Mountain Lion OS X - Thoughts?

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jwoair23

Feeling the Heat
Oct 2, 2011
289
Ohio
Anyone try it yet? Apple released it today, $20 to purchase. Just upgraded to it on my macbook pro, biggest difference I notice so far is Safari is much snappier/faster. I like that A LOT.

Only played with it for about 15 minutes so far, anyone else trying it out today?
 
Looks like I may be the only one trying this out, but here are a few updates after playing with it today for anyone out there considering it:
  • Boots up crazy fast now, I'm talking 8 seconds fast when restarting, the spinning circle literally isn't even showing up most of the time now (they didn't take it out, its just that fast). Keep in mind I swapped my optical disk drive for a SSD drive in my macbook, this makes it faster already, but it used to be about 15 seconds before the upgrade.
  • Messages is great in theory, but will be a lot better once IOS 6 comes out in the fall. Right now you can't link your iPhone number to it, so while you can message your contacts just fine and they can respond, it shows up from your email address not your phone #. This will be fixed with iOS6 though.
  • Safari is like a whole different browser, its so much faster. You can now search in the address bar, which I love, and youtube videos are no longer stuttering for me, which is a huge relief. Also coming in the fall with IOS6 will be the icloud tabs, which will be awesome, you can share open tabs between your iphone/ipad/mac.
  • The new notification system, for me, is "eh". The one thing I do like is that there is a popup for Mail when a new email comes in, I like that notification quite a bit.
Nothing huge or earth shattering it seems, but for the overall speed improvement across the OS, the few neat upgrades, and the low cost, its worth the upgrade in my opinion.
Hope this helps someone!
 
What kind of macbook are you running this on? original OS? Year purchased? Only supposed to work on systems that were sold after a certain year like 2009 or 10..
 
It's definitely an improvement for memory management and connectivity. At $20 for the upgrade it's a cheap bug fixer and feature improver.
 
What kind of macbook are you running this on? original OS? Year purchased? Only supposed to work on systems that were sold after a certain year like 2009 or 10..

I am loading it on a late-2011-revision macbook pro I bought in March of this year. It was originally running Lion.
 
I'm watching this thread to see if I want to update my iMac.
 
I'm watching this thread to see if I want to update my iMac.

Honestly I haven't seen a single thing that is worse or a step backwards so far. I have been really happy with the upgrade! If you have any specific questions let me know.
 
Thanks for the reply, jwoair23. If I should update, can I revert back to my current OS easily if don't like the update?
 
Honestly I haven't seen a single thing that is worse or a step backwards so far. I have been really happy with the upgrade! If you have any specific questions let me know.
I updated my 2010 MacBookPro and now my Office for Mac won't work anymore. It is an old copy of office from 2004. When you try to open a program (word, excel or powerpoint) a warning pops up saying that PowerPC applications are no longer supported. Now I'm going to have to drop some cash on some more software.
 
Heat seeker, the easiest way to do this would be to make a time machine backup I believe. I have an external hard drive I hook up, and use time machine to make a backup of the system. If you do this and then install the new OS, you could revert back to the state you were in. Otherwise you would have to wipe out the computer and do a clean install of the older OS again.

Stuckinthemuck, I know this won't make you feel better, but I use Office 2011 and its working perfectly with the no issues. I know it sucks to drop the cash to upgrade, but if you decide to do so, Office 2011 does work very well with Mountain Lion.
 
I do have an external drive and do the Time Machine backups regularly. What you say makes sense. Thanks!
 
I do have an external drive and do the Time Machine backups regularly. What you say makes sense. Thanks!
I would recommend going a step further and creating an image onto a second external drive using SuperDuper (free app). If the OS install fails you could have issues with Time Machine whereas you can boot from the image drive and not have any downtime.

We generally recommend our clients wait until the second update after an OS release before upgrading - usually a couple of weeks for Macs. The first update is released quickly to patch bugs; the second to patch problems created by the first update.
 
Good points - I'll wait a while. How would I boot from the second image drive, and couldn't I do that from my existing external drive?
 
Heat seeker, the easiest way to do this would be to make a time machine backup I believe. I have an external hard drive I hook up, and use time machine to make a backup of the system. If you do this and then install the new OS, you could revert back to the state you were in. Otherwise you would have to wipe out the computer and do a clean install of the older OS again.

Stuckinthemuck, I know this won't make you feel better, but I use Office 2011 and its working perfectly with the no issues. I know it sucks to drop the cash to upgrade, but if you decide to do so, Office 2011 does work very well with Mountain Lion.

Thanks jwoair23.. While you were typing this, I was buying Office 2011.. Fortunately, I was able to get a military discount on it, so it wasn't so painful. Should have done it long ago as it was always a pain to open the new file extensions ending in x. Other than the added purchase, mountain lion seems to be working well. Reason I upgraded is that I have some new software that required lion or newer and I was running osx 10.6.8 or something liket that.
 
Good points - I'll wait a while. How would I boot from the second image drive, and couldn't I do that from my existing external drive?
To boot from an external source, on startup press and hold the Option key to access Startup Manager and select the volume you wish to boot from.

You can use your existing external drive only if you've created multiple partitions, one of which Time Machine is using, and the remaining partition is equal to or larger than your system's drive.

The safe bet is to use a different drive which you can later use as an off-site backup of your system.
 
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