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OS X Software Apple

Mac OS X Mountain Lion Gets Three Million Downloads In 4 Days 397

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

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  • I have to wonder how many of these are people that received a free upgrade with their new Macintoshes... /didn't rtfm
    • All of them (Score:2, Redundant)

      by Theaetetus ( 590071 )

      I have to wonder how many of these are people that received a free upgrade with their new Macintoshes... /didn't rtfm

      Maybe you should have:

      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.”

      • by vux984 ( 928602 )

        Yes, and everyone who bought mac in the last few months had it ship with lion, but was entitled to upgrade and download mountain lion for FREE.

        • Yes, and everyone who bought mac in the last few months had it ship with lion, but was entitled to upgrade and download mountain lion for FREE.

          You're right. I withdraw my previous objection.

      • I'm not sure how your quote confirms or refutes what he said. It sounds like you think he thinks there was a DVD in a package of recent purchases.

        Purchasers of a new machine on or after June 11 do get a free upgrade to Mountain Lion. I don't know if those are counted in these numbers.

    • Possibly fewer than you'd think... Apple actually made claiming the free update hard enough that I'm considering just paying the $20.

      • Hard to claim?

        Click on link on Apple homepage. Fill in contact info and serial number (Apple Menu->About This Mac.... copy/paste). Click submit.

        A day or two later, get an email with a redemption code for the App store.

        Input redemption code, click install.

        • by Desler ( 1608317 )

          Yes on the day of release most people either couldn't get a code or Apple was sending out duplicate codes that other people had already redeemed.

          • Don't forget the step of finding your proof of purchase, scanning it and uploading it.

            I agree, it's not hard in the sense that solving global warming is hard, but given that I bought it through work and have to track down whatever purchasing drone can provide proof of purchase, and then have to find a scanner, and then have to find (again) the link to that web page (where I already filled in the whole form before getting to the point where I discovered I needed the scan of the proof of purchase), it's looki

          • by jbolden ( 176878 )

            I got one of those, and about 20 minutes later another email with the corrected codes.

  • by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Monday July 30, 2012 @01:54PM (#40820733)
    Not seen a reason to upgrade myself. What feature is it that people are after?
    • They don't really know. But whatever it is, they're pretty confident it will be FANTASTIC!
    • Re:Ok... but why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by spire3661 ( 1038968 ) on Monday July 30, 2012 @02:02PM (#40820827) Journal
      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
    • What feature is it that people are after?

      I waited a couple of days, to check that there were no obvious glitches on loading, and then went for it — I wanted it for one thing only, really, and that was a bug fix: faster logging in after opening the screen / coming out from sleep/hibernation/whatever it is.

    • For me, it was the AirPlay Mirroring, which lets me stream my desktop in 1080p with audio from my Mac to my Apple TV in a different room. I had in the past looked into getting a dedicated "wireless HDMI" device, but that tends to run into the hundreds very quickly.

      Other than that, they added iCloud, Notification Center, Reminders, and a lot of other niceties from iOS. For the new features, Gatekeeper is getting the most press probably, and while I find the trend that it might be indicative of to be a fright

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Gatekeeper is getting the most press probably, and while I find the trend that it might be indicative of to be a frightening one, I do think that it, taken alone, is a great feature that helps to keep novice users much more secure while keeping hassle to a minimum, and since it can be easily circumvented without needing to be a pro user, I don't see it as problematic

        Well, with good reason, because people fear that the "Anywhere" optoin can be removed at any time.

        Which is very unlikely for many reasons.

        First

    • Re:Ok... but why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by dingen ( 958134 ) on Monday July 30, 2012 @02:10PM (#40820929)

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

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        "runs better on systems with less than 4G of RAM"

        Tempted to add my own remarks but this kind of speaks for itself.

        • by jo_ham ( 604554 )

          "runs better on systems with less than 4G of RAM"

          Tempted to add my own remarks but this kind of speaks for itself.

          So which is it? Bash Apple for leaving usable hardware behind with forced obsolescence, or bash Apple for improving performance on older machines?

          You have to pick one troll direction and stick to it or you look wishy washy. I've seen you do better.

  • Depends on Why... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by localman57 ( 1340533 ) on Monday July 30, 2012 @01:55PM (#40820739)
    Remember that Windows 7 was Microsoft's most successful OS ever, in terms of adoption speed. Part of it had to do with the new features that 7 introduced, but part of it also had to do with how incredibly craptacular Vista was. Not saying that's neccesarily the case here; just saying you have to think a bit past the marketing hype.
    • by Ucklak ( 755284 )

      There are also more people alive in the world since XP.

