
John Siracusa's OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Review - thisisblurry
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/
======
blinkingled
TL;DR

"In some ways, Mountain Lion is a refinement, enhancement, and yes, a _major
bug-fix for Lion_. But the changes and additions are significant enough that
they will inevitably come with their own set of bugs. Let's not forget Snow
Leopard, which promised no new features but still brought plenty of bugs in
its 10.6.0 release."

I hope they fixed memory management - Lion is too swap happy and slow on a
decent 3Gb RAM Core 2 MBP. Windows comparatively flies on the same machine but
of course suspend resume is flaky and other Win-Mac integration annoyances
mean it's not a win-win.

~~~
rhizome
3GB, my word, son...crucial.com is your friend!

~~~
blinkingled
The machine supports a maximum of 4GB, and believe me it only gets marginally
better with the added 1GB.

I guess Crucial also sells SSDs and Apple sells new MBPs with 16GB RAM :) -
but at this juncture I hate to spend money on anything when the other
supposedly more bloated OS named Win 7 works just great with 3GB - that
seriously ought to be more than enough for browsing, email and occassional
Word/PPT stuff.

As for the swappiness - it seems to be at least somewhat better than Lion -
hasn't used up swap after 20 minutes of doing normal stuff. But the Apple
ID/Password annoyance is still there - I still had to enter Apple ID /
password several times during and after the installation! The last time
hopefully was for iTunes. Why can't they use one single sign on?

~~~
primatology
Agreed. I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my 4GB MBP to 16GB of memory.
Officially unsupported, but it works like a charm.

~~~
bpyne
May I ask what MBP you have?

~~~
dbalatero
Any 2011 15" MBP or newer will take 16gb of RAM, unofficially. You can check
OWC for a full compatibility guide.

~~~
hpguy
May I ask which brand you bought and for how much?

------
keithpeter
I've suggested this before (and not done much about it), but that is not going
to stop me suggesting it again.

How about a crowd-sourced 'Siracusa style' review of Ubuntu 12.04? Or Debian
Wheezy, or Fedora (large integer, preferably 18 because that is the version
that RHEL 7 will be based on)? Or the safe and conservative CentOS/SciLi/PUIAS
version 6.3, now being targeted by Oracle. Or _your_ favourite GNU/Linux, or
BSD?

So many of the free software reviews are shallow.

I think the Penguins have done enough work to merit something with _depth_

~~~
masklinn
> How about a crowd-sourced 'Siracusa style' review

I don't think a crowd-sourced review could ever be that, as it most likely
won't be a cohesive work and will have a hard time finding talented writers
(which I hold Siracusa to be). And will probably fail to balance the emphasis
(at all) between features of differing importance and levels of interest.
Furthermore, Siracusa's reviews are also the result of more than a decade of
writing these things.

Don't aim to write "Siracusa-style" reviews, aim to write in-depth reviews
which are not complete dreck. That will probably work better. Or work at all,
for that matter.

~~~
JonnieCache
Maybe there could be a kickstarter to just pay Siracusa to write 26,000 words
about ubuntu?

~~~
keithpeter
That is touching my open source nerve, the penguins ought to be able to
assemble something like this themselves.

~~~
Tloewald
This is hilarious. Mythical man ymonth applied to writing. Let's crowd source
some more Tolstoy novels while we're at it.

~~~
keithpeter
A review of a computer system is _hardly_ a major work of art. Brooks'
n(n+1)/2 won't kick in until we exceed five or ten people I think.

------
nicholassmith
This is almost the best part of _every_ OS X release.

~~~
stephen_g
I have to agree - I love all the technical details in these articles so much
that I used to read them in detail long before I switched to the Mac... It was
probably the biggest thing that convinced me to change (that, and I wanted a
laptop that didn't look and feel like cheap plasticy rubbish, which apart from
Apple products were few and far between then).

~~~
mdonahoe
Has anyone here tried any of the macbook air clones?

<http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/models/aspiresseries>

~~~
rhizome
This isn't really the right place for that question, but all of those have bad
resolution screens, as do all of the linux-able ultrabooks. I'm not saying
that they should be Retina, but 768 vertical px is unacceptably regressive.

~~~
trotsky
The Asus zenbook prime 11" and 13" are shipping with full hd ips screens.

~~~
rhizome
That's nice to see, thanks, but at a 50% premium over an MBA (including
Windows tax).

~~~
trotsky
I'm not sure which model you looked at, but I believe the 13"/4g/128gb is
priced at $1100 msrp vs. similarly configured air at $1200. Microcenter had it
for $1000 a few weeks ago.

