Apple OS X Mountain Lion hits 3.2% penetration in two days

Not bad for some small penetration.  

This one was the easiest Mac OS upgrade I ever made.  The only annoyance was the slowdown while Spotlight was indexing indexing indexing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mac_128 

... Or it proves how bloody bad Lion was ...

 Or how small the Mac community really is... Or how accessible and easy to upgrade to ML really is...

There's no historical data presented in the article to judge how successful this launch is compared to previous OS launches. Maybe Apple will release numbers to the press after this weekend on # of downloads.

Originally Posted by Mac_128 
... Or it proves how bloody bad Lion was ...

Yeah… except it wasn't. *shrug*

Quote:

Originally Posted by SolipsismX 

I am surprised by both the marketshare for a $20 item that can be bought and installed from your Mac only having 3% and by SL having the majority when Lion is only $29, better than SL and just as easy to buy and install as ML. I hypothesis that people still aren't completely comfortable with not using their optical drive.

Maybe many people don't even realize that there is an update. If I were to ask my wife what Mountain Lion was, she'd grasp straws and go back to surfing on her Macbook Air.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mac_128 

... Or it proves how bloody bad Lion was ...

I agree - Lion was horrible. We tested Lion and reverted to SL after 3 weeks. I tried Mountain Lion yesterday on a test machine and am now willing to install it as my main system. We have around 75 Macs and will consider a full roll out once I have a few weeks under our belt with testing.

I think it would have hit MUCH better if AirPlay was supported in some fashion for all machines. The major feature of this release only works with a few machines, and Lion is a brilliant release. $20 might not be a lot of paper, but what do I get for my $20?

Apple deciding to exclude pretty much the headline Mountain Lion feature (Airplay mirroring) to 2011 only Mac's has annoyed many people. Apple's forums are flooded with complaints over this.

Quote:

Originally Posted by saarek 

Apple deciding to exclude pretty much the headline Mountain Lion feature (Airplay mirroring) to 2011 only Mac's has annoyed many people. Apple's forums are flooded with complaints over this.

What more can be said? Their implementation requires the use of a newer computer.

This does not surprise me. Nor am I surprised that Snow Leopard still has more penetration than Lion. Lion was Apple's Vista.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SpamSandwich 

 

What more can be said? Their implementation requires the use of a newer computer.

"Their implementation requires"?  Ha ha ha ha ha. More like "Their business model requires."  

I said Ef to their business model and installed it on my 2006 MacPro1,1.

And I'll bet of that 3.2% adoption rate that 99.9% of those ML installs came from a Lion upgrade.  Legacy SL users know better than to jump on a x.0 release.

Originally Posted by ron1701 
Lion was Apple's Vista.

And FUD is the troll's bread and butter.

Originally Posted by audioinside 
And I'll bet of that 3.2% adoption rate that 99.9% of those ML installs came from a Lion upgrade.  Legacy SL users know better than to jump on a x.0 release.

I'm sorry, I find hilarious your assertion that all current users of Snow Leopard, a three year old OS, are geniuses.

I jumped on as soon as it was available by the way I'm using dictation to write this message on my 2008 MacPro love how things are working out so far just wish I had AirPlay no worries other than that.

By the way I really hated typing before dictation was Integrated.

Fantastic take up rate! But why not, it's cheap, it's good, it's fast & it's easy get and easy to install.

Resisted though.. for a whole day, then: did a Superduper bootable backup (just in case), went down to the nearest Apple Store with the MBA and a 16GB flash drive, DLed ML over their WiFi (20 mins), made a bootable ML installer (15 mins with free ML Diskmaker), installed ML (20 mins) and then DLed and ran the available Aperture, iPhoto, MBA Firmware and iMovie updates. (I'm on pay-as-you-go 3G dongle broadband at present).

BTW, both Lion and SL were fine - never gave any significant problems or failures - but seemed like transition OSs and that this is more the finished product in all its glory. 

Maybe more people would have upgraded to Lion from Snow Leopard if Apple didn't drop features like Rosetta and Front Row.

Originally Posted by rcfa 
No wonder given how badly Lion sucked compared with Snow Leopard… …total disaster that was Lion.

Didn't we just cover that this is a giant lie?

Quote:

Originally Posted by rcfa 

...total disaster that was Lion.

If that is your experience then I can understand a rant. Out of curiosity, can you give one example of what you think was badly done in Lion? And make it a lasting statement, well founded, grounded, solid statement of why it was bad. Something like "I didn't like the Auto-version-ing as opposed to the Save-as commands because when working on a picture on my SD card it never asked me to safe changes; it all happened automatically and I cannot revert to the original version"

Wow, lots of still people using .6.

.8 fixes many of the things people didn't like about .7 (or at least reduces them) so maybe some of the moaners will be come back in the fold now.

Quote:

Originally Posted by PhilBoogie 

Quote:

Originally Posted by rcfa 

...total disaster that was Lion.

