John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
"In some ways, Mountain Lion is a refinement, enhancement, and yes, a major bug-fix for Lion. But the changes and additions are significant enough that they will inevitably come with their own set of bugs. Let's not forget Snow Leopard, which promised no new features but still brought plenty of bugs in its 10.6.0 release."
I hope they fixed memory management - Lion is too swap happy and slow on a decent 3Gb RAM Core 2 MBP. Windows comparatively flies on the same machine but of course suspend resume is flaky and other Win-Mac integration annoyances mean it's not a win-win.
I guess Crucial also sells SSDs and Apple sells new MBPs with 16GB RAM :) - but at this juncture I hate to spend money on anything when the other supposedly more bloated OS named Win 7 works just great with 3GB - that seriously ought to be more than enough for browsing, email and occassional Word/PPT stuff.
As for the swappiness - it seems to be at least somewhat better than Lion - hasn't used up swap after 20 minutes of doing normal stuff. But the Apple ID/Password annoyance is still there - I still had to enter Apple ID / password several times during and after the installation! The last time hopefully was for iTunes. Why can't they use one single sign on?
Also, regarding doctoboggan's comment about SSDs: SSDs are still an order of magnitude slower than system RAM. The reason they're so nice is because they're an order of magnitude faster than traditional HDDs, but that doesn't mean you can get away with skimping on RAM.
Also, I've installed a SSD.
Mountain Lion does in fact swap less than Lion due to some VM improvements.
Switching to a MacBook Air and thus solid-state storage made OS X an entirely new operating system for me. I'm in no hurry to ever use it on a spinning platter disk again.
I laughed
How about a crowd-sourced 'Siracusa style' review of Ubuntu 12.04? Or Debian Wheezy, or Fedora (large integer, preferably 18 because that is the version that RHEL 7 will be based on)? Or the safe and conservative CentOS/SciLi/PUIAS version 6.3, now being targeted by Oracle. Or your favourite GNU/Linux, or BSD?
So many of the free software reviews are shallow.
I think the Penguins have done enough work to merit something with depth
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/8403291/unityessay2.html
for an inadequate and partial outline for the 12.04/unity gui
Challenge: put your suggestions/contributions on dropbox or githib or wherever and post here and I'll attempt a synthesis.
I don't think a crowd-sourced review could ever be that, as it most likely won't be a cohesive work and will have a hard time finding talented writers (which I hold Siracusa to be). And will probably fail to balance the emphasis (at all) between features of differing importance and levels of interest. Furthermore, Siracusa's reviews are also the result of more than a decade of writing these things.
Don't aim to write "Siracusa-style" reviews, aim to write in-depth reviews which are not complete dreck. That will probably work better. Or work at all, for that matter.
OK, challenge still stands, even this would be an improvement in what we see in Linux reviews
If you listen to Hypercritical (his weekly 5by5 podcast), you'll have heard that he struggles just getting the OS X reviews out the door. Since Apple is trying to move to a yearly release cycle, that’s just going to get harder. When’s he going to get the time to write an Ubuntu review?
It’s also worth considering that, “He has been a Mac user since 1984” (from his Ars bio). Part of what makes his reviews so good is his deep-rooted knowledge of the Mac platform, and having watched OS X (and previous versions of Mac OS) “grow up”, so to speak. I don’t know how much experience he has with Ubuntu, but I bet it’s not as extensive as OS X.
And that’s putting aside all the arguments of whether it’s a good thing to do, or whether the Ubuntu community would want him to write such a thing.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/01/gimp-2...
Suite freedom: a review of GIMP 2.6.4 Ars brings you a massive, in-depth review of one of the most popular cross- …
Welcome to release day, Apple style. :)
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/19/#mission-c...
Do I even understand this correctly ? If you have multiple monitors, and an application goes full screen, the other two monitors go grey ?
I am still on SL on my mac pro, so I have yet to see this ... what the fuck do people working at apple (with multiple screens) do ?
That’s the decision Apple took. It makes sense† but it’s also utterly stupid. For some reason they stick to it. I don’t think it’s a big deal. Fullscreen apps suck anyway and there is no reason whatsoever to use them on a big screen, much less when you have more than one screen available to you. They might make sense on the 11" Air but certainly on no other computer or screen Apple sells.