~~~
rhizome
I think I was probably looking at list price.

------
swdunlop
Just don't put it on your development workstation yet; XCode 4.4 is blocking
the install of Command Line Tools for some developers. This means Homebrew
doesn't work, VIM doesn't work (no /usr/include for pyconfig.h), and things
are generally horked unless you want to play end-user in the app store.

Welcome to release day, Apple style. :)

~~~
jevinskie
Yup, getting 403 on
[http://adcdownload.apple.com/Developer_Tools/xcode_4.4_21362...](http://adcdownload.apple.com/Developer_Tools/xcode_4.4_21362/xcode44cltools_10_86938106a.dmg).
This is really disappointing!!! Why is it taking Apple so long to fix?

~~~
swdunlop
Looking at my inbox? Because they are too busy declaring that they can't
reproduce it.

~~~
jevinskie
It WFM now. Hope you get it working soon as well!

~~~
swdunlop
Finally sorted itself out this evening. I just went back to Lion for the day
and waiting for the #xcode rage to die down on twitter. :)

------
vdm
TL;DR full screen with multiple monitors is still broken
[http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/18/#full-
scre...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/18/#full-screen-
multiple-monitors)

~~~
rsync
How is this even possible ?

Do I even understand this correctly ? If you have multiple monitors, and an
application goes full screen, the other two monitors go grey ?

I am still on SL on my mac pro, so I have yet to see this ... what the fuck do
people working at apple (with multiple screens) do ?

~~~
aprendo
If you go full screen, the app in full screen mode gets to use all your
monitors. It gains control over every last pixel available to you. The other
monitors are not unavailable, they are greyed out because the app you are
using doesn’t take advantage of them. It could if it wanted to.

That’s the decision Apple took. It makes sense† but it’s also utterly stupid.
For some reason they stick to it. I don’t think it’s a big deal. Fullscreen
apps suck anyway and there is no reason whatsoever to use them on a big
screen, much less when you have more than one screen available to you. They
might make sense on the 11" Air but certainly on no other computer or screen
Apple sells.

Just use apps like you always did (before Apple introduced their stupid
fullscreen mode) and they will work fine. Like before, like nothing changed. I
have the sneaking suspicion that only maximize-crazy Windows converts run into
this problem. On the Mac you don’t maximize. Apple only implemented fullscreen
mode the really stupid way to make that abundantly clear to everyone.

—

† More than Apple just disabling other monitors, anyway.

~~~
rsync
How does DVD Player going full screen "not make sense" ? Don't you want movies
full screen ?

And if you have other monitors, you want them to be useless while, say,
Quicktime is full-screened ?

I have triple 30s on one side of the room, and a 60" on the other side of the
room. With snow leopard (and presumably, any other OS) I can watch a DVD or
other video output full-screen while other output continues to display on the
three other screens.

Also, what about full-screening a guest OS in vmware on one monitor, while you
do other productive work in your other physical monitors ? That must be a
_very common_ use case, right ? As in, all day every day for most vmware users
?

I'm not going to waste time talking about the "maximize" issue - even if I
conceded every point of the maximize issue, there's still a problem with an
inability to go full screen in one physical screen while working in another...

~~~
aprendo
Why so angry? I totally agree with you. In all cases where Apple ported an
already existing fullscreen mode to their new solution they fall flat on their
face. It’s an awful experience if you have more than one screen. So that’s
QuickTime and the DVD Player. Not a big deal.

Third party developers should just not use Apple’s stupid mode. Problem
solved. (Though I don’t understand everyone’s sudden fullscreen love. It’s
just goofy on a big screen expect for a select few use cases. Don’t use it.
That has always been the Mac OS philosophy.)

Overall I don’t think it’s a big issue. A small minority of Mac users is
affected by this problem in a tiny number of use cases. It sucks for them –
but no need to whine for hours on end. That’s just annoying for the rest of us
:-)

It seems like every single discussion about OS X is dominated by this stupid
topic. It’s boring. Yeah, it sucks. Everyone knows it. Apple made a stupid
decision. Can we talk about something more interesting now?

------
m_st
And there goes my spare time... Every OS X release I'm more eager for
Siracusa's review than the actual disk (or now download) itself :-)

~~~
dasil003
So glad I waited and am having a late lunch today.

------
kyleslattery
Some info from Siracusa about the different ways to read the review:
[http://siracusa.tumblr.com/post/27978338524/about-my-
mountai...](http://siracusa.tumblr.com/post/27978338524/about-my-mountain-
lion-review)

Sounds like if you buy the Kindle version when it comes out ($5), he'll get a
direct cut, which is nice.

