I was looking forward to ML until I read the supported hardware and found that my 2006 Mac Pro won't be supported. This has happened in the past with other Macs, but this is the first time it has bit me.
My Pro is perfect for me, I have it maxed at 32 GB of memory, dual optical drives, and 4TB of local disk. Quad 2.66GHz cores is more than enough for me.
I understand that things like display Airplay mirroring depend on newer CPUs/GPUs, but ML should still be supported, just with fewer features.
And yes, I know this is a 6 year old system. But it's still a good solid system with a long life ahead of it. I'll keep running Lion on it until something dies (system board?) that's irreplaceable.
When 10.5 came out, a lot of unsupported systems only required a minor hack to make 10.5 install (copy the DVD to HD, edit a file, burn back to DVD).
With luck, there will be an easy hack this time as well. I believe the factor that decides which machines got cut off is the lack of 64bit EFI, which Apple requires for booting a 64bit kernel. Some people have already worked out how to use hackintosh tools to boot from Legacy Mode into a 64bit EFI and then into a 64bit kernel on the 2006/2007 Mac Pros, which apparently increases expansion card compatiblity (particularly making it possible to put unflashed PC video cards in the machine). Also, after doing this, some of the older MacPro video cards will be unsupported (such as the 7300GT). A suitable Radeon replacement is probably cheap though.
It is too early to tell, but with luck the same thing can be done by dedicated MacPro owners to get 10.8.
Personally, I'm very disappointed that my wife's MacBook is also on the unsupported list. I will probably end up just replacing her laptop rather than trying to hack it.
If the hacks progress to the point where I can upgrade to a card that supports display mirroring via Airplay, I may look into it. The video card on this system is its only weak spot in terms of reliability. Too much WoW burned out two prior cards, and replacement cards are outrageous.
EDIT: Now I see that it's a CPU issue, not GPU, so I'm screwed. Maybe I'll end up getting a new Mini to replace my old one for HTPC.
Airplay mirroring was the first "gotta have" feature for me, but my videocard is too old to support it, regardless of whether I can hack ML to run on my system.
Do you have any third-party drivers installed? I've been using Lion on a MacBook Pro since release and I've never had a kernel panic.
You might also look into hardware diagnostics — not sure if Apple Hardware Test is still available, but the Genius Bars certainly have something — as intermittent kernel panics from flaky hardware aren't unusual.
Check your hardware. xnu is incredibly stable. It may also be a 1.0 driver, considering what you're running it on. You _are_ on the absolute cutting edge of the universe right now, GPU-wise, after all.
First, boot holding D. This will boot a special firmware-based hardware tester (or one downloaded from Apple on latest hardware) that will test all aspects of your system.
To toss my hat into the "i haven't had any problems so no one had any problems" ring, I've only seen on kernel panic and that was because I had just put some bad memory in. Lion's gotten way better, make sure you do all the updates and you should be fine.
Can anyone comment if airplay is disabled on pre 2011 macs? I'm going to be royally pissed if airplay is disabled because I'm missing some BS drm chip. Hopefully the era of "Jailbreaking" macs has not started.
If anything it may be a CPU/GPU restriction that holds you back.
Modern Intel CPU's have a quicksync feature which is H.264 encode assist in the HD 3000 and 4000 GPU. These features may be required to make airplay mirroring work.
Similar hardware is in the A5 chip in the iPad 2 and up, and iPhone 4S and up.
Good to know, but it's still a bit disappointing that no Mac Pro can do AirPlay.
I wonder if there's a new API coming down the pipe for this. The obvious way to implement AirPlay mirroring, in my mind, would have been to add Quick Sync Video support as an optimization to existing video APIs, and then simply have AirPlay mirroring use that. Then not only could people with lots of free GPU cycles but no Quick Sync Video CPU (alas, like me) use AirPlay mirroring, but other video apps would automatically take advantage of the new performance.
Also false. They never shipped those and they were also nt Macs. those were developer only machines that you could lease and they were built using standard Intel boards which had that unused TPM module.
Check out AirParrot, it's $10. Fullscreen AirPlay audio and video.
It works fine on my 2008 Macbook but it gets a little hot and noisy. The lag is noticeable but tolerable, fine for browsing the web but not gaming. Audio/video sync is fine too for watching flash videos or whatever.
