Apple Previews OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, also Apple sells 150 million iDevices in 2011

[Icyculyr]

Apple surprised everyone this morning with a developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. The new release brings a number of iOS-like features to the Mac, as detailed in this video:
[video=youtube;TyXKZJl238I]

- Messages - new version of iChat with iMessage support
- Reminders - create lists and tasks, synced via iCloud
- Notes - create notes, synced via iCloud
- Notification Center - on screen pop-up notifications
- Share Sheets - share buttons to email, tweet, message, etc...
- Game Center - social gaming center for Mac
- AirPlay Mirroring - broadcast your Mac's screen to your Apple TV

And...

Asymco's Horace Dediu noticed a startling statistic: Apple sold 156 million iOS devices in 2011. That's 30 million more than the 122 million Macs that Apple has sold since the first one went on sale in 1984.

To date, Apple has sold 316 million iOS devices total, across the three iOS product lines.

Pretty impressive iOS device sales, and I'm looking forward to Mountain Lion

Roundup of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Features and Notes

Apple surprised everyone this morning with a developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. The new release brings a number of iOS-like features to...

www.macrumors.com

 

[Accname]

Omg, did anybody watch this?
What a joke, i have even less respect for apple now then i had before.

What did they change about their OS? Nothing, really nothing. They just added in gimmicks and useless junk.
I thought windows was bad with how it tried to promote its own software on its OS, like windows messanger and all that stuff always being installed on windows OS. And when you buy it you have to manually disinstall all that crap. And now apple is doing the very same thing.
"Oh look you can take notes" have you ever heard of text edit apple? Everything you show can easily be done with freeware which was on the market long before.

More over, i dont like the new "looks" that todays OS have. Why do they need to make every window fly around your screen and make everything so flashy? I want performance and stability and not a laser light show on my desktop. Same for windows 7 with their "aero" look, first thing i did was getting rid of that and using the good old windows 98 look. Its faster, less loading time, better performance.

I want an OS with no gimmicks and no toys and nothing of that useless data garbage they promote these days. I want an OS which loads in like half a minute after turning on the pc and which has a system so fast and sleek that i wouldnt even feel any delay for loading times when i do something.
And i want an OS which saves energy by not needing a GPU to show windows and contents.

 

[Icyculyr]

First off, this is what Apple is referring to as a pre-developer build, it isn't even alpha yet, and it's still got five or six months of work before it's actually released, which means there will be more to it than that, and second, how is any of what's demonstrated in the video useless?

They're bringing more cloud integration, so you can literally just create a document on the cloud and you'll be able to access that document on any of your other Macs, whether it's a text document, iWork document, and potentially any document from a third party app.

Apple's bringing together OS X and iOS, and Mountain Lion will bring some of the best from iOS into OS X. Game Centre, Notification Centre, AirPlay, etc., as well as other necessities such as Reminders, Notes, which both sync with all your iDevices, as well as AirPlay Mirroring, and iMessages.

Look at Game Centre, for example, it'll allow developers to easily setup achievements and enable multiplayer functionality in their games, using Apple's servers to handle finding other players, etc., and there's other benefits to it, think of it as Apple's "Steam", except it actually makes it easier to integrate multiplayer functionality and enable it.

It's obvious we have drastically different opinions. We don't need to save every last ounce of power from our systems purely because today, they're simply so powerful. I want natural, visually pleasing interactions with my devices, whether it be on a Mac or an iDevice.

 

[Accname]

What are you even talking about? This is an operating system and not the next playstation.
If they are creating an operating system they should focus on that instead of gimmicks and toys.
If i order somebody to make me a microwave and he gives me a radio it can be the best radio i have ever seen but i want something to cook my meals.

And for the other things they implement there is already freeware software or other software on the market.

And what if i dont have any apple smartphone or ipod or other device? Does that mean their operating system didnt change at all from the older versions and i shouldnt even think about buying this?

 

[tom_mai78101]

Just a question, nothing much worth pondering:

Isn't a preview video of the Mac OSX 10.8 used to demonstrate the flashy features in the OS? If we want to see the stability and energy-conserving side of the OS, we would be expecting to see a Stress Test video of some sort (or similar video names) for the Mac OSX 10.8.

