OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

Osmo

Osmo

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I was kind of expecting a Mountain Lion thread on here today with the announcement that it was available as a download yesterday.

The last time I had to pay for an OS upgrade was a very long time ago and as such £13.99 for an updated OS seemed great value to me, even if just for the additional security.

The 4GB download took 7 hours though!! :puke:

It's downloaded and installed but not used yet - anything of particular interest I should try out?...I'm still new to Apple so please type slowly! :D
 
I was just wondering about it too. My only concern is whether it will be ok with an older wacom graphire tablet. Tablet works fine in lion but having been caught out before with OS upgrades I'm slightly averse to finding out it's buggered on it!
 
20 minutes.. wow! Direct data link to Apple California?
 
srichards said:
I was just wondering about it too. My only concern is whether it will be ok with an older wacom graphire tablet. Tablet works fine in lion but having been caught out before with OS upgrades I'm slightly averse to finding out it's buggered on it!
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So long as my RAW image files are still viewable I'm happy....not tried it out yet to be honest.
 
I've confirmed that you can make your own install media, as you could with Lion, via the "installESD.dmg" buried away in the Mountain Lion install app.

I'm going to stick it on my test iMac as the weekend, put it through it's paces, and if all is well I'll buy it from the app store and roll it out to the other household macs.
 
Downloaded pretty fast yesterday and installed. Even better value after buying a £15 iTunes voucher for £11 online

Do have an issue burning 'installESD.dmg' to a dvd. Get a not enough space on disk error.
 
Osmo said:
I was kind of expecting a Mountain Lion thread on here today with the announcement that it was available as a download yesterday.

The last time I had to pay for an OS upgrade was a very long time ago and as such £13.99 for an updated OS seemed great value to me, even if just for the additional security.

The 4GB download took 7 hours though!! :puke:

It's downloaded and installed but not used yet - anything of particular interest I should try out?...I'm still new to Apple so please type slowly! :D
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It sounds to me that you have done an upgrade, my DL, erase and clean install took 30mins.
Upgrades always take much longer to carry out.
 
Mattwood said:
Downloaded pretty fast yesterday and installed. Even better value after buying a £15 iTunes voucher for £11 online

Do have an issue burning 'installESD.dmg' to a dvd. Get a not enough space on disk error.
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Use a dual layer DVD, or better still use a cheap 8GB USB stick - it'll boot and install way faster. DVDs are effectively dead as an install medium these days. Too slow and too small.
 
menthel said:
Anyone used the new airplay features with an appletv yet?
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Sore point!

Now I am a massive fan of Apple, but this really takes the pee! Airplay will not work with any mac older than 2011! iMac (Mid 2011 or newer), Mac mini (Mid 2011 or newer), MacBook Air (Mid 2011 or newer), and MacBook Pro (Early 2011 or newer).

I emailed a complaint about this and was offered a refund provided I uninstall, but there are some nice features so i am going to keep it.

I just feel that Apple are not playing fair. There is the air parrot app that allows you to stream from any mac, yet Apple themselves will only allow from 2011. I call forced upgrade! There are huge threads on the Apple forums and I would imagine they may backtrack on this. It is possible on the new ipad, yet not my 27" iMac from 2010 running 12GB Ram? :bonk:
 
ding76uk said:
Sore point!

Now I am a massive fan of Apple, but this really takes the pee! Airplay will not work with any mac older than 2011! iMac (Mid 2011 or newer), Mac mini (Mid 2011 or newer), MacBook Air (Mid 2011 or newer), and MacBook Pro (Early 2011 or newer).

I emailed a complaint about this and was offered a refund provided I uninstall, but there are some nice features so i am going to keep it.

I just feel that Apple are not playing fair. There is the air parrot app that allows you to stream from any mac, yet Apple themselves will only allow from 2011. I call forced upgrade! There are huge threads on the Apple forums and I would imagine they may backtrack on this. It is possible on the new ipad, yet not my 27" iMac from 2010 running 12GB Ram? :bonk:
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Seems crazy. Luckily I have an iMac from the 2011 refresh so it should work. Not that I have an apple tv yet!
 
menthel said:
Seems crazy. Luckily I have an iMac from the 2011 refresh so it should work. Not that I have an apple tv yet!
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I have 2010 iMac and 2009 Macbook. Both of these can stream airplay via iTunes with ease whilst I work on other things.

I can see this being addressed in a firmware update to calm a lot of peed of Apple users.
 
I'd think they'll definitely back track on the airplay issue. Having a feature which a computer older than 12 months can't have is idiotic. I'd imagine someone would hack lion to do it or hack mountain lion to do it if apple don't sort it pretty quick.

The power nap mode also only works on the macbooks with the pro retina displays for some reason..
 
No mountain lion for me, my MacBook is a 2006 model, so sticking with lion, which runs very well.

:)
 
Rob 80386 said:
No mountain lion for me, my MacBook is a 2006 model, so sticking with lion, which runs very well.

