Apple announced a developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion (Mac App Store link) in mid-February 2012, and it became available on July 25, 2012. As expected, it makes Macs even more iOS-like, continuing the trend begun with OS X 10.7 Lion in July 2011.
Features ported over from iOS include AirPlay Mirroring, Game Center, Messages, Notes, Notification Center, Reminders, and Twitter integration. New features include Gatekeeper and Share Sheets. Gatekeeper can restrict Mountain Lion Macs to running only apps from the Mac App Store. Share Sheets is designed to make it easier for you to share links, photos, and videos by sending links in Safari, emailing or messaging from Notes, posting photos to Flikr and videos to Vimeo, and “tweeting just about anything.”
As with Lion, Mountain Lion will only available by purchase and download from the Mac App Store, where it retails for US$19.99.
Mountain Lion is susceptible to the “goto fail” bug. See Apple and the ‘goto fail’ Bug for information on securing it.
Apple has really raised the bar on hardware requirments. Where Lion had only left Core Dou Macs behind – all of them introduced in 2006 – Mountain Lion is abandoning Core 2 Duo Macs that use Intel GMA 950 or GMA 3100 graphics. Some of those were introduced in Late 2006, but some were not discontinued until Mid 2009, which means they were barely three years old when Mountain Lion was released.
Models supported by Lion but not Mountain Lion include:
- Late 2006 17″ 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac, disc. 8/7/07
- Mid 2007 Mac mini, disc. 3/3/09
- Late 2006 MacBook
- Mid 2007 MacBook
- Late 2007 MacBook
- Early 2008 MacBook
- Late 2008 MacBook White, disc. 1/20/09
- Early 2008 MacBook Air, disc. 10/14/08
Oldest Macs supported by OS X 10.8 by release date:
- Mid 2007 15″ MacBook Pro
- Mid 2007 17″ MacBook Pro
- Mid 2007 iMacs
- Early 2008 Mac Pro
- Late 2008 Aluminum Unibody MacBook
- Late 2008 MacBook Air
- Early 2009 MacBook White
- Early 2009 Mac mini
- Early 2009 Xserve
- Mid 2009 13″ MacBook Pro
Mountain Lion Links
- First Impressions of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, Simon Royal, Tech Spectrum, 2012.07.26. Installation took 45 minutes, all apps that ran in Lion run well, and everything seems a little faster.
- The Rapid Rise of OS X Mountain Lion, Dan Knight, Mac Musings, 2012.08.01. In just a few days, Mountain Lion passed Snow Leopard on its way to displacing Lion as the king of the OS X jungle.
Downloadable Updates
Standalone Updates let you update to a newer version of Mac OS X from your hard drive instead of using Software Update, which requires an Internet connection. Download the one(s) you need and install them after mounting the disk image and launching the Installer program.
There are two types of Standalone Updates: Individual (or Delta) and Combo.
- Individual Updates update one version of Mac OS X to the next version. For example, the Mac OS X 10.8.4 Update updates Mac OS X 10.8.3 to version 10.8.4. Individual Updates are also known as Delta Updates.
- Combo Updates update the base version of a Mac OS X release to the version specified in the Combo Update, including all intermediate updates. For example, the Mac OS X 10.8.4 Combo Update updates any earlier version of Mac OS X 10.8 to Mac OS X 10.8.4 using a single installer, as opposed to installing the individual Mac OS X 10.8.1, 10.8.2, 10.8.3, and 10.8.4 updates.
Standalone Updates are generally available 24 to 48 hours after the Update is available through Software Update.
If you burn a Standalone Update to CD, its disk image must be copied to your desktop or another location on your Mac OS X startup disk in order to be installed.
OS X 10.8.1
OS X 10.8.2
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