Did you mirror a fullscreen h264? That's probably not an ideal use case. You can AirPlay directly from iTunes or by using AirFlick and AirVideo server which may suit your needs. They're both free.
Not only awesome, it's the only reason why I would want to use this. Lets say I hear my iPhone buzzing in my backpack. I know I have my iMessages synched to my mac. Now the guessing game begins - should I pick the iPhone or wait until it has been synched? How long should I wait? Nevermind, what was I doing right now?
Absolutely useless, unless you have started some kind of Apple religion and all your contacts have iPhones.
It's been announced for iOS 6 that you can register your phone number under your Apple ID so that phone-number iMessages will appear on your Macs and iPads.
I love both. They're incredibly polished, work fantastically, and were crafted with very fine attention to detail. Perhaps you don't like the details they focused on, fine, but if you think these are crap software, you don't know actual crap software.
I encourage you to buy a cheap consumer embedded NAS to learn.
Apple .0 software always has at least one showstopper.
My favorite was the way the initial release of SL hosed fonts that it decided conflicted with the system ones. Like non-Apple versions of Helvetica. Thanks Apple! ;-)
Something very odd is happening at Apple. Either there is a massive shortage of developers (unlikely) or developers have been moved to a new project (AppleTV ?).
Because Mountain Lion and iOS6 are by far the most underwhelming updates yet in terms of features.
After Snow Leopard, they changed to a development cycle consistent of two week sprints followed by a one week convergence period. Stuff that can't get in by the specified milestone gets pushed back, moved, or cancelled.
It actually makes for a nicer development model than the 'everything doesn't work for a year and then miraculously comes together 4 months before release' development model. For example, with Snow Leopard, XCode became garbage collected and was unusable for like 50 releases in a row.
Ultimately, while you get a slightly less buggy release that comes out on time more or less, the features seem less ambitious.
The cost has nothing to do with the product, that's determined based on other factors, like how many Mac's OSX sells. There's no straightforward relationship between price number of features.
The direction appears to be cheap upgrades, and merging feature sets between IOS and OSX so eventually there's one operating system that changes in unison.
"The direction appears to be cheap upgrades, and merging feature sets between IOS and OSX so eventually there's one operating system that changes in unison."
It is believed by some that Apple will not be pushing their operating systems in this direction:
Specifically: "Mountain Lion is not a step towards a single OS that powers both the Mac and iPad, but rather another in a series of steps toward defining a set of shared concepts, styles, and principles between two fundamentally distinct OSes."
I think I might have been misunderstood. I have no complaints with Mountain Lion and think it offers tremendous value.
My point was whether there had been a movement of developers to a new iOS/OSX based project e.g. like an AppleTV. Because it seems that iOS6 and Mountain Lion combined seem to lack the combined punch of previous releases.
Over 200 new features and plenty of behind-the-scenes refinements, all for $20 and 12 months after Lion. Sounds like they're firing on all cylinders in Cupertino.
Beg to differ / disagree. I'd say there's a lot less than 200 features, most are "refinements". I mean, really, is "Date Picker in Calendar now has a mini Calendar" is a "new feature"? A new widget on a control?
These are user features. Snow leopard and mountain lion (as their names might suggest) are all about under the hood refinements. Snow leopard was ten times better than leopard, but the most striking new user feature was scrollable stacks (in Dock)! So, don't judge ML too harshly. I used dev versions and they were rock solid (more stable than anything before 10.6.4 or 10.7.1).
Small features like VIP whitelists for Mail.app, the Finder "share" button, and bigger features like Power Nap are significant improvements for many users.
I'm all about the future made into reality, but what kind of features do you see in other recent OS updates that are a) successful and not buggy as hell and b) ambitious enough to be not considered "underwhelming"?
The refined App sandbox and new system services (through XPC) are a major under-the-hood change. I don't have time to go through it, but they seem to have changed erything in OS X for XPC (watch WWDC sessions if you're interested).
But I completely agree with your first point. iWork hasn't been updated since 2009... I just can't believe it. It's still not on iCloud so if you want to share files between iOS and iWork on Mac, you have to manually copy and upload them. It's disgusting.
