OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: From the Beginning

Apple released the next OS, 10.8 or Mountain Lion, last Wednesday. At $20 this upgrade is a no brainer. Granted, discretion is the better part of valor, and if you are in the middle of a project you might want to hold off until you have put the final touches on it. There is always the chance that something you desperately need will be broken. Luckily, I have not heard of anything major breaking. Personally, everything works just fine on my system. And, this should go without saying, be sure to back up everything before you start the upgrade process. The previous paragraphs were your CYA warning. WhatCulture is not responsible for any mishaps you might encounter when updating your system to Mountain Lion. Now, on to the good stuff... First, if you purchased a new Mac from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller on or after June 11, 2012, and it does not have Mountain Lion installed, you qualify for the "up-to-date" program; in other words Mountain Lion is free. To request your copy go to www.apple.com/osx/uptodate/ This is how I got my copy. Truth be told, it was a bit painful. Now that Mountain Lion has been out for over a week, and all of us in the "instant gratification" camp have our copies, your experience should be better. That is, hopefully you will receive the email with your redemption code in less that 72 hours. Whereas having everything in the cloud is a real boon, and I will attest that it has made my life so much easier, there is one huge pitfall. No matter how well prepared they think they are, Apple's servers are slammed when they have releases like this. Resulting in things coming to a screeching halt. I've read many complaints about this, and there were a few expletives flung from my mouth each time I checked my email and there was no message with my code, but realistically I cannot blame Apple. I do not know if there is any way they could be more prepared. Regardless, my reaction made all the difference. When I was impatient it was excruciating. When I went on with life, all was fine. C'est la vie. Oh, one other hitch in the cloud system. This is a 4.4GB download so be prepared to wait several hours, or more, for the download to complete. My advice: start the download and then go see The Dark Knight Rises (or some other film that grabs your fancy). Because I was updating a new MacBook Air I was not worried about compatibility. If you do not have a new machine, here is the list of supported hardware, from Apple's Discussion forums:

The following Macs with 10.6.8 or later, 2GB of RAM, and 8 GB of hard space (presumably an additional 15% of free hard disk space will be beneficial as has always arbitrarily been found in the past) are able to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.8: iMac 7,1 and later MacBook 5,1 and later MacBook Pro 3,1 and later MacBook Air 2,1 and later Mac Mini 3,1 and later. Airdrop is compatible on 10.8 systems of the following model identifier: MacBook Pro 5,1 and later MacBook Air 3,1 and later MacBook 5,1 and later iMac 9,1 and later Mac Mini 4,1 and later Mac Pro 4,1 and later Airplay mirroring is compatible on 10.8 systems of the following model identifier: Mac Mini 5,1 MacBook Air 4,1 MacBook Pro 8,1 iMac 12,1 Powernap is compatible just with these Macs: MacBook Air 3,1 MacBook Pro 10,1 and later.

After having the system for several days I have to say there's not much difference from Lion, visually. That is not to say all the improvements are all "under the hood." Rather, the changes are mostly inconspicuous. Because there are so additions, over the next few days I will cover the major ones, specifically what works, what does not, and what pitfalls there may be around the corner. Here is a list of the new features I'll be covering in upcoming articles: iCloud Notes/Reminders Gatekeeper Messages/Mail Notification Center Power Nap Dictation Airplay Sharing/Social Integration/Game Center Safari How many of you have upgraded to Mountain Lion? How did you find the experience? If you have not upgraded, why? We would love to hear from you. Leave your answers below in the comments.