 

If that is your experience then I can understand a rant. Out of curiosity, can you give one example of what you think was badly done in Lion? And make it a lasting statement, well founded, grounded, solid statement of why it was bad. Something like "I didn't like the Auto-version-ing as opposed to the Save-as commands because when working on a picture on my SD card it never asked me to safe changes; it all happened automatically and I cannot revert to the original version"

Examples, more than I care to remember:

a) kitschy, dysfunctionally decorated apps (AddressBook, iCal, etc.) that sacrifice functionality (e.g. the back and forth paging between AddressBook groups and address list view, which is a massive step backwards from the clean, functional Snow Leopard (and before) interface of AddressBook, which allowed you to adjust the width of the various columns and panes to fit your working style and screen space)

b) the "hunt for GUI elements" approach, which not only makes an artificial distinction between mouse and touch interfaces (cause there's no mouse-over in a touch interface), but is also unproductive, e.g. UI elements that only become visible when the mouse is near them, such as scroll bars, or the replacement of disclosure triangles with usually hidden "hide/show" tags

c) lack of UI precision, be that with the disappearance of scroll bar up/down buttons, or with the invisible, but existing window borders

d) the abandonment of what you see is what you manipulate: you can see a window below two neighboring windows, but you can't click it to the foreground, because the invisible (i.e. fully transparent), but existing, window borders register your click rather than the window that you see and think you're clicking. All in the name of "visual simplicity", when it castrates intuitive interaction

e) the un-natural "natural" scrolling, which neglects the difference between a full-screen touch interface and a windowed pointer interface

f) Mission Control and the disappearance of two dimensional spaces and the show all windows command, which results much less efficient window management for anyone who has more than just a few open windows.

g) the creation of an app rather than task centric interface, visible in both how iCloud document storage works, and in the lack of the all windows view of Mission Control

h) the discontinuation of keychain syncing, which is a massive step backwards in security, because if you can't sync keychains, you end up having to choose again passwords you can't remember, since you can't remember (and sync instead) a password like "ljkhOPU0-9ih(lG;Ghkglh_RDt" and will instead use something like "password123"

i) the creation of a standalone "Notes" app, instead of keeping it integrated into Mail.app, which just results in more app switching for no good reason, the creation of a separate Reminder's app instead of keeping To Do's in iCal, the removal of calendar groups, etc.

j) the new layout in Mail.app, and the naming of the "classic view" which is just a hair-width away from calling it "deprecated view" even though on a regular sized computer screen it's the much more productive view than the iPad inspired layout.

k) the AirPort utility, that no longer shows certain key information

l) OS X Server, which keeps losing functionality

etc. There is more, but that should give good enough of an impression.

Some of the most obnoxious things are somewhat fixed, e.g. Contacts now allows again a column for groups, even though the window layout is still more rigid than in Snow Leopard, and the kitschy, non-functional decorations still remain, or e.g. the ability to disable the "group windows by application" setting in Mission Control gives at least the "all windows" command back, even though not in the full glory of Snow Leopard.

But by and large, while Mountain Lion is a big improvement over Lion, it's still a step back from Snow Leopard.

I've been using NeXTSTEP since the 0.8 release, and Mac OS X since it was called Rhapsody Prerelease, and Lion is the worst in the entire 24 year history, and Mountain Lion is just a tad better.

Apple keeps dumbing down things past the point of usefulness.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jragosta 


So what?
Few people with 3+ year old computers ever upgrade, anyway. And it's not as if your old computer is going to stop working.
One of the reasons Macs work so well and upgrades are so painless is that Apple limits the scope of their OS. They have no desire to support every Mac ever built because the complexity increases exponentially for only very modest gain.
If you want to be able to install your OS on 10 year old computers, stick with Windows. Just don't complain if it doesn't work well because you're part of the reason it doesn't work well.

I don't think you understand Windows users.

They don't put new operating systems on old computers. They put old operating systems on new computers. Just look at the huge number of people still using Windows XP.

The retail version is still crap.  I've been using the DP for months on my MBA 11" late 2010 with 4GB ram, and there were lots of problems with Safari and Quicktime crashing and the entire machine freezing to the point to where the way to restart was to hold down the power button.  I was expecting all of this to be resolved with the full retail version, but it hasn't.  I'm considering a fresh install, which is something I've never had to do for a Mac before.  Has anyone experienced the same as me and did a fresh install help?

By the way, I noticed that Safari removed Activity Window and replaced it with a Develop menu.  I use to download clips and other stuff off of the web with Activity Window, can anyone tell me how I can do this now?

Quote:

Originally Posted by jragosta 
 

If you want to be able to install your OS on 10 year old computers, stick with Windows. Just don't complain if it doesn't work well because you're part of the reason it doesn't work well.

 Why would XP on a new i7 be inferior to XP on an old pIII?

My experience of putting older OSes on newer hardware is that they tend to run better than on older hardware.

Are you suggesting that the principle of making hardware backwards compatitble is a bad thing?

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerbrent 

I think it would have hit MUCH better if AirPlay was supported in some fashion for all machines. The major feature of this release only works with a few machines, and Lion is a brilliant release. $20 might not be a lot of paper, but what do I get for my $20?

After some digging, I found its Intel's fault, not Apple's. (well, partially)

Support for Intel Quick Sync Video was added in OS X Mountain Lion for use with AirPlay Mirroring - but only high-end Sandy Bridge Processors or newer have Quick Sync video. From the benchmarks I've seen on the internet, Quick Sync is about 22x faster than software decoding/encoding on the same processor.

I've tried Air Parrot on my Arrandale i7 iMac (AirPlay Mirroring but in Software) and the CPU usage was surprisingly high.

Whilst AirParrot is running on the desktop with a web browser, there is a little bit of usage across all cores. Started playing a video full screen and all 8 threads became active, with the 4 physical cores (threads 1, 3, 5 and 7) running at around 50% each.

I can see /why/ Apple didn't want AirPlay Mirroring natively on setups without Quick Sync, but they should have at least let us try it! That kind of sustained processor usage can make any computer hot hot hot!

Originally Posted by capoeira4u 
By the way, I noticed that Safari removed Activity Window and replaced it with a Develop menu.  I use to download clips and other stuff off of the web with Activity Window, can anyone tell me how I can do this now?

No, the Develop menu has always been there. They removed Activity and gave the shortcut to the Inspector (that has also always been there).

When you find out how to do what the Activity window did, let me know. They better just bring the darn thing BACK in 6.0.1.