ZFS file system. Fixing iCal and Address book by returning them to proper non-skeuomorph applications, maybe even adjusting the UI to the strengths of computers rather than bring in the inefficiencies of the paper tools we left behind.
Proper Mail.app plugins. Not limiting the notification system to App Store apps. Finder replacement. Maybe with something like semantic tagging replacing folders, complete with proper filesystem level unix support.
Even bigger pie in the sky features: distributed process migration. If you are at home and have multiple computers, why not borrow your desktops CPU to do heavy processing (say for photos or video?)
In other words, features targeting professionals, the opposite of Apple current strategy.
While you have some legitimate suggestions spliced in here, the majority of your post says to me "The feature they should have added is to change everything back to the way it was, and change the business strategy". This is not really a very good interpretation of the question, for obvious reasons.
Skeumorphism is about taste. You just don’t share Apple’s. Simple as that. As long as it doesn’t impact the UI there is nothing wrong with skeumorphism.
Every app can use the notification system. They only can’t use push notifications if they are not in the App Store. Not terribly relevant for the desktop.
I disagree that skeuomorphism is only about taste. It's not just a skin, it also removes and limits functionality. I can even give specific examples. If you have lion, go to your address book.
It probably opens and lists people on the left with their details on the right. It looks like a book. Can you group people? It's certainly not obvious that such functionality (which is useful!) exists.
Now click the red bookmark thing on top. Not very intuitive. It looks like a bookmark, not something that switches to a different view. Anyways, viola! The grouping interface! But now I can't see contact details. I need to "flip the page" back to see the details. This is a huge step backwards and is so inefficient that I completely stopped using groups when I moved to Lion.
Hey! It's the three column view from the old address book! Now I can see my groups, contacts, and details, just like before. Not as skeuomorph though. Now it's just an app that is skinned to look like a book. It doesn't function like a book. There are no pages to flip. It still has the dimensions of a book I guess, but that only makes that left page looks mighty constrained.
UI is about displaying and working with information, and this skeuomorphism is arguably not a very good way of doing either. I can lodge similar complaints about iCal. For instance, why are months always on separate pages? When I'm near the end of a month, I have to keep switching back and forth (with a slow unneeded animation on top). It's a computer, surely we can come up with an interface that discards this old page limitation of paper calendars! Not if you are thinking with skeuomorphism though.
Of course we can come up with UIs that don't mimic the old school ways of doing things, we had them. Skeuomorphism is absolutely purely about design choices.
The bookmark thing is a bookmark, and it works like one. It saves your place on a page in a book and you use it to go back to one. The little familiar groups icon on the tab tells you where it goes.
I'm not going to argue that some of the functionality of Address Book has been reduced or gone, but it has to do with a decision that Apple made about what they wanted, not directly tied to the fact that the interface is skeuomorphic now.
You cannot just change the definition of a word to suite your argument. Most people consider skeuomorphic design to include both looks and behaviour. Regardless, what I've described is all looks. Address Book still has grouping functionality. It's just been made extremely difficult to use because of the design of the interface.
Further, looks are about much more than just taste. Designs affect how easy it is to understand the information being displayed, or to understand how to use an application. Skeuomorphic design is typically used to try to improve the latter: help people to understand how to use the app. It mimics a physical object because people already know how that object works. This benefit disappears if your skeuomorphic design doesn't actually work like the object it mimics though.
Does the amount of stuff added matter? If the quality is good I honestly don’t care.
Lion was a bit of a dud. Mountain Lion doesn’t add much but it improves massively on Lion. It corrects its mistakes. I’m very much ok with that, I don’t need flashy new features. I really don’t want Apple to start pulling features out of there ass (especially now that they switched to a yearly update cycle), mere refinements every year for something mature like OS X would be awesome.
My Pro is perfect for me, I have it maxed at 32 GB of memory, dual optical drives, and 4TB of local disk. Quad 2.66GHz cores is more than enough for me.
I understand that things like display Airplay mirroring depend on newer CPUs/GPUs, but ML should still be supported, just with fewer features.
And yes, I know this is a 6 year old system. But it's still a good solid system with a long life ahead of it. I'll keep running Lion on it until something dies (system board?) that's irreplaceable.