non-techies feels more and more integrated with iOS.

Will we ever lose access to the do-anything BSD box underneath? That will be a sad day for me - Windows+cygwin is an abomination.

there• 14 years ago

I can't imagine Apple ever removing the open Unix access in its OS X server due to so many customers relying on it (though I can't really imagine them removing it in the normal OS X either, but who knows). Maybe power users will just have to upgrade to OS X server on their laptops, like Windows NT Workstation.

dean3• 14 years ago

Yawn. A whole OS upgrade to move a few iPad apps to the desktop? Apps I don't even use on my iPad. Hopefully there will be more than this.

pnathan• 14 years ago

I guess I am looking at Lion and Mountain Lion and not seeing a place for someone who works outside of the Apple target audience. I like the way I use mac books, which is "skin over Unix with usable UX and a mighty fine piece of HW".

I think it's time I started looking at high-end Linux laptops...

dekz• 14 years ago

So does this imply touchescreens with the iOS Gaming Center to come?

joejohnson3• 14 years ago

The Messages beta has significantly impacted my productivity in one day. I no longer have to look down at my phone to text while I'm at my desk and instead can chat with my SO all day while I work, and the them it appears like a text message.

api• 14 years ago

I really hope they don't try to converge the interfaces too much. The design elements in Lion that were very iOS-like were IMHO the worst.

The thing is: pads and phones are fundamentally different kinds of devices. Their UI paradigm is designed around frequent but brief and relatively shallow interactions, while a PC is for deeper longer-term interactions. Trying convergence here seems like something very easy to botch horribly.

jonnathanson• 14 years ago

Agreed. You really can't have a hybrid of the two. It ends up being neither fish nor fowl -- a suboptimal experience in either form. Either rip off the band-aid, and go swiftly but painfully through the transition to pure-iOS on everything, or keep OSX and iOS relatively separate (if, perhaps, working gradually toward more interoperability).

My guess is that Apple is waiting for the day when cloud computing is the standard, and there is no longer a great deal of need for the hardware-based functionality or design of a laptop. When that day comes, a simple iOS-style interface might be fine for everything. In the meantime, however, there are still plenty of distinct use cases for Macs and iDevices. Arguably, we're still in the awkward adolescence of cloud computing. We know it's going to grow up quickly, but that day isn't quite here yet.

(And let's not forget that Apple is a hardware company and, accordingly, is probably hesitant to hasten the demise of any of its key hardware lines).

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

In Microsoft's case, they're building a completely new UI for both PC and Tablet form factors in Windows 8, and from trying the Developer Preview, it seems to work OK on PC (although it does need a lot of tweaking)

squealingrat• 14 years ago

First off- I think Gatekeeper will further lure the average user into a false sense of security. Second, Apple needs to simplify how users are identified when communicating with iMessages. Third- it's curious that they didn't have a formal announcement.

niels_olson• 14 years ago

Any evidence in the preview that they plan to have 3G in their laptops?

SeanLuke• 14 years ago

Is it really true that Apple didn't realize it's already used this cat in an OS X release?

OSX 10.1 Puma.

Puma, Cougar, and Mountain Lion are names for the same species of cat (Puma concolor).

msbarnett• 14 years ago

The release code words are just that: code words. They're not meant to represent some kind of underlying biological reality. OS X 10.1 was not code-named "The biological species Puma concolor", and OS X 10.8 is not code-named "The biological species Puma concolor".

The code-names "Puma" and "Mountain Lion" are distinct words, ergo they represent different releases. That in biology these words refer to the same species of cat is utterly irrelevant.

tensor• 14 years ago

The tie-ins to the closed Apple ecosystem are really startling. Take someone like myself. I have no iOS devices and have friends on various operating systems and services. Perhaps I'm a minority, but this is how it breaks down for me.

iCloud - not useful, no iOS devices.

Messages - not useful, too Apple centric, I already use Adium to interface with several non-apple services.

Reminders - not useful, wont' sync to my phone. I already just use CalDAV via iCal for this.

Notes - not useful, wont' sync anywhere, I already use the much better Evernote.

Notification Center - maybe, but it only works with App Store apps of which I have few. I used to use Growl from the command line to notify me when long running computational jobs were completed, but if it's locked to App Store apps I suppose I won't be able to use it for that.

Share Sheets - maybe, but I already use Sparrow instead of Mail and Chrome instead of Safari. I use another photo hosting site that isn't Flickr and don't use Twitter.

Twitter - don't use it.

Game Center - not at all a compelling feature for me.

AirPlay Mirroring - don't have an Apple TV and prefer more open platforms for this.

Gatekeeper - this is a good idea in principle, remains to be seen if it gets in the way.

The exclusive partnering and increasingly closed Apple ecosystem is really showing. Maybe I'm a very small minority, but this direction is not in the slightest bit thrilling to me. Where are all the options to plug your own services into the system?

jsz05• 14 years ago

I really like where Apple is heading with OSX. With iCloud and a common set of features/services iOS and OSX are developing a very symbiotic relationship. It kind of confuses me to see people saying Apple is trying to turn OSX into iOS. It's really the exact opposite from my perspective. They are evolving OSX to be part of a future where SmartPhones/tablets are a major part of how people use technology. There has to be some degree of feature/usability parity for these devices to co-exist happily. Why should my $500 iPad have AirPlay and not my $1500 Mac? If I like using the Reminders app on my iPhone why shouldn't I have it on my Mac? I've yet to see any good argument against these features that doesn't rely pretty heavily on nostalgia or fear of change.

SODaniel3• 14 years ago

OS version update for something that Windows would call an 'optional update'. Way to squeeze every drop of PR out of a few new icons Apple!

SODaniel3• 14 years ago

Open letter to every UI designer trying to change 30+ years of usability of desktop interfaces, mouse actions and shortcuts behavior to 'iPad style' that has been out all of 3 years: DON'T!!

Apple announces Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

Related Stories