Apple has just released Mountain Lion to the Mac App Store. For a measly $20, Lion users can move to the new release right now, and honestly, at that price, there’s little reason not to for the Mac users among us. It’s not a huge or massive release or anything, but if you’re a fan of iOS, you’re going to love all the OS bits and pieces that are being transferred to your desktop. Have fun installing, and, as always, be sure to read the only review that matters: John Siracusa’s 25000 words long review (that’s almost as long as the thesis I wrote to earn my master’s degree, holy cripes!). I know what I’ll be reading today on my brand new Nexus 7. If you can, please support Siracusa by buying the ebook version on Amazon (currently stuck in the review process, should show up any minute now). Why? Because Siracusa’s kind of technology writing is something we need to cherish, because we have less and less of it.
Annoyingly I keep getting the message that it’s not available, try again later.
But meanwhile I updated Safari to version 6. iWork is assumed to be updated today too.
The dumbification continues …
Would you care to elaborate on what’s been dumbed down in OS X?
I’ve been using OS X for five years and can’t think of a single feature lost over the four OS updates in that time. Instead, I’ve found OS X becoming more flexible and intuitive. In my opinion, you just can’t beat an OS that provides the likes of quick look alongside a full unix command line.
While I agree that the updates have been mostly for good, I have to complain that Apple removing Rosetta hurt me quite a bit when I got Lion over Snow Leopard.
Luckily, the software in question was also available in Windows so running it in Virtualbox was a workaround for me.
It’s up in the UK store. Though, worryingly, it appears as a valid purchase on my MacBook (BlackBook 2.2Ghz late 2007 Santa Rosa) and that machine fails to meet the basic specs…. I won’t be purchasing at this time, but I’d be interested to see what happens if I do…
Biggest issue? There is now no longer any way to purchase Lion. So basically, if you have Snow Leopard on any Mountain Lion incompatible hardware, you can’t upgrade to Lion anymore. So glad I trusted my intuition and hacked the restore image for my Mac Mini last week to install it on my MacBook
Do it and let me know the results, so i don’t have to.
The latest I heard is that if you bought Lion it will show up in the app store in your purchases list, but yesterday it was not possible to download it.
I assume they’ll fix this and I guess they turned it off not to make downloading Mountain Lion even slower.
Looking forward to the ebook. Not too many take the time to do proper reviews of anything tech related.
Can’t wait for the next couple of releases:
Sea Lion
Politician Lyin’ (Oh, wait…
You lied. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8keZbZL2ero
The next release will be called “Angry Lions”
I know which review from Thom I will be waiting for
I prefer the reviews from Ars personally, I’m not into opinion pieces as much as I once was…
I’m putting the review on my Nexus 7 too
A 250,000 word review of a point release of an OS? Seriously? Look, just how much of a geek do you have to be to read something that long about such a dry subject for enjoyment? rofl
(Mind you, I speak as a long time geek. Former network admin/engineer/architect, PC support, Novell Netware support, Unix/Linux/VMS/Windows server sysadmin, board level/component level electronic repair tech. I can’t imagine wading through something that long for fun unless I was planning to use the material to build my own Hackintosh.)
Apart of exposing your curriculum vitae, you should take a look to John Siracusa’s reviews of all OS X versions, starting from 10.0. His reviews are amongst the best tech reviews over there and therefore his work is truly respectful.
Edited 2012-07-26 02:18 UTC
His review are very detailed, so they are very “high quality” for those who want to know every detail of Mac OS X.
For the other who want to know what are the interesting points (and not the pointless details), they are not very good because they dilute the interesting points among a lot of unininteresting details.
Are you trying to compensate for something? Because I surely get that impression…
Either compensating or projecting.
Given how most of his post, complaining about the verbosity of others, was made up of useless/unrelated information about himself.
Edited 2012-07-26 17:50 UTC
The review is 25,000 words, not 250,000. Do you suffer from dyslexia?
Is this a list of the jobs your dyslexia got you fired from?
IIRC, the news above originally said 250000 (I remember I had an impression that the quoted number is insanely high; 25k wouldn’t cause that impression) – so at best, your cheap diatribe has wrong recipient.
Thanks for the CV, but I’m afraid we’ve hired a candidate with more curiosity and interest in his chosen career.
With a fascination for unpalatable amounts of pointless details (drawing away from tasty stuff), you mean…
no Darwin live CD.
I’ve been playing with ml for a while now, via dev builds, and did the official upgrade today. Overall, I’ve been impressed with it. The later builds, including the final release, feel quite snappy on my machine and most of the changes are improvements. The notification center, messaging, and the general act of bringing OS X and iOS closer together feels and operates as it should, i.e. this isn’t some attempt at an OS X Metro. Apple does seem to understand that, while you can bring the same functionality to both, desktops/laptops do still have a different interaction paradigm than mobile devices. That being said, there are a few things I don’t care for. Safari in particular has a few new quirks that I’m not too fond of relating to keyboard use, e.g. shift+arrows in a multiline text field no longer seem to select text properly but seem to select parts of the web page other than the text field I’m working in (just noticed this one as I’m writing this). The new password remembering feature in Safari gets in my way, as it keeps bugging me to save my passwords on a per-website basis and I’ve not found a way to turn that off. Ah well, that’s what Chrome is for
. The other thing I don’t like is that Gatekeepr is partially turned on by default. Yes, at the moment it’s easy to shut it off, but I am concerned with this trend that every os manufacturer seems to be taking these days, i.e. trying to take ever more control away from the user. I’m sure this is the point where the Linux fans will jump in, so please, don’t bother. I actually have to get work done, and Linux is a POS for audio work, so it’s not an option for me and I therefore find myself caught in the middle between my dislike of what the companies are slowly imposing and the fact that I have to deal with it anyway. In either case, a pleasant upgrade for the most part.