 

[Icyculyr]

What are you even talking about? This is an operating system and not the next playstation.
If they are creating an operating system they should focus on that instead of gimmicks and toys.
If i order somebody to make me a microwave and he gives me a radio it can be the best radio i have ever seen but i want something to cook my meals.

And for the other things they implement there is already freeware software or other software on the market.

And what if i dont have any apple smartphone or ipod or other device? Does that mean their operating system didnt change at all from the older versions and i shouldnt even think about buying this?

There's nothing here that's a gimmick or a toy, these are features people will use in their daily life. An OS is nothing without the software to have to use with it, and on OS X, Apple's adding a bunch of new software which will be useful. Game Centre will add to the gaming experience on a Mac, and even allow you to play multiplayer with iDevices, as well. Having notifications will be great, and it'll replace the need for apps like Growl.

There are apps for note taking, and for reminders, and so on, but they're not Apple's apps, and they certainly won't allow you to sync them between devices. Apple's bringing the best for iOS to OS X.

There's not really any different experience to your OS whether or not you've got an iDevice or not, other than having your info pushed between devices.

Just a question, nothing much worth pondering:

Isn't a preview video of the Mac OSX 10.8 used to demonstrate the flashy features in the OS? If we want to see the stability and energy-conserving side of the OS, we would be expecting to see a Stress Test video of some sort (or similar video names) for the Mac OSX 10.8.

That's pretty true, but also remember this is early days. We may see more flashy features later.

I'm looking forward to having my notes and reminders synced between my devices, and I'm wanting Notification Centre and Game Centre, they'll be particularly useful/cool.

 

[PurgeandFire]

I'll still probably stick to evernote, but it is nice that they are adding those note/list features natively. The other features are a little less appealing--I think they could've waited a bit longer to unveil the preview (to accumulate more features) but I still look forward to it. =)

 

[sqrage]

http://gizmodo.com/5885803/the-end-of-mac

Pretty sad really, I wouldn't even care if Windows wasn't going in the same direction too. Guess it'll be Linux for me in a couple of years.

 

[Genkora]

Eh, I think I'm a middle man. I don't really care for flashy gimmicks, but I don't mind an os looking nice though. I multiboot and I think windows 7 and os 10.6 look fine. I grew up using macs, and I still love the OS, but the company keeps moving so much further away from what it should be. I don't want iOS and OSX coming closer and closer, I want ios for my phone and OSx for my computer. Unless developers start making programs require certain libraries and stuff older versions don't have, I'm content with sticking with 10.6. Of course if Blizzard came out and said you needed 10.7 or 10.8 to run D3, I would buy it for windows (they won't). Yeah sqrage, I think I might have to run to Linux if shit gets too bad, it is the smoothest os out there.

And by buy it for windows, I mean install it on windows. You get both versions.

 

[Vestras]

I kinda like the fact that they add standard software. It feels like the computer comes as more of a complete package. Seems a bit tame for an OS update though.

 

[Icyculyr]

I kinda like the fact that they add standard software. It feels like the computer comes as more of a complete package. Seems a bit tame for an OS update though.

There'll be more by release time. This build isn't even alpha yet, and there's a lot of bugs in it right now. I'm really hoping they work on Mission Control a bit, it's good because it's unified, but it takes a little longer to find the window you want. It could be fixed though if they worked on the algorithm for calculating window sizes and made it use the screen space available better.

I like the small size of it too. It's only 3.5GB to download, and after installing it on an 8GB USB drive, I still had 1.3GB of space left. Was incredibly sluggish though, either I didn't have enough space left, or USB 2.0 isn't good for an OS. (Works fine via FireWire w/ a 200GB partition though.)

 

[Accname]

[...]
installing it on an 8GB USB drive, I still had 1.3GB of space left. Was incredibly sluggish though, either I didn't have enough space left, or USB 2.0 isn't good for an OS. (Works fine via FireWire w/ a 200GB partition though.)

USB and similar flash devices are really bad to store applications at if you want to use them.
The typical NAND-flash memory units are aweful to run code at. Doesnt matter what kind of bus you use.

 

[Icyculyr]

USB and similar flash devices are really bad to store applications at if you want to use them.
The typical NAND-flash memory units are aweful to run code at. Doesnt matter what kind of bus you use.

Ah, I see. It wasn't just an application either, it was the entire OS.