Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion GM Released

[dagamer34]

1: Microsoft is charging $40 to upgrade to Windows 8, which I have heard some refer to as a service pack. They charged $100+ to upgrade from Vista to 7, and I know plenty of people called that a service pack.

If people call Windows Vista, Windows 7 and certainly Windows 8 a service pack.... never mind. I'm just going to shake my head...

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Looking forward to native support for the 6950/70

 

[SnoopKatt]

Looking forward to native support for the 6950/70

That would be sweet! Video cards are the main things that kill Hackintosh support.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

That would be sweet! Video cards are the main things that kill Hackintosh support.

Eh, I've just been using trusty old G80 and G92 nVIDIA GPUs in my Hackintoshes.

 

[ViRGE]

Eh, I've just been using trusty old G80 and G92 nVIDIA GPUs in my Hackintoshes.

Emphasis on old there...

 

[kubani1]

Vista to windows 7 was a $50 upgrade or free if you bought your PC a couple months prior to 7's launch

OSX 10.7 was free if you bought a computer after 10.7 was announced, which was, i believe, 3 months in advance.... which is pretty similar.

 

[kubani1]

Apple gets praised when they make you pay $20 to $30 a year for service packs. If Microsoft were to do it, it'd start a riot.

hmmm, i wouldn't call it a huge update, but its more than any service pack i've ever had from microsoft.

Apple routinely drops support for older hardware. If Microsoft were to do it, they'd get mobbed.

how many people actually are going to install microsoft 8 on something older than 5 years, 10.8 will still load on a macbook pro from 2007, 5 years. while i will concede your point that windows has better support for older hardware, that is largely because they have to from a business stand point, they don't make hardware, so they need as wide an install base as possible. but then again, i don't think someone with a laptop from 2008 is going to bother with the windows 8 upgrade, at least not the average user. hell, i would argue that most people with a computer from 2011 will stick with windows 7 and forgo the upgrade despite it only costing $40

Apple charges $1400 for a decent laptop with Mac OS. You can buy a decent PC laptop for $1000. People still say Microsoft's licenses are expensive.

macbook air - $999, asus zenbook ultrabook - $999

while i agree you can find cheaper, well made laptops, if you want something with the same exterior finish with similar specs as an apple computer the price is not that much different, if you don't mind about looks, yeah you can get things cheaper, but apple has always charged a premium for its design.

Apple forces you to make an appointment to get your $3k machine serviced, then makes you wait for an hour because they're swamped, only to tell you that you need to pay them $400 to get it fixed in 7 to 10 business days. I called Lenovo, told them I poured water on my Thinkpad and it stopped working, and they came to my location at school the next day, installed a new keyboard, and went on their way. I bought my laptop for something like $800.

i can't really comment on this, i had an issue once with an old macbook and i took it to the apple shop without an appointment and they replaced the harddrive right away, similar to say a best buy or other similar computer store (the computer was 6 years old, it cost me $60 for the harddrive and $20 for labor). so i guess your 3k macpro with 16 cores and 32gb ram was just unlucky compared to your 2 core 2 gb lenovo thinkpad.

i agree that apple costs more in general, and that businesses tend to go a cheaper alternative, i would do the same, but apples core business is not businesses, and the overall cost of a new operating system is cheaper with apple, though the hardware is still priced at a premium.

your whole arguement is spent talking about how apple is so expensive, your right, you can buy cheaper hardware, i don't think anyone thinks otherwise, but you blow the difference out of proportion. i like both operating systems, but i prefer working on an apple, but thats just a personal preference. if i bought a 'pc' laptop, i would probably spend just as much as i spent on my Mac because i'm not interested in whats cheap, i'm interested in whats good and what fills my desire for good design and practicality. when i was a poor student struggling to get by, i liked cheap dell laptops, because thats all i could afford, now i can afford more and i look for more than just cost.

 

[stlcardinals]

Can you upgrade from 10.6 to 10.8? I haven't ever upgraded a mac before. I don't know if I will cause all I use it for is photoshop, dreamweaver, lightroom, music, and browsing. As long as my current versions of those work, I should be fine.

Straight from Mountain Lion page on Apple's site.

Make sure you have Lion or the latest version of Snow Leopard.
While you have the About This Mac window open, check what version of OS X your Mac is running.

