![]() ![]() The idea was so big that it’s overflown into Mountain Lion: More than most operating-system updates, this one riffs on the same concepts as its immediate predecessor.įor starters, a bunch more iOS features, including some which didn’t even exist a year ago, have come back to the Mac. When the company first previewed Lion back in 2010, it did so at an event it called “Back to the Mac.” That meant that it was giving operating system features to the Mac which were inspired by iOS, such as a full-screen mode, a minimalist application manager called Launchpad and an App Store. ![]() Fork over just $19.99 for Mountain Lion – down from $29.99 apiece for the last two versions – and you’re entitled to install it on all the Macs associated with your iTunes account, provided they’re currently running either Lion or Snow Leopard. Speaking of irresistible, Apple, which once charged $129 for OS X upgrades such as Leopard, now prices them as if it were Crazy Eddie. (I tried the new operating system on both my own MacBook Air and a pre-loaded Retina MacBook Pro loaned to me by Apple.) Rather than paying for a shiny disc in a box, you buy it as a 4GB download from the Mac App Store installation requires next to no human intervention and went smoothly in my case. : Apple Retina MacBook Pro review: The MacBook Pro only more–and less–soĪs with last year’s OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple is doing its darndest to make the Mountain Lion upgrade irresistibly painless. This software is happy to be a conventional (albeit ambitious) operating system for conventional (albeit ambitious) computers. So Mountain Lion is built for precisely the same machines as previous versions: MacBooks, iMacs, Mac Minis and Mac Pros, equipped with a keyboard and either an oversized touchpad or a touch-sensitive Magic Mouse. The company is even going to sell some of those tablets itself: The uncommonly slick Surface is the first-ever PC to carry the Microsoft name.Īpple, by contrast, doesn’t need to give OS X a radical mobile makeover or gin together an iPad-esque tablet – hey, it’s already got the iPad. It’s de-emphasizing the Windows look and feel that haven’t changed much since the mid-1990s in favor of Metro, a bold, touch-friendly interface designed to work on everything from hulking tower PCs to slim, iPad-esque tablets. Microsoft thinks the future is about one operating system that runs on all sorts of gadgets. To swipe a line from Yogi Berra, both Apple and Microsoft see a fork in the road – and they’re taking it. Each uses an Internet service – iCloud in the case of Mountain Lion, SkyDrive with Windows 8 – to share data, settings and other items between multiple computers and other devices.īut what’s most striking about Mountain Lion and Windows 8 isn’t the similarities, but their fundamentally different visions. Both draw inspiration from their makers’ mobile operating systems, Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Superficially, the two updates share big-picture themes. Apple’s new Mac software, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, is hitting the Mac App Store today Microsoft’s Windows 8 is due just three months later, on October 26. We’re about to get answers to that question from both Apple and Microsoft, in the form of major upgrades to the world’s two most popular operating systems. How do you prep a venerable computer operating system to flourish in late 2012 and beyond? ![]()
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