Mountain Lion (And Lion) Foot-Dragging Explained – The ‘Book Mystique

Last week PixoBebo’s Kate MacKenzie noted that some 25 percent of the Mac-using visitors to her site are already using OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which, if that represents an accurate sampling of the big picture, has to make it the fastest-adoption Apple desktop OS version upgrade ever.

Price is presumably a significant factor, making Mountain Lion also the cheapest OS X version upgrade thus far — pretty hard to argue with.

I’m an OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard holdout who skipped Version 10.7 Lion, but Apple has thoughtfully made it possible to upgrade directly from 10.6 to 10.8, so it’s likely that my pass of Lion will be permanent, which doesn’t trouble me. Snow Leopard has been a smooth operator, and the software ecosystem I’ve developed to support efficient workflow is continuing to function very nicely on my 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo late 2008 unibody MacBook, providing me with little incentive to change up.

So why didn’t I transition through Lion (the first Mac OS/OS X version upgrade I’ve skipped since System 7.1)? Several reasons. For starters, there was not one feature in Lion that enticed me as opposed to Snow Leopard’s feature set. On the other hand, there were a bunch of changes I really didn’t like, such as “natural” scrolling, loss of the Save As command, and more emphasis on full screen apps. Huge was the loss of Rosetta emulation to support programs containing Power PC binaries, and adding insult to injury, support was dropped for my just over two-year-old (at the time) Apple USB modem, Yes, I still need to use dial-up Internet on occasion.

However, now the time has probably come to either upgrade or crystalize operations at OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard as I have with OS X 10.4 Tiger on my ancient but still in daily service G4 Pismo PowerBooks, and the combination of friendly price and low-hassle upgrade path to Mountain Lion have convinced me to proceed sometime in the near future. There are also a few new features in Mountain Lion that weren’t in Lion that actually do appeal to me, eg: Dictation and Substitutions. But I’m still in no hurry.

Why?

Well, it’s going to be disruptive. Rosetta is still gone, and the modem still won’t work (some third party ones will, but I coughed seventy bucks Canadian for the one I have, and I’m stubborn about stuff like that). Some of the elements of that production ecosystem I mentioned a moment ago are Carbon apps that contain Power PC code, and thus require Rosetta to run so aren’t supported by either Lion or Mountain Lion. I’ve been casting around for satisfactory substitutes, but so far have struck out.

For example, there’s Color It! 4.5, an venerable image editing app that dates back to now near prehistoric 68k classic Mac days nearly 20 years ago, but that never has been matched IMHO for nice to use still works beautifully in Snow Leopard. There are of course plenty of good contemporary OS X image editing programs, but I have yet to find one I like as well for certain tasks as I do Color It! I could give other examples the non-support of which will be inconvenient at minimum, and undoubtedly will cause workflow slowdown.

For those reasons, and more Snow Leopard will remain installed on the primary hard disk partition of my MacBook indefinitely. Mountain Lion will go on the other partition, allowing me to experiment with it without burning any bridges. Eventually, I will probably end up with a Mac that won’t boot Snow Leopard, and I’ll be up to speed. However, I’m doubtful that I’ll ever be a fan of the iOSsification of OS X.

I used the qualifier “probably” in the last paragraph because of a phenomenon I’ve been noticing lately, as colleagues and acquaintances who for years would have never considered any computer but a Mac becoming much more flexible and adventurous, experimenting with, or even switching to, other OS and hardware platforms; the iOS of course, but also increasingly Linux, Android, or even Windows — the latter a trend that I expect will become even more commonplace once Windows 8 is available. Personally, I find myself intrigued by Microsoft’s forthcoming Surface tablet PC that will be able to run the standard desktop version of Windows 8 and the vast application ecosystem that supports it.

I’m sure that there are a variety of reasons respectively for the defections (at least partial) of many Mac veterans, but I think a major one is that many longtime loyalists feel that Apple has thrown them under the proverbial bus with the Rosetta termination and the evolution of OS X into being more and more like the iOS, giving them a pretext and rationale to jump ship and climb aboard elsewhere if a non-Apple platform is perceived as being able to better meet their needs. I’m not to that point yet, but I’m closer than I have been in 20 years.

Meanwhile, maybe Mountain Lion will surprise me once I log some production hours on it – once I get around to installing it.