The Basics of Apple's New OS - OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

The Basics of Mountain Lion

Mountain Lion, OS X 10.8, is the ninth edition of Apple’s desktop OS. Announced earlier this year in February, it was officially made available on July 25 through the Mac App Store. And for the first time, Mountain Lion will only exclusively be available through the Mac App Store. There will be no physical purchase of Mountain Lion. What this really means is that one would need the Mac App Store, which is available from Snow Leopard upwards (OS X 10.6.6) to purchase and install Mountain Lion.

In this article, we will go through some of the basics of Mountain Lion: what you need to install it, the installation process, performance boost (if any), discuss some of the new features in brief, and finally offer our overall thoughts about Apple's latest desktop OS. First, let's begin with what you need to install Mountain Lion.

System Requirements

First thing to note before installing Mountain Lion is that it meets Apple’s system requirements, which are as follows:

• 2GB RAM
• 8GB of storage available
• Running at least Snow Leopard 10.6.8

Additionally, even if you meet system requirements listed above, only the following models are supported:

• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

Installation Process

Before installing Mountain Lion, it’s always good to make a backup of your system in case something goes wrong. Also, if you are running Snow Leopard, make sure it’s been updated to 10.6.8.

Depending on your Internet connection, downloading Mountain Lion off the Mac App Store should take around 30 minutes. The size of the installer is about 4.35GB. After the download is complete, you should see the Install OS X Mountain Lion.app in your Applications folder. Click on it to run and the app will prepare your Mac for installation. In our experience, this process takes only a few minutes. Once done, your system will reboot for the actual installation.

The actual installation takes much longer, around 40 minutes to a full hour, depending on your system specs. The whole process is fairly straightforward so there's not much else to describe.

Updating Multiple Mac Systems

One thing to note is that the license agreement in Mountain Lion allows you to install it on any other Mac computers so long as it meets the system requirements listed above. So if you have multiple Macs and you wish to upgrade them to Mountain Lion, we recommend making a copy of the installer app on a flash drive so that you can simply copy them onto your other Macs without having to download it again from the Mac App Store. Power-user Tip: You should copy the file out before installing Mountain Lion on the first system because as part of the installation process, the installer app will be deleted.

Upgrading from Leopard?

Still on the topic of installing Mountain Lion, apart from the fact that Mountain Lion can only be downloaded via the Mac App Store, there's actually no other real reason why you couldn't install Mountain Lion over Leopard. So, for example if you have Snow Leopard family license and decided to leave one of your older Macs to run Leopard, you could actually easily install Mountain Lion over Leopard without first upgrading it to Snow Leopard. This can save you a lot of time. Specifically, the Mountain Lion installer only checks a particular file, so if you are familiar with the workings of OS X, you could actually easily install Mountain Lion over Leopard as detailed here. 

Performance Matters

Apple doesn’t make any official mentions about performance improvements in Mountain Lion, so we decided to do some basic testing of our own by benching two MacBook Pros with Geekbench and also measuring the startup time.

The specifications of the two MacBook Pro notebooks we used:

Late 2011 MacBook Pro

• Intel Core i7-2720QM (2.2GHz)
• 8GB DDR3-1333 RAM
• AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 512MB VRAM
• 750GB HDD (5400RPM)

Early 2008 MacBook Pro

• Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 (2.4GHz)
• 4GB DDR2-667 RAM
• NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB VRAM
• 250GB HDD (5400RPM)

Using Geekbench, a popular Mac benchmarking tool that measures processor and memory performance, we measured the both system’s performance before and after installing Mountain Lion to see if there’s any measurable gain in performance. We also measured the time taken for the system to boot up into the OS from a cold boot (power off and on).

 

Geekbench Results

Judging from the benchmarks, it seems that installing Mountain Lion does not improve performance as the results are nearly identical. However, Mountain Lion does seem to take considerably longer to start up. Both our test systems took an additional 21 seconds to boot from a cold start.

Actual usage experience is pretty pleasant even on the aged Late 2008 MacBook Pro. That said, we definitely recommend upgrading older systems to at least 4GB of memory to ensure smooth operation, especially if you intend to use it for more memory-intensive tasks such as photo and video editing. In fact, with memory being one of the upgrades that Apple allows users to perform, and the fact memory is pretty affordable these days, we would definitely recommend getting as much memory as possible for the best experience even if you have a newer Mac system.