:)
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That's good to know. Still on leopard with my 2008 macbook. Lost the snow leopard install DVD I bought so I may never reach the dizzy heights of lion on it :)
 
ding76uk said:
It gets worse. They have taken Airplay out of iTunes! WTF! So to use a feature I already used just yesterday I need to buy a new machine!

Seriously this takes the ****!
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Are you serious? I was just about to upgrade but that's a complete deal breaker for me :(

Edit: Just had a google of it and indeed that's the case. I don't have AppleTV and don't want to mirror video to my TV but I do want to continue sending audio to my Airport Express and the attached hi-fi. I sometimes use Airfoil but the unavoidable delay it adds makes it useless for anything other than music from Spotify or YouTube so I hoped this would overcome that problem. Seemingly, upgrading to Mountain Lion would actually strip back some of the functionality I already make use of.

Upgrading my mid-2009 MacBook Pro certainly isn't an option sadly :(
 
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Mountain lion...... :eek: I'm still running snow leopard as I don't think my 2008 imac would handle an update.

I'm ready to push the button on a new imac though as soon as they update to ivy bridge chips, so hopefully mountain lion isn't too far away :)
 
TriggerHappy said:
Are you serious? I was just about to upgrade but that's a complete deal breaker for me :(

Edit: Just had a google of it and indeed that's the case. I don't have AppleTV and don't want to mirror video to my TV but I do want to continue sending audio to my Airport Express and the attached hi-fi. I sometimes use Airfoil but the unavoidable delay it adds makes it useless for anything other than music from Spotify or YouTube so I hoped this would overcome that problem. Seemingly, upgrading to Mountain Lion would actually strip back some of the functionality I already make use of.

Upgrading my mid-2009 MacBook Pro certainly isn't an option sadly :(
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I cocked up. My Wifi went nuts today so I had to reset it all. Apple TV didn't pick it back up for some reason, so a quick restart and then I am able to use it the same as always.

Sorry about the false info.:bonk:
 
ding76uk said:
I cocked up. My Wifi went nuts today so I had to reset it all. Apple TV didn't pick it back up for some reason, so a quick restart and then I am able to use it the same as always.

Sorry about the false info.:bonk:
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Thanks for letting me know. I'll leave it a little while to hear more about people's experience as time goes by but for £14 I'll no doubt give it a go if only for iMessage on my laptop. Thanks again :)
 
ding76uk said:
Was going to keep it but refund it is. Sticking it your loyal customers! Way to go Apple
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It's the Apple way. Kind of got use to it after all this time. How else do you think they keep selling all them macs?

Same with iPhone. Restrict the features people will use to new machines. They will break eventually and shell out for a new mac.
 
Reading around it would appear that the video aspect to airplay requires the use of "Intel QuickSync Video" which was only introduced on the Sandy Bridge processors. Basically Macs introduced in (not necessarily bought or produced in) 2011 have the requisite intel hardware to support this feature. The new Mac Pro is the exception to this and will not do video Airplay.

Besides there are other ways to achieve this, using AirParrot for example will effectively provide the video features to those whose hardware is older.

Personally I don't buy the planned obsolescence argument that the apple fanboi dickwads seem to be spouting around the interwebs at the moment. I think that apple has simply used a feature of the newer intel hardware to provide another function.
 
Rob 80386 said:
No mountain lion for me, my MacBook is a 2006 model, so sticking with lion, which runs very well.

:)
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Mines a 2008 polycarbonate so no ML for me either. Only issue is no Lion either as I never got round to upgrading. Hoping SL support continues for a while, at least on an application level anyway.
 
Slaphead said:
Reading around it would appear that the video aspect to airplay requires the use of "Intel QuickSync Video" which was only introduced on the Sandy Bridge processors. Basically Macs introduced in (not necessarily bought or produced in) 2011 have the requisite intel hardware to support this feature. The new Mac Pro is the exception to this and will not do video Airplay.

Besides there are other ways to achieve this, using AirParrot for example will effectively provide the video features to those whose hardware is older.

Personally I don't buy the planned obsolescence argument that the apple fanboi dickwads seem to be spouting around the interwebs at the moment. I think that apple has simply used a feature of the newer intel hardware to provide another function.
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I think you answer your own comment. Air parrot works, so why not make the older macs run on an apple made equivalent of Air Parrot and then use the newest Intel tech on those that can run it for smoother play.

What happens when the next set of chips come out in a year, will the new Macs be obsolete then? Every new OS has features that won't run on older Macs. Not really going to keep customers loyal is it.

Iphone 4 and iPad offer this, which I am pretty certain have less grunt that a 2010 iMac with 16GB ram. I would imagine in an update coming out soon Apple will address this, purely due to the amount of bad blood it has caused.
 
