Mac OS X Mountain Lion is now available

Posted on 26. July 2012

If you are a Mac user you probably heard already that there is a new Cat in town. Since today you can download the new OS, which is called Mountain Lion, right from the Apple App Store. But is that an update you will need? Is it save to update now or should you wait? I will try to answer some of your questions here in this post.

Let me start with the price. I was already impressed when Apple announce last year the new OS Lion for just $29.99 and thought this is quite cheap for an OS. This year Apple dropped the price even further and therefore you can get the new cat for only $19,99 which is really cheap, if you think about the extra features you will get.

Twitter is fully integrated into Mountain Lion, the Reminder function, many of us like on the iPhone, is now an extra application. A notification centre is integrated as well as iMessage (which I use since the BETA and love very much). You have now a nice extra Note App like you have on your iDevice (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) and even Game Centre is now on your Mac. So basically Mountain Lion is building finally the bridge to your iDevices, something we kinda hoped for with Lion, right?

I could start explaining how every single of those function works, but first of all there are already tons of reviews out there and second I think most of us know how to use them. So I would like to mention one concern I had when I started the download, which is Games.

I had my bad experiences in the past, when I upgraded my OS to soon. Had problems to run certain programs, because the game developer were maybe not paying enough attention or didn’t care for those of us who not only work with their Mac, but also enjoy to play with it. Maybe it was because a few years ago the Mac wasn’t really a computer you use to play with. But in the last two years this has changed in my opinion. Many games became available on the Mac and I liked especially Blizzards effort in securing that their programs (Star Craft II and Diablo III) were shipped for Windows as well as Mac OS at the same time.

So now the question for those who like to play games on their Mac… Is it save to upgrade or should you wait?

Well I upgraded to Mountain Lion this morning and tested a few games already. So far I wasn’t running in any problem, was able to open Diablo III, used my Steam account and the games I had there such as the Witcher, Dungeon Defenders and Splinter Cell (to name a few). All of them were running just fine, I even had the feeling the games loaded slightly faster than before.

Of course I had not the chance to try out every single game, but had the chance to run a few and tried to pick them based on their age difference. So far no problems, which is good news, if you ask me.

Beside the games I tried also the new features and think that Mountain Lion is a very stable and great upgrade which isn’t that expensive. Spending $19.99 on a new OS, which by the way has also a lot of security features I didn’t mention yet, is in my opinion a no question. Of course for those who are skeptical it doesn’t hurt to wait a few weeks and to read more reviews, but for those who want to get their hands on Mountain Lion I would say go for it. Just make sure you read the instructions first, not all Mac’s are able to handle the new cat. Also a good idea is to make a backup before you start the installation process. I did not loose any documents and had no problem at all with the installation, but it is always better to be save than sorry.

I hope this short review was useful for you and if you have any comments please feel free to post them.