7 ms·

Apple Releases Final Mac OS X Mountain Lion to Developers

48 points by jpadilla_ 14y ago

taligent 14y ago
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.
- chrisdroukas 14y ago
  Eh. OS X has been on somewhat of a tick-tock update cycle since Leopard. Add features then refine them. Also, it's twenty bucks.
  - dr42 14y ago
    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.
    - Zirro 14y ago
      "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: http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion 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."
  - taligent 14y ago
    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.
    - gdsf34dfsg 14y ago
      Agreed. I think they have gone quite carefully on iCloud. Beyond that, actual UI enhancements are minimal. It's more iClouding Apps. Or App improvements. Less to do with the OS itself.
    - jaylevitt 14y ago
      Frankly, if the only punch Mountain Lion packs is "breaks way less", I am first in line.
- ary 14y ago
  What exactly would have been overwhelming?
  - tensor 14y ago
    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. edit: these would be overwhelming to me
    - shawnz 14y ago
      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.
    - mkaltenecker 14y ago
      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.
      - tensor 14y ago
        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. Now consider Mountain lion: http://6.mshcdn.com/wp-content/gallery/apple-os-x-mountain-lion-top-15-new-features/10-contacts.jpg http://6.mshcdn.com/wp-content/gallery/apple-os-x-mountain-l... 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.
- mkaltenecker 14y ago
  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.
- elithrar 14y ago
  They have also moved to an 18 month release cycle for OS X[1], so we should not expect huge swathes of changes in each release. [1]: http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/143731/mac-os-x-mountain-lion-release-signals-shift-in-secrecy-at-apple http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/143731/mac-os-x-mountain-li...
  - yottabyte47 14y ago
    I thought they announced they were moving to a yearly release cycle. http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/44444/mac-os-x-updates-yearly-2013 http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/44444/mac-os-x-updates-yearl...
- CoolGuySteve 14y ago
  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.
- bluthru 14y ago
  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. http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html
  - FireBeyond 14y ago
    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?
    - pooriaazimi 14y ago
      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).
- r00fus 14y ago
  Underwhelming by what means? 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"?
- masto 14y ago
  There are lots of changes for developers, especially in iOS 6. IMO these are releases to enable new apps and new options (for example, one iOS feature just screams "get ready for different screen sizes"). I expect the next one will again focus on end-user features.
- pooriaazimi 14y ago
  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.
chrismealy 14y ago
Anybody know if Messages has improved? The beta I'm using is buggy as hell.
- akulbe 14y ago
  Very much so!
  - dguaraglia 14y ago
    Sorry, that didn't clarify much. Is "very much so buggy as hell" or "very much so fixed"? I'm confused :(
    - sneak 14y ago
      Very much fixed. Apple doesn't ship crap software these days.
      - mkaltenecker 14y ago
        Uhm, Podcasts App? Lion?
        sneak 14y ago
        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.
        mitchty 14y ago
        The podcasts app doesn't even sync podcasts in ios 6 beta 2. It may be visually polished, but complete it is not in its current form.
        mkaltenecker 14y ago
bstar77 14y ago
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.
- dylanvee 14y ago
  AirPlay mirroring relies on Intel Quick Sync Video support in your CPU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video
  - ken 14y ago
    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.
- zdw 14y ago
  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.
  - fpgeek 14y ago
    Is quicksync also behind Intel Wireless Display? Despite needing to by special recievers, I've found it pretty handy.
- st3fan 14y ago
  DRM Chip? What did that crazy rumour come from?
ethank 14y ago
Still filing some radars against this, including the lingering text formatting issue in Mail. If this follows the typical pattern there will be some sys update right after public release.
- rangibaby 14y ago
  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! ;-)
cdrxndr 14y ago
Just bought a new Macbook Pro and have recently gotten my first taste of Lion. Two words: kernel panic. Hoping for a stability boost on this one. No way my entire overpowered system should crash from running a browser, text edit, and Skype.
- sneak 14y ago
  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. Lion itself is rock solid.
  - rangibaby 14y ago
    Agreed. The only KPs I've gotten since at least ~Snow Leopard have been hardware-related. Off to the Genius Bar!
    - sneak 14y ago
      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. It's the first thing the Genius Bar will do.
  - shadesandcolour 14y ago
    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.
- Zev 14y ago
  Retina MBP? If so, I can vouch for things being much better in 10.8 than 10.7.
- jasomill 14y ago
  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.
greedo 14y ago
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.
- sneak 14y ago
  Agreed, that is bullshit. That system is more than capable. Apple shouldn't penalize anyone in software for paying a small price premium for their ultra-reliable hardware.
- bugmenot 14y ago
  Here! http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/18/install-os-x-mountain-lion-developer-preview-on-old-unsupported-macs/ http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/18/install-os-x-mountain-lion-de... While my Macbook does run ML, I know how you feel, even more so as your machine has better specs than mine. I also get the feeling Lion is a bit slower than SL for the small things, like opening apps. I know SSDs are faster for IO operations in general, but previously it wasn't like this for HDDs, even on fresh installs.
- jdboyd 14y ago
  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.