If you are running Lion (10.7.x), you’re ready to update to Mountain Lion. Go to Step 3. If you are running Snow Leopard (10.6.x), update to the latest version of OS X Snow Leopard before you purchase OS X Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store. Click the Apple icon and choose Software Update to install Snow Leopard v10.6.8, the latest version.

 

[MotionMan]

my Macs are too old for 10.8, and frankly, i don't care. i don't even have 10.7 on them. 10.6 is fine, i can do pretty much everything i need to do under that OS.

I picked up an eMac G4/700mhz, 128mb soldered RAM, 40gb HD, SuperDrive, circa 2002-2003, for $1 at a garage sale a few weeks ago. I installed an $18 stick of 512mb PC133 SDRAM, an AirPort Card a friend gave me, OSX 10.4 (Tiger) and Office 2004.

I have no idea what, if anything, I will use it for, but I love turning from my main rig and just playing round with the eMac for a few minutes. It is pretty snappy and seems to handle everything that comes up on the web.

I will probably end up selling it at a garage sale for $50-75, but I will be sorry to see it go.

MotionMan

 

[slugg]

your whole arguement is spent talking about how apple is so expensive

I have no problem with paying premiums, so long as I receive a premium product and/or service. But with Apple, you pay a premium and get nothing to show for it.

Take AppleCare, for instance. You really don't get much; you get the same awful warranty for 3 years instead of 1. But compare that to HP, Dell, and Lenovo's offerings and you'll find that Apple's is sub-par. If you spend around the same amount of money as AppleCare costs on one of the other brands, you'll get accidental damage coverage and on-site, same day or next day service (depending on how much you pay, the brand, etc).

Serviceability is another major issue with Apple. Suppose you're relying on your laptop, whether you're a student or a business. Out of nowhere, your hard drive dies. You have backups, but you also have to make a presentation tomorrow. You go to the computer parts store, buy a new hard drive, throw it in, restore your backup, and you're good to go. Now, according to Apple's extremely conservative warranty terms, you've voided the warranty on the entire laptop. HP, Dell, and Lenovo fully support you in servicing your own laptop. I've even had them send me parts to replace myself! Dell sent me an entire motherboard, HP sent me an LCD, and I've never had to service one of my ThinkPads (on-site service). For obvious reasons, the factory warranty doesn't cover the new part; that's it. If down the road your GPU burns out (for example), it's still covered under warranty. With Apple, you're screwed waiting for a "genius" to get to you, only to tell you that you'll need to leave your laptop in their store for up to week.

And it's funny that you mention the MacBook Air and Asus Zenbook as being equally priced. Well, let's do a quick comparison: The Zenbook has a 13" 1600x900 screen, 4 gb ram, 128 SSD, and a 1.7 ghz i5. The MacBook Air, to match the 13" screen, has the same specs, except a 1.8 ghz i5. So for 0.1 ghz faster and an inferior warranty, you pay $200 *more* for the Air. Or, if you want to compare dollar for dollar, that's hard to do because for some people, like myself, the smaller 11 inch model is actually a good thing. But ignoring the screen size, spec-for-spec, you'd have to purchase an $1100 MacBook Air to keep up with the $1000 Asus Zenbook. Oh and by the way, did you know that all of Asus's premium laptops come with one free year of accidental damage protection? There's just no way that I can agree with you here.

I'll agree that comparing an $1100 Mac to a $400 PC is stupid, but premium product versus premium product, there are better PC offerings. Literally the only thing that makes the Mac worth it is OS X, and that's subjective. In my case, the sole purpose of my MacBook Air is to let me write software for iOS, simply because you need Apple's tools and environment for development... and I prefer to be portable. If I didn't need the portability, I would have gone with a Mini. Hackintosh is okay for messing around and non-critical machines, but I consider my work critical.

Before anyone says I'm biased, I've owned and been working with Macs *and* PCs side by side ever since Leopard. Between work and personal, I've had iMacs, a Mac Pro, a couple Minis, a hackintosh somewhere in there, MacBooks, a couple MacBook Pros, and now this Air. I've had two Dell Latitudes, one HP Evo briefly, and three Lenovo Thinkpads (T61, X200, T520). I'd consider myself an expert user, if that matters.