New Features

Apple says that Mountain Lion has over 200 new features, but truth be told, it’s hard to tell where the 200 features are unless you looked hard. One of the most noticeable new features, however, has got to be the new Notification Center, among a handful of other core highlights which we'll touch upon briefly.

Notification Center

As the name suggests, Notification Center combines elements of Growl and Notification Center from iOS devices. Alerts from applications appears as pop-ups and if you have a trackpad, a two finger swipe from right to left reveals a vertical list of notifications from various applications. You can also click on the Notification Center icon on the top right-hand corner to invoke this vertical list of notifications. At this point of time, only a handful of applications support Notification Center but we are sure that more will in the near future as they are being updated for Mountain Lion.

Gatekeeper

Another new feature of Mountain Lion that you are likely to come across is Gatekeeper - a security feature that prevents users from opening potentially dangerous apps. By default, Gatekeeper will only allow your Mac to run apps downloaded from the Mac App Store and by identified developers. To run other third-party apps, you’ll need to delve into the Security and Privacy tab in your System Preferences and tweak the settings to run unsigned apps. With Gatekeeper, Apple is hoping to make Mountain Lion its most secure OS yet, at least for not so tech-savvy users. This all sounds very much like the Windows User Access Control (UAC), only smarter and less annoying.

Messages

With Mountain Lion, Apple has also ditched iChat in favor of a new Messages app. The new Messages app resembles Messages on the iPad and it also supports Apple’s iMessage instant message protocol. In theory, it’s supposed to let users take their conversations from their desktops to their iOS, but in practice, it’s pretty haphazard as messages get delivered to both your devices. Furthermore, the iMessage service, despite having been rolled out since October last year, is still a bit wonky at times as messages sometimes get missing or get delivered in a bunch. Clearly, this feature needs further refinement.

Safari 6

Apple has also introduced the latest version of Safari with Mountain Lion. Aesthetically, you’ll notice that Safari 6 loses its search bar and instead has a unified search and address bar, not unlike Chrome. Safari 6 also introduces iCloud Tabs which syncs open tabs across your Mac and iOS devices. iCloud Tabs works for Mountain Lion but mobile devices will have to wait until the release of iOS 6.

Calendar, Reminders & Notes

iCal has now been renamed to Calendar. The pointless page curling animation has been ditched and the list of calendars, which was displayed as a pop-over in Lion, has been reverted to a proper sidebar.

Reminders and Notes from iOS devices now have dedicated equivalent apps on OS X. If you’ve setup iCloud on your Mac, reminders and notes will all sync automatically, so any reminder or note that you create on your Mac will automatically appear on your iOS and vice versa.

Closing Thoughts

If Lion marked the beginning of Apple's desire to merge both OS X and iOS elements, then, from the changes we’ve seen in Mountain Lion, the latest version of OS X brings the convergence of these two OSes even further. With new apps such as Messages, Reminders and Notes, and thanks to iCloud, integration between OS X and iOS is more seamless than ever.

On a whole, we are pretty pleased with the new features of Mountain Lion. Since the release of iOS 5, Reminders and Notes have been crying out for an equivalent standalone app on OS X and we are glad that Mountain Lion gave us exactly that. However, some features, such as Messages, need further refinement and rethinking. Hopefully the release of iOS 6 will improve the way in which Messages currently works. Also, on top of the features we touched upon briefly, there’s more that we’ve haven’t had the time to cover such as Power Nap, AirPlay Mirroring, Dictation and more. We'll touch upon these progressively once we've had more hands-on time with the new OS.

That said, like the first version of any OS, Mountain Lion currently has some bugs and issues. For us, one of the bugs we encountered was that for some reason, Chrome would sometimes refuse to launch. A quick search on Google revealed that we weren’t the only one suffering from this bug. Other bugs that have been widely reported include wireless connection that would randomly go off and decreased battery performance. We fully expect these to be solved when Apple rolls out the inevitable OS X 10.8.1 update.

If the question you have on your mind is whether or not Mountain Lion is worth the S$25.98 upgrade, we say yes. Mountain Lion is Apple’s most affordable upgrade yet and it packs a lot of useful, new features. Granted, some of them require further refinement and some aspects of the OS are still buggy, but given Apple’s track record, we are confident these issues will be ironed out in future updates and when iOS 6 is released.

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