Just use apps like you always did (before Apple introduced their stupid fullscreen mode) and they will work fine. Like before, like nothing changed. I have the sneaking suspicion that only maximize-crazy Windows converts run into this problem. On the Mac you don’t maximize. Apple only implemented fullscreen mode the really stupid way to make that abundantly clear to everyone.
—
† More than Apple just disabling other monitors, anyway.
And if you have other monitors, you want them to be useless while, say, Quicktime is full-screened ?
I have triple 30s on one side of the room, and a 60" on the other side of the room. With snow leopard (and presumably, any other OS) I can watch a DVD or other video output full-screen while other output continues to display on the three other screens.
Also, what about full-screening a guest OS in vmware on one monitor, while you do other productive work in your other physical monitors ? That must be a very common use case, right ? As in, all day every day for most vmware users ?
I'm not going to waste time talking about the "maximize" issue - even if I conceded every point of the maximize issue, there's still a problem with an inability to go full screen in one physical screen while working in another...
Third party developers should just not use Apple’s stupid mode. Problem solved. (Though I don’t understand everyone’s sudden fullscreen love. It’s just goofy on a big screen expect for a select few use cases. Don’t use it. That has always been the Mac OS philosophy.)
Overall I don’t think it’s a big issue. A small minority of Mac users is affected by this problem in a tiny number of use cases. It sucks for them – but no need to whine for hours on end. That’s just annoying for the rest of us :-)
It seems like every single discussion about OS X is dominated by this stupid topic. It’s boring. Yeah, it sucks. Everyone knows it. Apple made a stupid decision. Can we talk about something more interesting now?
Sounds like if you buy the Kindle version when it comes out ($5), he'll get a direct cut, which is nice.
At least he seems to be fine either way.
...priceless...
Whatever for? It's interesting, I'll give you that, but why don't you just spend $20 on the OS itself?
On the other hand, this new iCloud support sadly highlights another unrelated new feature in Lion, and not in a good way: Automatic Termination.
You must use TextEdit to browse your iCloud documents, which is fine, but TextEdit keeps fucking disappearing on you because it has no open documents. Command+Tab away for a split second and it's gone, forcefully removed from your Dock and Command+Tab list.
Automatic Termination is a feature that is meant to serve only the most novice of Windows users who are coming to OS X for the first, while it breaks an existing feature of the OS that has been fundamental to Mac OS X and NeXTSTEP for the last 23+ years. And it's not even an option.
It is hugely frustrating and hugely disappointing.
One feature aims to preserve system resources during low memory conditions in way that's completely invisible to the user.
The other forcefully removes running applications from the Dock and Command-Tab list even though these apps remain running in the background.
My frustration is with the latter feature.
Siracusa does a good job describing his annoyance with this feature - and points out that while appropriate for IOS, which has the MRU task switcher, it doesn't work very well on OS X which lacks that metaphor.
It has always been perfectly acceptable to close all of your windows and then hit Command+N or Command+O to open a new document. And that's even more important now that you must use Command+O to browse your iCloud documents. But if something happens in between those steps, say an email comes in or you need to look something up, then it breaks in a really bad way.
It also has nothing to do with iOS. iOS never tries to guess that you've finished working with an app, never prevents you from switching to an app, never removes an app icon from Springboard or task switcher. Indeed, this form of Auto Termination is the exact opposite of how iOS operates.
It also has nothing to do with conserving resources. These "terminated" apps remain running the background, consuming memory. The OS simply prevents you from switching back to an app that you were previous using.
It is strictly a Windows UI feature, and a very unwelcome one.
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool true
Ivy Bridge: 21 pages http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-core...
I'm sure there are others.
The SSD series were not technically review but went well beyond 20 e.g. http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/ is 27 pages.
edit: http://archive.arstechnica.com/cpu/03q1/ppc970/ppc970-0.html with the glorious old design
About 25000
edit: more precisely, from Siracusa's blog: 25935 words, 167 images, 206 external links
Besides, the page breaks are not arbitrary (like on so many other websites), they actually make sense. They are basically chapters. I do not think there is anything wrong with those kinds of page breaks. (Though your personal preference may be different and if it is you are free to pay, suffer through the page breaks or not read the review. It's up to you.)
http://www.readability.com/articles/6ynwkoyx
Pictures seem to be stripped out, though.
