Posted on by Terry White

Your Mac is About to Become More Like an iPad

 

Apple just took the wraps of Mountain Lion – aka Mac OS X 10.8, which is due out later this year. The above video shows a nice walk through of how your Mac is about to become even more like an iPad. Personally I'm looking forward to the AirPlay feature and it's great having the Messages App (now in public beta). What are your thoughts on this direction of the Mac OS? Mac OS X 10.7 Lion left me feeling very underwhelmed, but Mountain Lion looks useful. 

11 Replies to “Your Mac is About to Become More Like an iPad”

  1. Mac os X Lion is no running well here, and the forums are full of people with problems, i hope they fix everything, Snow Leopard is the king of this jungle, still.

  3. I’m extremely excited to get the AirPlay feature finally on the OS X. This is going to transform the way i make my presentations.

  4. Well i know nw that I’ll be carrying an AppleTV and some adapters in my backpack. 🙂

    Wonder how fast the image gets replicated over the air?

    Tommi

  5. If Finder could finally do Cut & Paste and merge folders or if TextEdit gained the ability to ask for admin rights when editing and saving a system file (right now it’s copy to Desktop, edit, replace original), I’d be excited. But this? Not a single feature I really needed. If I want an iPad, I’ll get an iPad. I want to work with my computer, you know. Macs used to be the platform of choice for creative professionals.

    If you look closely, you’ll see that Apple is specifically targeting home users with their new features. This is all about getting iPhone, iPod and iPad users to buy Macs. It’s the Final Cut 7 to Final Cut X transition on the OS level, only a bit more gradual. But the focus shift is there. Sure, home users is a bigger market and I don’t blame them for wanting to make money, but I didn’t think they would be willing to dump their traditional user base so easily. I’m not saying OS X is no longer a good choice, or that things like iMessage aren’t useful, but the apparent general focus shift towards “lifestyle product for home users” is a little disconcerting for me.

    1. What’s this “I didn’t think they would be willing to dump their traditional user base so easily”?

      Apple made Final Cut Pro X look like a modern editor and changed the fundamentals to support future dynamic editing. It’s a lot different with v. 1.0.3, I’ve heard, so why is that development a signal Apple no longer supports professionals?

      I mean, definition of professional is not making things more complex than they should be, right? Has Apple really showed professionals a pattern that working professionals are left behind in their strategy? I get that Lion style iCal and Address Book look awful and LaunchPad is not something that professionals need but Leopard and especially Snow Leopard were huge performance upgrades before Lion – that doesn’t demonstrate a pattern that Apple is not focused in high performing software. Even for professionals.

  6. To be honest, I think Lion is rock solid, much more so than Snow Leopard. A lot of folks gripe about issues which are often related to improved security and not all 3rd party apps play nicely in that space. I have 3 machines running Lion now and rarely do I have an issues. I do agree that feature-wise, Lion is not all that revolutionary although you can’t deny some of the apps like Mail did see significant improvements. I am excited about Mtn Lion too, especially improved iCloud and Airplay Mirroring support. The updated iOS apps will be a nice addition too, especially reminders which currently is just a kludge tacked onto iCal.

    I’d love to see updates of the iWork apps (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) as these don’t support iCloud yet. I was expected an iWork rev for the holidays, but that didn’t happen. I also would like to see Mtn Lion support more DropBox like features in iCloud support. Certainly it is nice that iCloud takes care of things for you without you having to do a thing, but there are times when I need to use Dropbox such as sharing files/folders.

  8. Another big ho-hum effort from Apple. With more derivative features taken from the IOS world. I agree with all the others that the announced features are not that appealing to traditional Mac users. Where is the innovation on the Mac platform?

  9. I think it’s great that Apple is integrating iOS features into mountain lion. However, I truly hope that they don’t loose sight or focus on continued development of the desktop OS. I feel that there will always be a need for solid desktop computing regardless of how far or popular iOS devices become.

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