Apple Releases Final Mac OS X Mountain Lion to Developers
mashable.com
mashable.com
My Pro is perfect for me, I have it maxed at 32 GB of memory, dual optical drives, and 4TB of local disk. Quad 2.66GHz cores is more than enough for me.
I understand that things like display Airplay mirroring depend on newer CPUs/GPUs, but ML should still be supported, just with fewer features.
And yes, I know this is a 6 year old system. But it's still a good solid system with a long life ahead of it. I'll keep running Lion on it until something dies (system board?) that's irreplaceable.
With luck, there will be an easy hack this time as well. I believe the factor that decides which machines got cut off is the lack of 64bit EFI, which Apple requires for booting a 64bit kernel. Some people have already worked out how to use hackintosh tools to boot from Legacy Mode into a 64bit EFI and then into a 64bit kernel on the 2006/2007 Mac Pros, which apparently increases expansion card compatiblity (particularly making it possible to put unflashed PC video cards in the machine). Also, after doing this, some of the older MacPro video cards will be unsupported (such as the 7300GT). A suitable Radeon replacement is probably cheap though.
It is too early to tell, but with luck the same thing can be done by dedicated MacPro owners to get 10.8.
Personally, I'm very disappointed that my wife's MacBook is also on the unsupported list. I will probably end up just replacing her laptop rather than trying to hack it.
EDIT: Now I see that it's a CPU issue, not GPU, so I'm screwed. Maybe I'll end up getting a new Mini to replace my old one for HTPC.
Apple shouldn't penalize anyone in software for paying a small price premium for their ultra-reliable hardware.
Hoping for a stability boost on this one. No way my entire overpowered system should crash from running a browser, text edit, and Skype.
Lion itself is rock solid.
It's the first thing the Genius Bar will do.
You might also look into hardware diagnostics — not sure if Apple Hardware Test is still available, but the Genius Bars certainly have something — as intermittent kernel panics from flaky hardware aren't unusual.
Get that sucker replaced.
Modern Intel CPU's have a quicksync feature which is H.264 encode assist in the HD 3000 and 4000 GPU. These features may be required to make airplay mirroring work.
Similar hardware is in the A5 chip in the iPad 2 and up, and iPhone 4S and up.
I wonder if there's a new API coming down the pipe for this. The obvious way to implement AirPlay mirroring, in my mind, would have been to add Quick Sync Video support as an optimization to existing video APIs, and then simply have AirPlay mirroring use that. Then not only could people with lots of free GPU cycles but no Quick Sync Video CPU (alas, like me) use AirPlay mirroring, but other video apps would automatically take advantage of the new performance.
AirServer functions as a destination already: http://www.airserverapp.com/
For a source, Airfoil works for audio: http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/
It looks like a hardware limitation if you don't have the ISQV, you're SOL.
You're just missing the hardware (it's a huge efficiency gain, 13% of the time using the special hardware).
It works fine on my 2008 Macbook but it gets a little hot and noisy. The lag is noticeable but tolerable, fine for browsing the web but not gaming. Audio/video sync is fine too for watching flash videos or whatever.
Absolutely useless, unless you have started some kind of Apple religion and all your contacts have iPhones.
/edit to clarify, 99.9% of the software they ship has at least a few interesting bugs. Just have a look at their changelogs for 10.x.1 :-)
I encourage you to buy a cheap consumer embedded NAS to learn.
If this follows the typical pattern there will be some sys update right after public release.
My favorite was the way the initial release of SL hosed fonts that it decided conflicted with the system ones. Like non-Apple versions of Helvetica. Thanks Apple! ;-)
Because Mountain Lion and iOS6 are by far the most underwhelming updates yet in terms of features.
It actually makes for a nicer development model than the 'everything doesn't work for a year and then miraculously comes together 4 months before release' development model. For example, with Snow Leopard, XCode became garbage collected and was unusable for like 50 releases in a row.
Ultimately, while you get a slightly less buggy release that comes out on time more or less, the features seem less ambitious.
Also, it's twenty bucks.
The direction appears to be cheap upgrades, and merging feature sets between IOS and OSX so eventually there's one operating system that changes in unison.