~~~
rb2k_
On twitter, he actually points to the Arstechnica subscription (5$) which will
give you the review in pdf/epub/mobi

At least he seems to be fine either way.

------
taylorwc
"Once the OS has been out for a while, try asking a Mac-using friend who is
not obsessively reading multi-thousand-word operating system reviews on the
Internet if he has noticed anything different about scrolling in Mountain
Lion."

...priceless...

------
da_n
Epic review as usual from John Siracusa. Dan Benjamin volunteered to do a
reading of this for release in audio format, but I think John Siracusa ruled
it out. Understandable as I think too many problems to overcome (images,
footnotes, licensing etc), so just a dream really. Would happily have paid for
that though. Hope they can sort out the Kindle release, definitely going to
purchase that.

~~~
duaneb
> Hope they can sort out the Kindle release, definitely going to purchase
> that.

Whatever for? It's interesting, I'll give you that, but why don't you just
spend $20 on the OS itself?

------
tbonnin
Marco made a review of John Siracusa review ;)
[http://www.marco.org/2012/07/25/siracusa-mountain-lion-
revie...](http://www.marco.org/2012/07/25/siracusa-mountain-lion-review-
review)

------
kristofferR
I find it fascinating that he "wrote" this piece using Dragon Dictate, a
dictation program.

~~~
aprendo
He has RSI.

------
thought_alarm
The new iCloud support is interesting. I just edited the same iCloud document
in TextEdit on two different machines, and I gotta say that is really damn
cool.

On the other hand, this new iCloud support sadly highlights another unrelated
new feature in Lion, and not in a good way: Automatic Termination.

You must use TextEdit to browse your iCloud documents, which is fine, but
TextEdit keeps fucking disappearing on you because it has no open documents.
Command+Tab away for a split second and it's gone, forcefully removed from
your Dock and Command+Tab list.

Automatic Termination is a feature that is meant to serve _only_ the most
novice of Windows users who are coming to OS X for the first, while it breaks
an existing feature of the OS that has been fundamental to Mac OS X and
NeXTSTEP for the last 23+ years. And it's not even an option.

It is hugely frustrating and hugely disappointing.

~~~
jsz0
I can't recall ever experiencing auto termination on Lion or Mountain Lion
throughout the DP previews. My hardware is nothing fancy -- 2011 MBA /w 4GB of
RAM. What are your specs? Do you often have memory hungry applications open?
Most of mine are pretty modest. I'm just curious what would cause such
different results. Auto termination should definitely be the last resort and
most low memory footprint apps should be totally excluded.

~~~
thought_alarm
Unfortunately, there two different and unrelated features called "Auto
Termination", which only muddies the water.

One feature aims to preserve system resources during low memory conditions in
way that's completely invisible to the user.

The other forcefully removes running applications from the Dock and Command-
Tab list even though these apps remain running in the background.

My frustration is with the latter feature.

~~~
ghshephard
To be clear though - Auto Termination of the latter form only occurs if no
windows are active. It's basically saying, "If the user no longer has any
active documents, and has moved this application to the background, then close
it down."

Siracusa does a good job describing his annoyance with this feature - and
points out that while appropriate for IOS, which has the MRU task switcher, it
doesn't work very well on OS X which lacks that metaphor.

~~~
thought_alarm
Yes, that's how it's supposed to work. But there are a bunch of edge cases
usability-wise that it fails to handle. It is incredibly thoughtless to
automatically quit an app the split second the user switches away from it,
particularly if that user explicitly launched the app and has been using it
for the last hour.

It has always been perfectly acceptable to close all of your windows and then
hit Command+N or Command+O to open a new document. And that's even more
important now that you _must_ use Command+O to browse your iCloud documents.
But if something happens in between those steps, say an email comes in or you
need to look something up, then it breaks in a really bad way.

It also has nothing to do with iOS. iOS never tries to guess that you've
finished working with an app, never prevents you from switching to an app,
never removes an app icon from Springboard or task switcher. Indeed, this form
of Auto Termination is the exact opposite of how iOS operates.

It also has nothing to do with conserving resources. These "terminated" apps
remain running the background, consuming memory. The OS simply prevents you
from switching back to an app that you were previous using.

It is strictly a Windows UI feature, and a very unwelcome one.

------
agumonkey
Definition of a review, by ArsTechnica : <http://imgur.com/RdohV>

~~~
checker
<http://www.anandtech.com/> also has some pretty awesome reviews (for
hardware).

