Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
Upgraders from Lion will face an almost flat learning curve, because almost every feature they’ve learned to use works in almost exactly th
e same way as before. But Mountain Lion unobtrusively slots in dozens of new features – Apple counts two hundred of them – that enhance sharing, messaging, cloud-based synchronization, security, web browsing, instant notifications, and accessibility.
The ninth major version of OS X adds more than 200 new features. A few major additions stand out from the crowd, but there are many more small tweaks tucked in for good measure. The maximum cost of upgrading your OS is £40, but check that any applications you depend upon have no known issues with Mountain Lion. OS X no longer includes Rosetta, the technology that enabled PowerPC apps to run on Intel Macs. If you’re upgrading from Leopard or Snow Leopard, you’ll need to ensure that your applications have been rewritten to support Intel processors. A lot has changed since early 2001. We’ve got a new president approaching the end of his first term, the US has embarked on two major wars and the words “Lady Gaga” have become much more than just gibberish. Some things, however, don’t change. In nearly each of these intervening years, Apple has issued a major update to its desktop operating system, OS X. This time last year, the company issued OS 10.7 Lion, a king-of-the-jungle moniker many thought would mark the end of Apple’s big cat naming scheme and, by extension, the OS X lineage. In February, however, the old operating system showed she still had some life left in her, when the next edition was revealed, arriving over the summer and called Mountain Lion