I upgraded from Snow Leopard last night. Thought it was a no brainer for £14. iMessage on the desktop is nice, saves picking my phone up if I am working on the computer and I get a message. Quite a few of the other features such as launchpad and the notifications are good if you are an iPhone or iPad user as they make it look/work in a similar fashion. I'm sure there is much more functional, serious stuff on there too but only having got it late last night, not had chance to have a good play yet.
 
that video mirroring is so annoying. I have an imac mid 2010. I was really looking forward to that feature.

For me it's not the fact that it isn't supported on older models thats annoying, its that they didn't say that when they announced it. It's in tiny smallprint. If they said it right off the bat it would stop people being cheesed off having looked forward to it for so long
 
I'm running mountain lion on my 2012 Macbook Air.... Waiting for my retina MBP which will already have it.

I will be installing it on my Mac Pro 1.1 (even though you can't :)) The 2008 17" MBP also takes it but that is going to my daughter.

If people want to avoid re-downloading it just download it once. Abort the install and look in the Applications directory where you will find the DMG file. COPY this elsewhere and you will have it saved then just run the DMG from Apps.
 
joescrivens said:
that video mirroring is so annoying. I have an imac mid 2010. I was really looking forward to that feature.

For me it's not the fact that it isn't supported on older models thats annoying, its that they didn't say that when they announced it. It's in tiny smallprint. If they said it right off the bat it would stop people being cheesed off having looked forward to it for so long
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It's not as bad as having a machine with Quad Xeon processors 12Gb of RAM and a 5770 graphics card that is deemed unfit to run it just because of a 32 bit EFI. Got round that though :)
 
cowasaki said:
It's not as bad as having a machine with Quad Xeon processors 12Gb of RAM and a 5770 graphics card that is deemed unfit to run it just because of a 32 bit EFI. Got round that though :)
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Yeah, I'm going to have a crack at getting my late 2007 MacBook around it, but it's not looking good for the Intel GMA integrated graphics though.

Edited to add: there's no real technical reason why a 32 bit EFI can't load a 64 bit Kernel. In that respect it does appear that apple has planned obsolescence in place.
 
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Slaphead said:
Yeah, I'm going to have a crack at getting my late 2007 MacBook around it, but it's not looking good for the Intel GMA integrated graphics though.

Edited to add: there's no real technical reason why a 32 bit EFI can't load a 64 bit Kernel. In that respect it does appear that apple has planned obsolescence in place.
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No getting round the EFI is rather easy but there will be a lack of kexts for older integrated graphics cards. You might be able to get them from elsewhere but that's not a discussion for this forum. My mac pro is 100% compatible other than the EFI.
 
Well the installation on my old iMac went as well as can be expected. The only problems were with:

1. x11, which apple now appears not to support directly, but does direct you to xQuartz for the solution - x11 is needed for GIMP, so this could be a surprise for people updating.

2. Virtual box was rendered completely inoperative to the point that the system told me that it would not open the program. As this is an ancient 2009 model mac that sits in the guest room it goes relatively unmaintained, but updating to the latest version of virtual box resolved that problem.

3. If any of you have "special" accounts on your machine (accounts where the user id is less than 500) then the install process deletes that account entry. However the data remains under the same user id permissions. That was resolved by recreating the account and then pointing it to the "special" location on the disk where the account data is held.

Apart from those little hiccups everything seems fine. Nevertheless I'll test it a bit further before I roll it out to the other Macs.

With regards to my prehistoric MacBook, I think I've found a way of getting it running 10.8. I'm basically going to have to Hackintosh it - which is ironic given that it's apple hardware. Anyway that's a job for tomorrow morning.
 
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I'd be interested to know if xQuartz works ok with gimp and inkscape. Just wondering whether to try xQuartz with both of them and find out. Hopefully they'll work better as the gimp ui is rather slow.
 
Works perfectly on my 2007 iMac at work and even better on my 2011 MacBook Pro. Well worth the £13.99, just need to get myself an Apple TV to take advantage of the air play.
 
Xquartz works great with gimp on leopard. Seems a lot more responsive and it works without having to fiddle about so I'm going to stick it on the lion mac.
 
srichards said:
I'd be interested to know if xQuartz works ok with gimp and inkscape. Just wondering whether to try xQuartz with both of them and find out. Hopefully they'll work better as the gimp ui is rather slow.
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I haven't put GIMP through much more testing other than opening it and playing around with a very small file. However in previous testing with the official apple supported x11 environment I've actually found that running GIMP in a virtual machine running Ubuntu was much more responsive in terms of the interface. Couldn't comment on the heavy processing stuff though as it's very rare that I need to use anything other than Aperture.
 
I have Mountain Lion, and to be honest I can't really see what is better than Snow Leopard, Safari 6 is a bit of a cock-up if you ask me, no RSS reader and Tabs are too bloody wide.

Having gone straight from SL to ML, I don't like the new lay out of mail, can't see the point of launchpad on a desktop. Hate that there is no colour, is all drab grey and more..

Only got it to keep Aperture current, kind of wished I'd not bothered now.
 
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