Well, blow me down with a feather
There is a long tail after all!
Three million copies of Mac OS X Mountain Lion have been downloaded in the four days following its release on Wednesday, 25 July, Apple said today. That makes the Hillside Cat the "most successful OS X release in Apple's history", the Cupertino crew chirped. Don't forget that downloads doesn't equal buyers. A fair few folk, …
As I just found out. This isnt a 'new' install. As the lad in the t-shirt told me instore 'We havent sold our operating systems for years'.
You need to be on at least Snow Leopard to get this. Its a digital download.
When I asked how do I get to Snow Leopard? I was told... Go get it on eBay.
Yes. eBay. I thought he was joking.
So I believe if you're on legacy hardware...
1) Check you meet the requirements (thats Intel and 64bit bootable plus some other details)
2) Your on at least 10.6
3) Then I think, pay for 10.7, then pay for 10.8
So my 2009 MacBook Al (2.4Ghz C2D)
Will, if i do the full set, cost about £80 to get to Mountain Lion.
The need to cycle through the OSes is a pain in the arse. I don't see why they can't let me buy it using a system on a required version and then perform a clean install with it copied to a disc or USB stick. It's such a pain in the arse to install 10.6 (as that's the disc I have), then update away to get to the desired version. A fresh install is so much cleaner and less complicated - never do an in-place update as it goes bandy after a while as my last one did.
>> As the lad in the t-shirt told me instore 'We havent sold our operating systems for years'.
One of you is mistaken. Apple sold Snow Leopard on CD from their retail stores, Lion was the first to be available as a download and even then a US key drive was available.
>> When I asked how do I get to Snow Leopard? I was told... Go get it on eBay.
Apple offered all MobileMe users a free Snow Leopard CD a couple of months ago to ease their migration to iCloud - maybe worth rechecking your mailbox to see if you can snag a copy? Also the Genius bar are generally quite good at helping people upgrade if they're going to buy the latest version, indeed customers can even ask the store to do the upgrade if they lack a sufficiently fast broadband connection.
"When I asked how do I get to Snow Leopard? I was told... Go get it on eBay."
Any system capable of running 10.8 probably probably included 10.6 already.
"So my 2009 MacBook Al (2.4Ghz C2D)"
And it should have included 10.6, as 10.6 was released August 2009. If not, it probably included an free upgrade coupon.
Privacy is your choice with OSX too - I actually tracked the whole installation to see where privacy risks occurred.
At no point does OSX enable anything that could have consequences for your privacy without telling you what it does. It will not enable dictation without telling you that it will be shipping your data and contacts to Apple (I must admit that the shipping of contacts prevented me from even trying - I just wanted to try dictation), and it doesn't try to ram iCloud down your throat either. It's there, but no hard sell tactics.
However, it is by default quite a bit safer than 10.7 which was no slough in itself, but by default it throws out Java (had to re-install it as I run LibreOffice and FreeMind, but kept it out of the browsers) and Gatekeeper does its job.
If privacy is of interest to you I'd recommend you reconsider your platform. On OSX, a virus checker has to do a lot less work than on Windows. Same on Linux, but then you'll have to spend some more time managing the platform (once i's stable it's OK, but setting it up is IMHO a pain in comparison with OSX).
> a new OS.
Really?
It looks like new apps rather than a new OS. Which bits of the OS have they improved? You know, the bit which insulates the apps from the hardware and provides each app with a virtual machine.
It seems that the OS is actually a downgrade in capabilities (less compatible hardware) with new apps put in to distract attention from the fact.
/fuddyduddy who just stuck a penguin in his g5 and has a nice new usable machine for mythtv and iscsi time machine.
"Also OS X still has no blue screen capability like windows is proud of"
...it may not blue screen, but it can certainly kernel panic, which from an end-user perspective is pretty much the same thing. And something that mine (late 2011 MBP) does on a regular basis. Joy.
Meanwhile, my Windows 7 x64 PC (homebuilt, not a brand) has never, ever, bluescreened. I don't think it's my amazing skills as a PC builder. It's just that Windows is relatively stable now.
Less of the FUD and more facts would be just great.
Interesting, I have had exactly two properly solid "restart machine" crashes since I bought my MBP (mid 2010) - for the rest nothing (the low volume is why I remember :-).
I've installed 10.8 on 2 machines now - downloading is a pain so I made a copy, but the installs themselves were problem free for me.
No official 10.8 release for Intel Mac Pro tower first and second generations is such bullshit. Performance is still great (if upgrade video card) but forced obsolescence for you. You have to spend the money and rebuy a computer every few years to stay in the cool club or else you are forced to follow complex steps to basically make yoru computer a hackintosh.
I don't recall Windows 7 working on older, previously MS Windows-approved hardware, either. Nothing to do with being in a club, it's all to do with making sales - as well as utilising new hardware to offer new features/better performance. If that's not for you, switch to Linux and stop moaning, there are distros that can handle an incredibly wide range of hardware across an incredibly wide age-range.