48 points by jpadilla_ 14y ago

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.

chrisdroukas 14y ago
Eh. OS X has been on somewhat of a tick-tock update cycle since Leopard. Add features then refine them. Also, it's twenty bucks.
- dr42 14y ago
  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.
  - Zirro 14y ago
    "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: http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion 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."
- taligent 14y ago
  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.
  - gdsf34dfsg 14y ago
    Agreed. I think they have gone quite carefully on iCloud. Beyond that, actual UI enhancements are minimal. It's more iClouding Apps. Or App improvements. Less to do with the OS itself.
  - jaylevitt 14y ago
    Frankly, if the only punch Mountain Lion packs is "breaks way less", I am first in line.
ary 14y ago
What exactly would have been overwhelming?
- tensor 14y ago
  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. edit: these would be overwhelming to me
  - shawnz 14y ago
    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.
  - mkaltenecker 14y ago
    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.
    - tensor 14y ago
      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. Now consider Mountain lion: http://6.mshcdn.com/wp-content/gallery/apple-os-x-mountain-lion-top-15-new-features/10-contacts.jpg http://6.mshcdn.com/wp-content/gallery/apple-os-x-mountain-l... 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.
mkaltenecker 14y ago
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.
elithrar 14y ago
They have also moved to an 18 month release cycle for OS X[1], so we should not expect huge swathes of changes in each release. [1]: http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/143731/mac-os-x-mountain-lion-release-signals-shift-in-secrecy-at-apple http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/143731/mac-os-x-mountain-li...
- yottabyte47 14y ago
  I thought they announced they were moving to a yearly release cycle. http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/44444/mac-os-x-updates-yearly-2013 http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/44444/mac-os-x-updates-yearl...
CoolGuySteve 14y ago
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.
bluthru 14y ago
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. http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html
- FireBeyond 14y ago
  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?
  - pooriaazimi 14y ago
    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).
r00fus 14y ago
Underwhelming by what means? 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"?
masto 14y ago
There are lots of changes for developers, especially in iOS 6. IMO these are releases to enable new apps and new options (for example, one iOS feature just screams "get ready for different screen sizes"). I expect the next one will again focus on end-user features.
pooriaazimi 14y ago
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.

chrismealy 14y ago

Anybody know if Messages has improved? The beta I'm using is buggy as hell.

akulbe 14y ago
Very much so!
- dguaraglia 14y ago
  Sorry, that didn't clarify much. Is "very much so buggy as hell" or "very much so fixed"? I'm confused :(
  - sneak 14y ago
    Very much fixed. Apple doesn't ship crap software these days.
    - mkaltenecker 14y ago
      Uhm, Podcasts App? Lion?
      - sneak 14y ago
        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.
        mitchty 14y ago
        The podcasts app doesn't even sync podcasts in ios 6 beta 2. It may be visually polished, but complete it is not in its current form.
        mkaltenecker 14y ago

bstar77 14y ago

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.

dylanvee 14y ago
AirPlay mirroring relies on Intel Quick Sync Video support in your CPU: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video
- ken 14y ago
  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.
zdw 14y ago
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.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  Is quicksync also behind Intel Wireless Display? Despite needing to by special recievers, I've found it pretty handy.
st3fan 14y ago
DRM Chip? What did that crazy rumour come from?

ethank 14y ago

Still filing some radars against this, including the lingering text formatting issue in Mail. If this follows the typical pattern there will be some sys update right after public release.

rangibaby 14y ago
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! ;-)

cdrxndr 14y ago

Just bought a new Macbook Pro and have recently gotten my first taste of Lion. Two words: kernel panic. Hoping for a stability boost on this one. No way my entire overpowered system should crash from running a browser, text edit, and Skype.

sneak 14y ago
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. Lion itself is rock solid.
- rangibaby 14y ago
  Agreed. The only KPs I've gotten since at least ~Snow Leopard have been hardware-related. Off to the Genius Bar!
  - sneak 14y ago
    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. It's the first thing the Genius Bar will do.
- shadesandcolour 14y ago
  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.
Zev 14y ago
Retina MBP? If so, I can vouch for things being much better in 10.8 than 10.7.
jasomill 14y ago
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.

greedo 14y ago

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.

sneak 14y ago
Agreed, that is bullshit. That system is more than capable. Apple shouldn't penalize anyone in software for paying a small price premium for their ultra-reliable hardware.
bugmenot 14y ago
Here! http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/18/install-os-x-mountain-lion-developer-preview-on-old-unsupported-macs/ http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/18/install-os-x-mountain-lion-de... While my Macbook does run ML, I know how you feel, even more so as your machine has better specs than mine. I also get the feeling Lion is a bit slower than SL for the small things, like opening apps. I know SSDs are faster for IO operations in general, but previously it wasn't like this for HDDs, even on fresh installs.
jdboyd 14y ago
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.