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Comment by crag | Hacker News Reader

I have a brand new MBP (Retina) and I won't be upgrading to ML anytime soon (even though I get a free copy). I'm still bitter at the Lion upgrade process. It was a nightmare for me. And at that time I considered Lion to be Apple's trash OS. It's gotten better, After like 8 major updates. :)

Hell I tried to downgrade to SL, but that's not possible due to drivers.

Lesson learned. Also,I'm STILL being forced to download the OS from the App Store. I wouldn't mind that so much if the Store didn't have performance issues.

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Mountain Lion brings a lot of enhancements specifically for that Mac, I would strongly suggest getting it. Eg the Smart Sleep feature and using Core Animation in Safari, making it a lot faster.

You can bring your MacBook to an Apple Store to download Mountain Lion faster.

FWIW: I didn't encounter any crases in any recent ML builds. Since Apple is on a one year release schedule now, the differences between versions will (probably) not be as big as before.

Also, I never had any problems downloading Lion or Mountain Lion from the App Store. The downloads were always fast (I am on a 120 MBit downstream connection).

One would expect that they also release it on a USB stick as before (or DIY).

Welcome to every Mac OS upgrade I've ever encountered.

Although, I can't place the blame entirely on Apple. I find that for any consolidated release OS, a reformat is ALWAYS the way to go (after waiting a good long time for all the bugs to be ironed out). Hopefully one day Apple will drive the cost of their software down so much that they'll just go to rolling release.

Ok, setiously guys, what are you doing wrong?

I have updated 3 personal Macs to Lion. Some upgraded, some a clean install. Didnt have a problem with any of them.

What broke for you? Drivers for exotic hardware? (on that front, I use Wacom tablets, Midi controllers and external FW audio cards and had no probems with either in Lion).

On the other hand I refuse to install ANY haxie.

Seriously want to know what broke for you -- and I dont mean stuff like "I prefered old Expose better"....

I love me some Apple, but drama does occur. Off the top of my head:

- silent DVD-ROM read errors causing perma-botched upgrades, even though everything should be CRCed and nothing throws any errors at any point along the way

- pathologically long install stall-outs (40 minutes+)

- pathologically slow performance at first restart, usually on older RAM-constrained machines trying to re-thumbnail everything

- Significant keychain issues requiring creation of an entirely new keychain

- Spotlight issues requiring a first or second re-index

- Mail.app upgrades are quite problematic, especially when moving to V2 layout or accessing previously configured accounts

- Now-missing JVMs causing significant problems during first boot

- Lion download progress bars blowing some internal math and going for that 235905329052 gigabyte

The biggest hassle I think is exploding third-party software at first logon. Things like garbage rinter+scanner managers freaking out because drivers got moved around underneath them cause a flurry of popups that frustrate techs and freak out novices.

Of those, I've seen spotlight needing re-indexing after an upgrade. But it's something so minor and easily fixed that I don't even consider it a fault of the OS (actually, it could have as well been DESIGNED to do that, e.g to update the indexes to some new on-disk format).

Silent DVD errors, install stalls, keychain and Mail accounts missing sound like genuine bugs.

As for the rest,

>- pathologically slow performance at first restart, usually on older RAM-constrained machines trying to re-thumbnail everything

This doesn't sound like an OS bug, more like something to be expected.

>- Now-missing JVMs causing significant problems during first boot

Sure, but what uses Java at boot?

The above and third party printer/scanner managers freaking out, sound like totally orthogonal issues to OS bugginess.

If anything, I would _expect_ to have to install new third party drivers with an major OS update.

I thought the general consensus was that ML is more stable than Lion?

Mountain Lion is a much improved version of Lion, no more. That’s great.

I don’t see any roadblocks to installing it. It already works much better than Lion.

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