Mac OS X Mountain Lion Gets Three Million Downloads In 4 Days

hypnosec writes "Apple has announced that its latest Mac OS X version, Mountain Lion, has had three million downloads in just four days thereby making it the most successful OS in Cupertino's history. Philip Schiller, iPhone maker's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, said, 'Just a year after the incredibly successful introduction of Lion, customers have downloaded Mountain Lion over three million times in just four days, making it our most successful release ever.'"

Why not?

[Missing.Matter]

Barring comparability and performance regressions, at $20 why not upgrade? From my usage, Mountain Lion doesn't offer any real drastic changes, just some polish and some optional features, some of which are welcome, some which I'll probably never use. I haven't run into any showstopper bugs, and it's generally just a run-of-the mill upgrade with some nice features. Apple always claims they've added hundreds of new features, but their threshold for a "feature" seems to be lower and lower with each release, with even the lowliest check box being counted as a "feature" right next to full applications like iMessage or Reminders or Gatekeeper. When you separate the features by magnitude, there are only really a handful that stand out. I know every release of OSX is a "point" release, but Mountain Lion really captures the meaning behind the phrase.

Re:Ok... but why?

[spire3661]

Airplay that can mirror anything on you see on the Mac to an AppleTv was the killer feature for me. Also time machine backups can be set to rotate between different targets

Re:senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing

[dingen]

He answers only to the CEO, as do all senior VP's. There are just nine of these guys [apple.com] and they're each responsible for a fundamental aspect of Apple's operation.

I agree most corporate titles are complete bullshit, and I'm sure there are also lots of these folks running around at Apple Inc. But imho Apple's Senior VPs aren't really part of that nonsense as their titles actually show their responsibility and function pretty well.

Re:Ok... but why?

[dingen]

The real killer feature is that ML is faster than Lion and runs better on systems with less than 4 GB of RAM.

Other ways than torrents to save bandwidth

[SuperKendall]

would have saved them quite a bit of bandwidth

So does Akamai, which is what Apple uses.

Re:All of them

[jbolden]

You don't need a tool. If you open up the package that comes with mountain lion there is a file which is mountable / burnable as a stand alone installer. Very typical of Apple: hard enough to stop people who don't know what they are doing from shooting themselves in the foot, easy enough that if you do know what you are doing you can make your install media.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[the_humeister]

I have a Sempron 2600+ (64-bit too!) machine I assembled back in 2004. It runs Windows 7 just fine.

Re:Actual title should be

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

A lot of the house-keeping of multiple destination was left to the user. If you want round-robin or first available, etc.? You'd make this manually. But HEY! Time Machine is automatic, right? There is a plethora of AppleScript and even Cocoa Apps to manage this. These are pretty much obsoleted.

I'll defer to the Ars Technica description [arstechnica.com]:

Time Machine can now back up to multiple volumes. When more than one volume is selected, Time Machine will do a full backup to each selected volume, taking turns each time it runs.

Re:2007 Mac Mini couldn't be upgraded

[SuperKendall]

Why did she not simply re-install Snow Leopard?

There's no reason she had to upgrade any of that...

Re:Ok... but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was the killer feature for my son as well. But then he found out Airplay mirroring isn't supported on his 2010 MacBook Pro. He's a little pissed at Apple. I figure he's getting a lesson in tech obsolescence. I'm happy - Airplay mirroring works great on my 2012 Air. :-)

If he's techy at all, tell him why.

You can't send HD resolution video across WiFi (or even Gigabit Ethernet) uncompressed, so AirPlay mirroring requires compression. AppleTV hardware only supports the H.264 codec, so the format has to be H.264. While it's very efficient in terms of compression ratio, it's also very difficult to implement in software -- as in, it probably takes almost all of a quadcore CPU's cycles to encode 1080p in realtime. Since that would be pointless (you want to use your computer normally while mirroring, not have its fans howling just to send its display to the TV), Apple requires hardware H.264 encoding to implement AirPlay mirroring.

On Macs, that hardware is the QuickSync H.264 encoder / decoder block. QuickSync is a feature of Intel HD 3000 (or better) video, introduced in codename "Sandy Bridge" CPU models (aka "second generation Core i3/i5/i7"). Earlier Intel CPUs didn't have a hardware H.264 encoder. Sandy Bridge CPUs first shipped in 2011 Macs, so 2010 Macs cannot support AirPlay mirroring -- they do not have the required hardware.

Re:Depends on Why...

[El_Oscuro]

In Linux, the equivilent of the registery is stored in the users $HOME under hidden directories. I haven't got into that level with OS/X on my new Mac yet, but since it is Unix, it is probably done the same way.

So when I got tired of messing with Unity on Ubunu, I deleted the O/S partition and installed Linux Mint. Imagine my suprise when after booting it for the first time, not only did I have my desktop settings and icons, but Firefox even remembered my last opened tabs!