      I hope Windows 8 isn't as bad as Vista was.

    • Re:Depends on Why... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Dynedain ( 141758 ) <slashdot2&anthonymclin,com> on Monday July 30, 2012 @03:06PM (#40821619) Homepage

      You're absolutely correct. And I think the fact that it was a painless upgrade through their App store made it so quick for adoption.

      Compare to Microsoft's download options for Win7 where you had to find which online store you could actually purchase a download from, then download the disc image, find and download another app to turn that into something you could boot from, reboot the machine, and pray things would choke during the reformat. Not to mention the multiple price points and versions.

      The Mountain Lion upgrade on the other hand was:
      1) Open App store.
      2) Click install next the Mountain Lion.
      3) Pay $20 (or redeem an install code between steps 1 and 2)
      4) After download completes, launch the App from you Applications Folder
      5) Click ok, ok, agree, ok
      6) Wait for restart.

      Easiest OS upgrade I have ever seen. Even Windows service packs are more complicated.

  • .. in other news, Apple's new bot downloading cluster works perfectly. 2.8 million test downloads in 4 days.

    • by ktappe ( 747125 )

      .. in other news, Apple's new bot downloading cluster works perfectly. 2.8 million test downloads in 4 days.

      Cute.

      Whether it was being downloaded by bots or humans, this story was interesting to me from a distributed payload distribution angle. At 4.1Gb a copy, that many Mountain Lions comes out to over 12 petabytes transferred in under four days. That had potential to clog up Ted Stevens' series of tubes, but I've not heard of any problems.

      • Well, if you do the math....

        4 days = 345600 seconds
        4,100 MB * 4 million = 16,400,000,000 MB
        Converting to Mb for bandwidth purposes = 131,200,000,000 Mb
        That would average to 379,629 Mb/s, or 370Gb/s

        Well, that is still impressive. I'm sure they were serving it off of tens of thousands of machines, spread across many CDN nodes, which would have lowered the impact on the Internet at large.

        I just wouldn't want to see their data services bill. :) I'm sure a few someones got filthy rich off of that.

  • would have saved them quite a bit of bandwidth... and given another legitimate use for torrents...
  • Why not? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Missing.Matter ( 1845576 ) on Monday July 30, 2012 @01:58PM (#40820777)
    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.
  • by mpetch ( 692893 ) <mpetch@capp-sysware.com> on Monday July 30, 2012 @02:37PM (#40821261)
    Yesterday I went to the App Store, only to learn that my 2007 Mac Mini (Purchased in 2008) didn't have the hardware requirements to run OS/X Mountain Lion. I have a 64bit CPU, 2GB ram, but only have 32bit EFI. Apparently the video in this unit isn't supported. I was a bit surprised that 5 year old equipment just isn't worth it to Apple to support. If someone asks why I needed to upgrade - it was required to build and test some open source projects I work on.
    • by repetty ( 260322 )

      I was a bit surprised that 5 year old equipment just isn't worth it to Apple to support.

      Why were you surprised? They don't support my G4 PowerMac anymore, either.

      At what point, exactly, might you cease to be surprised?

      • Never? Windows 8 will run on a 10yr old computer. It might not run the best... but it'll run. Linux will run on just about anything as long as you get the correct drivers for it. Maybe you'll need to use an older GUI... or none at all... but it'll run.

        Apple is the poster child for locked in environments, less user choice, aggressive tactics to get users to upgrade as often and as frequently as possible... etc...

        Because Apple profits off of both the OS and the hardware, they have a very strong incentive to
        • Never? Windows 8 will run on a 10yr old computer.

          Only (some) 10 year old computers that have since had upgrades. The oldest Intel processors that W8 will support had just come out and the earliest AMD processors were 2003. And it would be a damn rare thing to find a 2002 graphics card that meets W8 support requirements.

          So, yes, if you bought the most expensive computer possible a decade ago and continued to upgrade its RAM and Video Card it would now run W8 at a minimal level.

          If you bought anything but the very cheapest models OSX 10.8 is good back to 200

    • So the entry-point machine from 5 years ago doesn't run the latest and greatest? Big surprise.
      My 2007 Macbook Pro will run Mountain Lion just fine.

      I challenge you to find a $600 PC from 2004 that would run Windows7 when it launched in 2009. You can even ignore 64bit Win7 and just focus on Win7 32bit Home Basic if you want. (As you yourself said, Mountain Lion is exclusively 64bit).

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