Mountain Lion Consensus: Smooth Operator

By Jim Lundy

 

Mountain Lion, the new Apple Operating System version released by Apple today, is a hot topic and upgrades are underway by many users as we speak. I upgraded a Mac in our inventory earlier today via the Mac App Store. The download over a wired ethernet connection took a while, but after that it was smooth sailing.

Mountain Lion Consensus

In fact, the consensus from ourselves and a few other analysts is that Mountain Lion is smooth. The upgrade, install and operation of Mountain Lion are all cleaner, simpler and smoother than the previous release – Lion.  Since this is still day one, we will be continuing to monitor things, such as Apple Mail integrations, etc. Overall, this release looks promising. I found the way that Safari loads a page to be smooth and gratifying.

Mountain Lion: Easy for Businesses to Upgrade

Also, for those that may not know, getting business upgrades of Mountain Lion is easy via their volume purchasing for business site. MDM tools can also work with the Apple App store and for enterprises that have multiple Apple product families, this is good news (note, MDM Vendors, such as AirWatch, are starting to offer Mac OS X management in addition to iPhones and iPads (see our  First Cut on AirWatch, BYOD and Macs).

For many that are not Apple shops, Mountain Lion is is the 5th major OS X release in 6 years (see Table 1). The pace of innovation of OS X is now on par with iOS, which has delivered a new mobile OS every year since 2007 (note, iOS 6 is in Beta and ships this fall).

Table 1: Apple OS X releases since 2006

OS X Release Name	Year Released	Media Delivery
Tiger 10.4	2006	DVD
Leopard 10.5	2008	DVD
Snow Leopard 10.6	2010	DVD
Lion 10.7	2011	Apple Mac App Store
Mountain Lion 10.8	2012	Apple Mac App Store

 

As we get ready for a Fall 2012, that will feature lots of new Operating System releases, including Windows 8, Apple is is the first out of the gate with a solid and smooth release of Mountain Lion.