~~~
agumonkey
Agreed, it's a reference, but I don't recall 20+ pages reviews. (Both had very
well executed website redesigns too)

~~~
masklinn
GeForce GTX 680: 20 pages [http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-
gtx-680-re...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5699/nvidia-geforce-
gtx-680-review)

Ivy Bridge: 21 pages [http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-
core...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/5771/the-intel-ivy-bridge-
core-i7-3770k-review)

I'm sure there are others.

The SSD series were not technically review but went well beyond 20 e.g.
<http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829/> is 27 pages.

~~~
agumonkey
You're right. It probably felt shorter because of the game testing parts.

~~~
masklinn
Yeah, not all pages on anandtech reviews clock in at a thousand words,
usually, and the number of graphs (especially for GPU reviews) make flying
through much faster, almost slideshow-like in some cases.

------
gaius
Am I missing an obvious single page link, or do they really want you to pay
not to have to click through 25 pages?

~~~
masklinn
> or do they really want you to pay not to have to click through 25 pages?

You can get Ars Premier, buy the ebook or use some sort of stitching reader.

Not that I have a problem clicking through 25 pages _when each page holds 1000
words and is a self-contained section or a pair of sections_. Siracusa pays
close attention to pagination in order to pace the article, in my experience
of his reviews the page breaks are actually welcome as they give natural
"yield" points for doing something else before coming back

edit: in fact, Siracusa notes (on his blog):

> I actually like [pagination] for very long articles because it helps me keep
> my place across multiple reading sessions. I can remember I was on page 8
> instead of remembering my exact position in a very long scrolling web page.

> [...]

> Some people think Ars Technica forces me to break my article up into many
> tiny pages. That’s not the case. I choose how to paginate the article. I
> like to break it up by topic, if possible, which means that the “pages” vary
> widely in length. This year, Ars Technica actually asked me to merge several
> pages together to reduce the total number of pages (and I did).

So not only did he decide the pagination based on his desires regardless of
advertisement money, ars actually asked him to paginate _less_.

~~~
malandrew
Apparently someone needs to do a 25-page review of the W3C HTML spec and link
to the section on the Anchor tag for him.

~~~
masklinn
You mean the thing he used in his table of contents and in every fucking
section title of his review?

You should avoid blaming him for your own misreadings.

~~~
malandrew
"I actually like [pagination] for very long articles because it helps me keep
my place across multiple reading sessions. I can remember I was on page 8
instead of remembering my exact position in a very long scrolling web page."

Tell me why 'I can remember I was reading the section "A Cloud In Three
Parts"' doesn't work?

There is a reason that sites that actually understand the medium put a
mouseover on Section Titles and anchors so that the link is discoverable. If
you don't put a link anchor next to it's respective title you really have no
option but to think "Gee, pages are better."

~~~
morsch
The same reason it's easier to remember that something in a book was 3 pages
ago rather than 14 paragraphs... or even sections. It's cognitively useful to
have a physical measure for distance rather than a more abstract one; clicking
a link on the web is (metaphorically) understood as a physical act of moving.
Scrolling is physical, too, but it's more fluid while paging is sort of
"integral".

~~~
malandrew
Give it another ten years and the concept of knowing you were on page 5 will
be the same as knowing you were listening to the b-side of a vinyl record.
It'll be nice for nostalgia, but will cease to be a reference point.

~~~
morsch
That might be the case but it's irrelevant to the point I was making, that
physical metaphors are cognitively useful to provide an alternative
structure/index to experiences/information. Your example is a good one because
we have lost this particular physical metaphor in the move towards CDs and
more so regarding MP3s. But the web has its own set of metaphors, and _web
browsing as a journey_ is a pretty powerful and entrenched one.

------
abruzzi
My biggest pet peeve with 10.7 (besides the loss of arrows on my scroll bars)
is the dumbing down of the Network control panel. In 10.7 you couldn't
configure your WiFi to connect to 802.1x networks (i.e. WPA Enterprise.) You
had to download the iPhone configuration utility, build a config file, then
import it. 10.6 would let you set the configuration in the network control
panel. Even iOS doesn't require ICU to connect. I didn't see anything about it
in the review so I assume 10.8 is still set up the screwy 10.7 way.

------
ditoa
Siracusa really does an outstanding job with these reviews.

------
outworlder
Is it just me, or did anyone else notice an increase in graphics performance?
I did not measure, but it should be significant, as I am noticing it in normal
usage.

I'll hook it up to an external monitor later to try and stress it a little bit
more.

I have a Late 2009 Macbook White, with 8GB and an SSD.