It is believed by some that Apple will not be pushing their operating systems in this direction:
http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion
Specifically: "Mountain Lion is not a step towards a single OS that powers both the Mac and iPad, but rather another in a series of steps toward defining a set of shared concepts, styles, and principles between two fundamentally distinct OSes."
My point was whether there had been a movement of developers to a new iOS/OSX based project e.g. like an AppleTV. Because it seems that iOS6 and Mountain Lion combined seem to lack the combined punch of previous releases.
I think they have gone quite carefully on iCloud.
Beyond that, actual UI enhancements are minimal.
It's more iClouding Apps. Or App improvements. Less to do with the OS itself.
[1]: http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/143731/mac-os-x-mountain-li...
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/44444/mac-os-x-updates-yearl...
Small features like VIP whitelists for Mail.app, the Finder "share" button, and bigger features like Power Nap are significant improvements for many users.
I'm all about the future made into reality, but what kind of features do you see in other recent OS updates that are a) successful and not buggy as hell and b) ambitious enough to be not considered "underwhelming"?
But I completely agree with your first point. iWork hasn't been updated since 2009... I just can't believe it. It's still not on iCloud so if you want to share files between iOS and iWork on Mac, you have to manually copy and upload them. It's disgusting.
Proper Mail.app plugins. Not limiting the notification system to App Store apps. Finder replacement. Maybe with something like semantic tagging replacing folders, complete with proper filesystem level unix support.
Even bigger pie in the sky features: distributed process migration. If you are at home and have multiple computers, why not borrow your desktops CPU to do heavy processing (say for photos or video?)
In other words, features targeting professionals, the opposite of Apple current strategy.
edit: these would be overwhelming to me
You can do this in Compressor.
Every app can use the notification system. They only can’t use push notifications if they are not in the App Store. Not terribly relevant for the desktop.
It probably opens and lists people on the left with their details on the right. It looks like a book. Can you group people? It's certainly not obvious that such functionality (which is useful!) exists.
Now click the red bookmark thing on top. Not very intuitive. It looks like a bookmark, not something that switches to a different view. Anyways, viola! The grouping interface! But now I can't see contact details. I need to "flip the page" back to see the details. This is a huge step backwards and is so inefficient that I completely stopped using groups when I moved to Lion.
Now consider Mountain lion: http://6.mshcdn.com/wp-content/gallery/apple-os-x-mountain-l...
Hey! It's the three column view from the old address book! Now I can see my groups, contacts, and details, just like before. Not as skeuomorph though. Now it's just an app that is skinned to look like a book. It doesn't function like a book. There are no pages to flip. It still has the dimensions of a book I guess, but that only makes that left page looks mighty constrained.
UI is about displaying and working with information, and this skeuomorphism is arguably not a very good way of doing either. I can lodge similar complaints about iCal. For instance, why are months always on separate pages? When I'm near the end of a month, I have to keep switching back and forth (with a slow unneeded animation on top). It's a computer, surely we can come up with an interface that discards this old page limitation of paper calendars! Not if you are thinking with skeuomorphism though.
The bookmark thing is a bookmark, and it works like one. It saves your place on a page in a book and you use it to go back to one. The little familiar groups icon on the tab tells you where it goes.
I'm not going to argue that some of the functionality of Address Book has been reduced or gone, but it has to do with a decision that Apple made about what they wanted, not directly tied to the fact that the interface is skeuomorphic now.
If it’s only looks it doesn’t matter and is only about taste.
Further, looks are about much more than just taste. Designs affect how easy it is to understand the information being displayed, or to understand how to use an application. Skeuomorphic design is typically used to try to improve the latter: help people to understand how to use the app. It mimics a physical object because people already know how that object works. This benefit disappears if your skeuomorphic design doesn't actually work like the object it mimics though.
Skeumorphism that doesn’t affect functionality is purely about taste. Anything beyond that is bad. End of the story.
I would also argue that a lot of their designs look downright ugly to be honest.
Lion was a bit of a dud. Mountain Lion doesn’t add much but it improves massively on Lion. It corrects its mistakes. I’m very much ok with that, I don’t need flashy new features. I really don’t want Apple to start pulling features out of there ass (especially now that they switched to a yearly update cycle), mere refinements every year for something mature like OS X would be awesome.