Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion review

Mountain Lion – or OS X 10.8, to give it its more prosaic designation – is the latest big cat to stalk onto the Mac. It will run on most Macs released since 2008, so long as they have at least 2GB of RAM and are currently running Snow Leopard or Lion, and the cost remains very low: a single £14 purchase from the Mac App Store allows you to upgrade all your authorised Macs (which in practice means up to five machines).

Yet although the price suggests Mountain Lion is a minor upgrade, it represents a significant shift in focus for OS X. Or, rather, it brings to fruition a shift that began last year, when Lion started importing iOS features such as full-screen applications, multitouch gestures and the Launchpad view to the desktop. Mountain Lion builds on this, tying the Mac in more closely to online content and services – and to iOS devices.

New online features

The most visible new feature is the iOS-style Notification Center. Calendar appointments, emails and software updates are heralded by tasteful notification balloons at the top right of the screen, which optionally either fade out or remain until snoozed or dismissed.

As in Lion, you can sign in to various external email services, including Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft Exchange – and you can now also connect directly with Twitter, Vimeo and Flickr. Facebook integration is promised for this autumn. If you miss a notification, simply swipe to the left or click the new icon at the far right of the menu bar to see your notification history (pictured above).

More subtle is the appearance of discreet Share buttons dotted around the various applications. In Safari, you can now share URLs and send images to email, Twitter or the Messages application directly from the toolbar. In iPhoto, Photo Booth and Preview you can click to post an image directly to Flickr – or set it as your avatar on online services. Even the Finder now sports a share button to send a file to a friend.

The Messages application now supports iMessages, so you can chat seamlessly with people using both OS X and iOS clients. More excitingly, there’s also now a Mac version of the iOS Game Center for playing games directly against mobile users – we couldn’t try this as it wasn’t yet live.

Living in the cloud

Mountain Lion isn’t only about socialising. iCloud integration has been beefed up to help you manage multiple devices. In Lion, this service synchronised mail, calendars and some types of document between your Mac and mobile devices: now it can also synchronise Safari web tabs – so you can put down an iPad and continue on the Mac – and share photo streams with other iCloud users.

You can share memos created in the new cloud-aware Notes application too: update a document and it will sync across your Mac, iPhone and iPad. The Reminders application works similarly, but lets you attach a date and time to an alert, which will then pop up on all of your Apple devices. Reminders can be assigned to locations too, popping up when you arrive at a particular place.

New desktop features

If you’re not interested in Mountain Lion’s online features, there’s good stuff here for standalone use too. Lion’s Auto Save feature receives welcome tweaks, so documents can be more easily renamed, reverted or saved under a new name. Time Machine at last supports multiple backup destinations, providing redundancy at home or extra security if you use your MacBook both at home and in the office.

Safari gets a single “omnibox”, into which either URLs or search terms can be entered. Software Update has been merged into the Mac App Store, tidying up the niggling inconsistency whereby application updates and OS updates arrived through different channels. And the Launchpad view now lets you type to search, just like Spotlight – turning it into a usable, albeit limited, launcher.

Mountain Lion makes no extravagant demands on your system – on our 2008 iMac with an upgraded 3GB of RAM it felt every bit as snappy as its predecessors – but it does include a few hardware-specific features. Trackpad users will appreciate a few new gestures, including a three-finger tap for Quick Look and a pinch overview of all your open tabs in Safari. If you’re using a recent MacBook Air (or a MacBook Pro with Retina display) you can also take advantage of Mountain Lion’s Power Nap feature, where OS X continues to do useful things while in power-saving standby mode, including downloading updates, processing Time Machine backups and even periodically updating its location with the Find My Mac service. Apple TV owners can use AirPlay mirroring – previously only supported by iOS devices – to display Mac content on a TV.

One of Mountain Lion’s quirkier new features is voice recognition. Impressively, this works everywhere in the OS – so long as you have an internet connection, as the actual interpretation is done online, presumably using a spin-off of the Siri back-end. But we found accuracy was poor unless we spoke loudly and clearly, so don’t plan to use it in Starbucks. The online processing model also means nothing appears on the screen until you tap a key or click to indicate that you’ve finished speaking, so you don’t see your words appear as you go.

Security

Mountain Lion is purportedly the most secure version of OS X yet, thanks to the new Gatekeeper feature, which optionally prohibits downloads from developers who aren’t registered with Apple. In practice we doubt this will make much difference: it’s easy to turn off, and frankly there’s very little stopping registered developers from publishing malware – there’s no vetting for the software itself.

There’s no great cause for alarm, though. The OS remains robust, thanks to its UNIX-like permissions model and automatic sandboxing in Safari and Mail.

Worth the upgrade?

The dozens of improvements in Mountain Lion affect almost every corner of the operating system, so even if you never use the internet and don’t own a single iOS device, there’s enough here to tempt an upgrade from Lion – after all, the cost is almost negligible.

But the principal goal of OS X 10.8 is evidently to make the Mac a more connected companion to its iOS brethren – and here it really impresses. Last year, when Lion seemed to hint at a straightforward convergence between OS X and iOS, we feared OS X would be dumbed down or even axed. Instead, it’s gone on to successfully embrace online services and mobile devices without compromising its own identity.

For sure, the range of services supported is limited, especially while we’re waiting for Facebook. We’d have liked to see a properly open framework for notifications and two-way communications, to help services such as reddit, Myspace, LiveJournal and Google+ join in the fun.

Overall, though, even in its current closed and inchoate form, Mountain Lion is a bold advance – and a persuasive alternative to the one-interface-fits-all approach of Windows 8. If you’re an existing Mac user we’ve no doubt you’ll upgrade. But even if you’ve never considered the platform before, we recommend you take a look at Mountain Lion before buying your next laptop – or, as it might be, your next tablet.

Details
Software subcategory	Operating system
Operating system support
Operating system Windows Vista supported?	no
Operating system Windows XP supported?	no
Operating system Linux supported?	no
Operating system Mac OS X supported?	yes