------
jacoblyles
I just want to know if it will be easier or harder to compile ruby and python
libraries with native extensions that depend on, say, libxml2.

I upgraded to Lion and it took 8 hours off of the installation process for
lxml. But nokogiri was still nearly impossible.

~~~
masklinn
> I upgraded to Lion and it took 8 hours off of the installation process for
> lxml.

Am I misreading this? It took 8 hours to compile libxml2, libxslt and lxml?

Surely that's not possible and I missed something, I just tried making a full
static build (to ensure I'd have to build libiconv, libxml2 and libxslt as
well) from the current HEAD, on 10.6, using the stock gcc 4.2 on a 2.4GHz 2010
MBP and it took 3:48 total including downloading the tarballs for libiconv,
libxml2 and libxslt and cythoning lxml.

------
wkral
If you need to properly prepare for this review checkout this video:
[http://patdryburgh.com/blog/preparing-for-john-siracusas-
rev...](http://patdryburgh.com/blog/preparing-for-john-siracusas-review-of-
mountain-lion/)

------
yskchu
For me, the update to the messages beta app alone was worth it: iMessage on
the Mac is so useful to keep in touch with friends, and the beta app was buggy
as

------
xutopia
The review doesn't say how long it takes to install once downloaded. Is this a
lunch break install or a "wait-till-evening" installation?

~~~
rewtraw
I did it during my lunch break ;) "Preparing to install" took 10 minutes (you
can still use the system during this time) and the install itself took ~30
minutes on a 2011 MBA. Rebooted right to the desktop with no fuss.

~~~
xutopia
Perfect! Did you have any services like postgresql or redis or anything that
needed to be reinstalled?

/EDIT I just rebooted and my services were still present with no change. They
had been installed with homebrew.

------
hiddenstage
What's with his obsession with iOS? He makes it sound like iOS is the
quintessential operating system.

~~~
shinratdr
It's not his obsession with iOS at all, it's Apple's obsession with iOS
leading to that being by far the most logical explanation for why something
has changed in OS X if the answer isn't immediately obvious. Last time I
checked the only iOS device Siracusa owns personally is a 2nd generation iPod
touch.

Why does a button now look like that, or a feature now work that way, why is
that app renamed or that texture changed? The answer is usually "because
that's how it works in iOS". You're making a mistake in assuming that because
he's trying to explain Apple's motivation behind it that he agrees with it.

As for why Apple is obsessed with iOS, it's probably because it has made them
tens of billions of dollars, has vast and focused mindshare, and it's wildly
popular. iOS makes tons of hard decisions in the name of making a device that
users can pick up and run with.

Our opinions on it (you, me, and Siracusa's) are basically irrelevant. The key
is Apple thinks iOS is the quintessential operating system and it has the
sales to back it up. That's why ML is the way it is. Acknowledging that when
trying to write a review about it is important.

------
locusm
Why is it when you enable dictation it needs to send your contacts to Apple?

~~~
tomkr
I'm assuming this is so that if you speak the name of one of your contacts, it
understands the word. Names can be weird, especially last names, so they're
bound not to be in the standard list of words that can be used. This way you
can name your contacts when dictating without the system freaking out.

------
shimonamit
Isn't there a TL;DR;TL;DR;TL;DR^25 somewhere?

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
Here you go: "Better"

~~~
quotemstr
Don't you mean "one step away from a walled garden"?

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
No, else that's what I'd have typed.

The walled garden thing is interesting. I (and a couple of other people I
know) instantly reacted to Gatekeeper with "fantastic, I can lock down my
Dad's machine and keep him out of trouble".

One step towards a walled garden doesn't place you inside a walled garden and
in it's current form Gatekeeper is a good thing. Disabling it was the first
thing I did when I installed Mountain Lion and it took about 15 seconds
(including me not knowing where the option was). In this version of OS X I
honestly think it's a non-issue.

The big question is whether this is the first step on a journey into the
walled garden or just an individual step that happens to be in that direction.

Personally my feeling is that they won't ever take that final step. I think
they get that OS X isn't iOS and that you can't apply the same standards for
any number of reasons, both practical and political. Taking something away
from people (which is what this would be) is a whole different thing to never
having given it to them in the first place (which is what has happened with
iOS).

But for now no-one knows. As I say, for now I don't see it as any issue with
10.8. Whether there is an issue with 10.9 or 10.10 or whatever, time will
tell.

------
abc_lisper
> But I walked my dog briefly in the middle.

Don't take the article too seriously. If you did, you probably missed the
point.