20$ … not much for putting yourself voluntarily in a virtual prison.
*Yawn*. I knew it wouldn’t be long. It’s a good thing OS X isn’t a virtual prison then, seeing as how you can run whatever the hell you want on it. Give me a break. There’s no such thing as a virtual prison imposed by your choice of os, seeing as how you can decide at any time to use a different product/os/device. Get over it, people. Your choice of an os does not imprison you. You want to see a virtual prison as you call it? Take a trip over to North Korea and have a look at their little intranet. *That* is a virtual prison.
For the time being, but it’s worth noting that Gate Keeper is “halfway” turned on and although it can easily be configured to let you run anything you like, there’s zero guarantee that this will be the case in the future.
And what about APIs available only to applications for sale on the App Store? Yes, anyone can apply to be a developer, the membership price is very reasonable, X Code is free, yadda yadda yadda, but not every (perfectly legit) application would qualify for the App Store — not to mention Apple’s proverbial capriciousness when it comes to what gets accepted and what gets refused (or maybe accepted and then yanked from the store a few weeks later).
And don’t get me started with this fixation with iCloud in general and an iCloud account in particular. John Siracusa’s review says (http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/12/):
It’s nearly impossible to set up and use a Mac running Mountain Lion without being prompted to enter an Apple ID for use with “the iTunes Store, the Mac App Store, iCloud, and more,” to quote one of the many dialog boxes Apple throws at the user.
Oh yes, of course it’s for my own convenience! In fact everybody knows that I’m just a dummy who doesn’t know when or where save a file… *sigh*
RT.
Edited 2012-07-26 12:47 UTC
TBH, that is where all the big players are going. Android, iOS, Windows 8 and even Ubuntu do this sort of thing to various degrees.
Edited 2012-07-26 13:34 UTC
I know, but that doesn’t mean that I have to like this trend — and don’t think for a moment that they have our best interest in mind.
RT.
And in the near future it will be something like:
“Well, we have technology X, Y, Z preventing us from GETTING OURSELVES INTO THE TROUBLE, but you can always disable it by chrooting, jailbreaking, code cracking, file mangling and general device hacking”.
Guess what – that won’t be possible without breaking the shit into pieces. It’s getting all glued together so you won’t change anything.
Come on … is that freedom of use? they fW#$ with your freedom and you’re allowing them to do it [you = the users].
Now, I give up. I’m not gonna say a single word about freedom in Apple’s context. You don’t even know what the freedom is anymore.
Sounds good to me. You, and those of like mind, don’t need to troll every Apple thread, thank you. On OSAlert especially, I believe we already understand your viewpoint.
No, I don’t know what “the” freedom is. Is this some sort of freedom to end all freedoms? What I do know is this: I have the freedom to use, or not use, an Apple product. If they get too restrictive, I’ll leave. You don’t get much more of a freedom than that. How about everyone who starts yammering about the *nix freedom stop commenting, learn programming, and deliver a decent and cohesive platform? That means stable drivers and APIs there in, solid graphics stack, high performance audio stack and software, and things like that. It does not mean I want the next pretty interface on top of X11. Give me a real alternative to something proprietary and I’ll happily switch. As it stands now, no real alternatives exist for my use. It’s either Mac or Windows, and I prefer OS X. That’s where the tools are.
I guess he’s the kind of guy who goes on holiday and sleeps in a self build hut and hunts for food while you are locked in a 5 star all-you-can-eat resort, although you can walk out of the door whenever you want.
Recently I read something about animals in zoos. They are locked up, no freedom. Indeed, but they have free food, which they don’t need to hunt for, free medical care and no predators. Unlike free animals that have to fight for survival every day.
If someone offered me a spear and a 5 star hotel ticket and my choice would determine how I would spend the rest of my life I’d go for the ticket.
Linux is a lot of fun, but also time consuming hassle. Just like hunting for food, while the hotel food is much better.
I see what you’re trying to say – but, well, you chose really poor examples…
Zoo animals are often, describing in human terms, mentally unstable, and with (often related) problems in breeding (and when there are no problems for particular species, there’s often OTOH large amount of “surplus” animals sold, also to game farms)
And that’s even before getting into roadside zoos, or numerous zoos in general in less regulated places, or long and really not very glamorous history of menageries, or high mortality (high yearly “turnover”). Or that, for every animal caught in the wild, several are killed in the process.
Also, it so happens that frequent contact with outdoor environments is generally healthy for us – conversely, one of more reliable ways of making people crazy is to confine them in crowded spaces.
And food & laziness… I don’t know, our organisms didn’t evolve to all the tasty shit offered by industrialised way of making food, or to our way of living in general – lots of “diseases of civilisation” have probably something to do with it, they more or less show up when any given place adopts “modern” diet and “modern” sedentary lifestyles.
I stumbled once on some report of a national health provider in one of EU countries (from among those with better healthcare systems, and good health rankings so far), arguing that if we won’t go “back” in our ways and habits, it will be virtually impossible to prevent otherwise the collapse of healthcare systems in ~western countries, inevitable on our present course in a few decades. Obesity and its effects, rapid increase of diabetes, various chronic “diseases of affluence” in general – that’s what westernisation / McDonaldization of life seems to give us.
(well, that is one solution to the issue of increasing proportion of pensioners to people of productive age, I guess…)
Edited 2012-08-02 00:19 UTC
I’m running Snow Leopard on hardware that Mountain Lion doesn’t support. Apparently the release of Mountain Lion means Lion is removed from the store, so I guess now I’m truly EOL. It’d sure be great to have an alternative to the store as a software distribution mechanism about now.
If you bought Lion in the app store it should show up in your purchases and you can download/install it.
I just need more reviews of the Mountain Lion before buy it …
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