You can get Ars Premier, buy the ebook or use some sort of stitching reader.
Not that I have a problem clicking through 25 pages when each page holds 1000 words and is a self-contained section or a pair of sections. Siracusa pays close attention to pagination in order to pace the article, in my experience of his reviews the page breaks are actually welcome as they give natural "yield" points for doing something else before coming back
edit: in fact, Siracusa notes (on his blog):
> I actually like [pagination] for very long articles because it helps me keep my place across multiple reading sessions. I can remember I was on page 8 instead of remembering my exact position in a very long scrolling web page.
> [...]
> Some people think Ars Technica forces me to break my article up into many tiny pages. That’s not the case. I choose how to paginate the article. I like to break it up by topic, if possible, which means that the “pages” vary widely in length. This year, Ars Technica actually asked me to merge several pages together to reduce the total number of pages (and I did).
So not only did he decide the pagination based on his desires regardless of advertisement money, ars actually asked him to paginate less.
His point is perfectly valid, it's about mnemonics.
> The way to do it is to have a table of contents, and fragment identifiers for each section.
Considering his reviews have both table of contents and fragment identifiers, I'm going to go ahead and assert he knows about those.
That does not help remember where you are in the article.
This would lead Siracusa to have an easier time remembering his position through page number due to his personal experience. Note how that's exactly how he worded it, that he preferred page breaks because he can remember it better? At which point "MatthewPhillips" asserted Siracusa was plainly and simply wrong?
You should avoid blaming him for your own misreadings.
Tell me why 'I can remember I was reading the section "A Cloud In Three Parts"' doesn't work?
There is a reason that sites that actually understand the medium put a mouseover on Section Titles and anchors so that the link is discoverable. If you don't put a link anchor next to it's respective title you really have no option but to think "Gee, pages are better."
I'll hook it up to an external monitor later to try and stress it a little bit more.
I have a Late 2009 Macbook White, with 8GB and an SSD.
I upgraded to Lion and it took 8 hours off of the installation process for lxml. But nokogiri was still nearly impossible.
Am I misreading this? It took 8 hours to compile libxml2, libxslt and lxml?
Surely that's not possible and I missed something, I just tried making a full static build (to ensure I'd have to build libiconv, libxml2 and libxslt as well) from the current HEAD, on 10.6, using the stock gcc 4.2 on a 2.4GHz 2010 MBP and it took 3:48 total including downloading the tarballs for libiconv, libxml2 and libxslt and cythoning lxml.
/EDIT I just rebooted and my services were still present with no change. They had been installed with homebrew.
Why does a button now look like that, or a feature now work that way, why is that app renamed or that texture changed? The answer is usually "because that's how it works in iOS". You're making a mistake in assuming that because he's trying to explain Apple's motivation behind it that he agrees with it.
As for why Apple is obsessed with iOS, it's probably because it has made them tens of billions of dollars, has vast and focused mindshare, and it's wildly popular. iOS makes tons of hard decisions in the name of making a device that users can pick up and run with.
Our opinions on it (you, me, and Siracusa's) are basically irrelevant. The key is Apple thinks iOS is the quintessential operating system and it has the sales to back it up. That's why ML is the way it is. Acknowledging that when trying to write a review about it is important.
The walled garden thing is interesting. I (and a couple of other people I know) instantly reacted to Gatekeeper with "fantastic, I can lock down my Dad's machine and keep him out of trouble".
One step towards a walled garden doesn't place you inside a walled garden and in it's current form Gatekeeper is a good thing. Disabling it was the first thing I did when I installed Mountain Lion and it took about 15 seconds (including me not knowing where the option was). In this version of OS X I honestly think it's a non-issue.
The big question is whether this is the first step on a journey into the walled garden or just an individual step that happens to be in that direction.
Personally my feeling is that they won't ever take that final step. I think they get that OS X isn't iOS and that you can't apply the same standards for any number of reasons, both practical and political. Taking something away from people (which is what this would be) is a whole different thing to never having given it to them in the first place (which is what has happened with iOS).
But for now no-one knows. As I say, for now I don't see it as any issue with 10.8. Whether there is an issue with 10.9 or 10.10 or whatever, time will tell.
Don't take the article too seriously. If you did, you probably missed the point.