We take a break from our regularly scheduled “Haven’t finished my Chuck posts yet!” messages to talk about the, well, mountain lion in the room… OS X Mountain Lion.
I was surprised to say the least– kind of like video game consoles, I expect to get a little life out of an OS upgrade, at least two years. Reducing the span between Lion and Mountain Lion to a scant year? Shocking. And while much of the attention has been focused on how ML makes Macs even MORE like iOS (iPhones/iPads), I’ve been more troubled/bothered/intrigued by the news that with ML they’re officially dropping “Mac” out of the Mac OS X name.
Like I tweeted Thursday, the Mac name is an institution and… it bothers me to see it go. Granted, in the old days of System 7, the OS was simply that: System 7. It really only shifted to Mac OS (in my consciousness, anyway) with OS 8. But there’s something unnerving about Apple repudiating the “Mac” name even a little.
Granted, as the chart that has been going around news sites illustrates, they’ve sold more iOS devices in four years than they’ve sold Macs in 28 years (seriously, take a look at the chart– it’s damn impressive). Clearly the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch line has become the bread winner for Apple (and rightly so– I’m never far from my iPhone or iPad). But any diminishment of the Mac brand just makes this old Apple fan sad.
That said, I’m really not bothered by the iOS-ization of Mountain Lion. I, for one, have loved Lion and have really taken to trackpad gestures to browse the web and apps. It streamlines browsing in such a way that moving to my desktop (still running Snow Leopard for Rosetta reasons) and its mouse-only interface almost seems quaint.
The addition of Mac support for Messages looks fantastic. I’ve already grown to appreciate the ability to continue iOS conversations between the iPad and iPhone and adding the computer to the mix is the next logical step. Nothing but thumbs up from me there.
Twitter integration? Nice. It’s worked well for me on the iOS front and making it easier to use from the computer with added share tabs in everything simply enhances the likelihood that I’ll tweet more. (And as an aside, the third-party Tweetbot apps by Tapbot for both iPhone and iPad are worth buying and have helped me increase my output a lot.)
Gatekeeper? I know people for whom it will be absolutely perfect. I know others for whom it will be a pain. I’ll need to play with it a little to see how intrusive it is with all my CD-loaded programs, but I’ll keep an open mind.
Really, though, the thing I’m most looking forward to is AirPlay mirroring. With an HD TV and Apple TV set-up, I’ve already used it to mirror my iPhone quite a bit. Great for running through presentations and/or playing videos to a wider audience so they don’t have to crowd around my phone. But the ability to full on mirror a PC wirelessly? To (fingers crossed) hopefully include playback of sites like Hulu on my TV, absent a subscription? Hell yes. I’d buy a second Apple TV for that.
There’s no computer company that creates synergy between devices quite like Apple. Mountain Lion seems to take that to the next level, so I will be upgrading when it is released this summer. But it will always be Mac OS X in my heart.