Edit: so back on the topic of Mountain Lion... It's less of a "service pack" than Snow Leopard was, I'll give you that. But still, it's pretty minimal. Windows Vista sucked, and 7 is what Vista should have been, but the upgrade from Vista to 7 is definitely out of the "service pack" size. From 7 to 8 is a pretty big difference, although not as big of a difference as the jump from XP to Vista, or 3.1 to 95. But to argue that Mountain Lion is so cheap when you've already paid $1100 for essentially a giant dongle is kind of ironic, regardless of whether or not you think the OS is the size of a service pack.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Emphasis on old there...

Heh, hey they get the job done. Better than the 8400GSes and 9500GTs my colleagues are running in their Hackintoshes

 

[TheStu]

Now, according to Apple's extremely conservative warranty terms, you've voided the warranty on the entire laptop

Please cite your sources.

 

[slugg]

Please cite your sources.

I'll look later, but they only allow you to replace user-serviceable parts. Anything else will void your warranty.

... but after thinking about it, I do believe both the memory and hard drives in the MBP's (non-retina) are user serviceable. So maybe that wasn't the best example. Let's say your keyboard broke; that'd be a better example.

That being said, *only* those two parts are user serviceable. In the modern retina MBPs and Airs, I don't believe anything is user serviceable. I'm not sure about the iMacs and others; I've never personally had to do anything to one.

 

[TheStu]

I'll look later, but they only allow you to replace user-serviceable parts. Anything else will void your warranty.

... but after thinking about it, I do believe both the memory and hard drives in the MBP's (non-retina) are user serviceable. So maybe that wasn't the best example. Let's say your keyboard broke; that'd be a better example.

That being said, *only* those two parts are user serviceable. In the modern retina MBPs and Airs, I don't believe anything is user serviceable. I'm not sure about the iMacs and others; I've never personally had to do anything to one.

MBP: HDDs and RAM
rMBP & MBA: Maybe the SSD
iMac & Mini: RAM (they used to allow the HDD in the iMac, and you can still find those knowledge pages on their site, but the aluminum ones... forget about it)
Mac Pro: Everything basically. Well, probably not the CPUs, PSU or ODD, but everything else is go basically.

Edit: On second thought, let's not derail this any further.

 

[MotionMan]

Mountain Lion now available for purchase and download.

MotionMan

 

[Printer Bandit]

not much difference between Mountain Lion and Lion. i don't think it's worth upgrading.

 

[PricklyPete]

Waiting on email from Apple so I can redeem my copy and update my rMBP.

 

[GWestphal]

I hope 10.9 or 11 or what have you adds new features, but focuses a lot on rewriting for speed/stability, decreasing bloat, ZFS, vectorization, Spotlight Indexing and utilizing frameworks like OpenCL, GL, AL, etc etc.

That way we can get back to OS installs that are <1GB and never lag.

 

[Printer Bandit]

ML download time 14 hrs

 

[MotionMan]

ML download time 14 hrs

Good luck downloading anything from Apple today.

MotionMan

 

[umrigar]

not much difference between Mountain Lion and Lion. i don't think it's worth upgrading.

yes and no.

http://www.macintouch.com/reviews/mountainlion/

worth it really depends upon how you use your Mac(s) and iDevices, if you have any.

as for me, i'm still not using 10.7 on any of my Macs (2 at home, 1 at work).
i have Lion on a 2nd partition on my MBP in case i need to reboot for something Lion-specific, but so far, that rarely happens.

 

[MotionMan]

Maybe I missed it, or maybe it is actually not necessary, but I have not seen any of the ML "Fresh Install" guides tell you to deauthorized your machine from iTunes before doing the fresh install.

Is that no longer necessary?

MotionMan

 

[TheStu]

Maybe I missed it, or maybe it is actually not necessary, but I have not seen any of the ML "Fresh Install" guides tell you to deauthorized your machine from iTunes before doing the fresh install.

Is that no longer necessary?

MotionMan

I never had an issue before, in the last 6 years.

 

[MotionMan]

I never had an issue before, in the last 6 years.

How many devices do you currently have authorized?

MotionMan

 

[Tyranicus]

iTunes authorizations are based on your machine's serial number. Even if you do a clean install, reauthorizing does not use up an additional authorization.