Apple's Mac OS X Mountain Lion To Adopt More Features From iPhones & iPads Discussion

The next release of Mac OS X might not include Apple's Siri voice assistant, but a preview by Apple reveals that OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion will adopt lots of new features first introduced in iOS 5, such as Notification Center, Game Center, a new messaging service, and Twitter integration.

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Computers are different than smartphones. They have different input devices, different screen sizes, and perform different duties, so there's no logical reason why their OSes should be the same. I'm not a fan of this trend (seen in both Win 8 and Mountain Lion) of consolidating tablet/smartphone OSes and computer OSes.

 

Agreed. I'd rather stick with using Windows 7 / OSX 10.7 than moving on to these "tablet OSes" and such. Maybe the industry is attempting to move closer and closer to a wall-garden approach?

 

It doesn't look like a dramatic change from Lion, just an incremental update - and most certainly not a desktop version of iOS. What is surprising is that Apple is moving from a biannual to an annual OS update cycle?

 

The other day in the office, I found myself tapping on the monitor to select an object. Was using the iPad all morning and being a creature of habit, I oddly forgot that with desktops you don't touch the screen, you use a mouse.

So in a way I sort of get why they are taking an unified approach to OSs. But it would make the most sense if laptops and monitors also had touchscreens as standard like their smartphone and tablet counterparts. Then adding iOS or Metro style interfaces to a PC OS would be a natural and sensible progression.

 

One morning, when I was a little groggy, I cracked two eggs into one glass and scrambled them, poured OJ into another glass, heated a skillet and put some butter in...and then promptly dumped my orange juice into the skillet. (True story). Should Tropicana genetically engineer a next-generation orange that's high in protein and tastes great fried, combining the best of both worlds, or should just I get more sleep?

 

There's no reason to avoid integrating good technologies made on one platform into another.

It's not like notification services or twitter integration are heavily mobile-oriented technologies anyway.

Right now the desktop notifications are done through mostly through a 3rd party service called growl, for example. There's nothing wrong with growl, but it is the type of thing that would be nice to have built in.

Same is true of messaging and games.

 

A lot of mobile-oriented features seem to have originated in the decidedly desktop oriented Ubuntu distro:

3 Features New to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion That Ubuntu Already Has

It's good to see that Apple's willing to take good ideas from any source, although Ubuntu has developed a decidedly Apple-like flavor in the last couple of years.

But anyway, there's nothing wrong with a notifications center, cloud storage such as Ubuntu One/iCloud or a software center concept such as Ubuntu Software Center or OS X App Store. These are good ideas. Ubuntu might be first, but Apple is quick to adopt. If the ideas are good, it doesn't matter who's first, but it will hurt the party that always seems to be running dead last: Microsoft!

On the other hand, nobody is talking about imitating Metro tiles, not in the Linux/BSD community, and probably not at Apple - although with all their secrecy, who can tell? The same goes for ribbon menus. Another concept that is unworthy of emulation. With Windows 8, Microsoft might finally have a complete and total monopoly on a really bad GUI.

 

SO stupid that they're not including iBooks in OS X 10.8.

I have a MBA and I can create books using iBooks Author but I can't view them unless I have an iPad?

They really need to get going on that...

 

Yeah, that decision makes NO sense for me. I mean, Kindle applications for OSX and Windows have been around for years. It would cost Apple almost nothing to give readers that extra option. Why NOT offer iBooks for Mac?

 

I guess they'll get around to it eventually.

 

OS X for content creation; iOS for content consumption.

To put it another way, Apple apparently has sold more iOS device in 2011 than Macs in its entire history. There are apparently more consumers than creators.

 

If you believe that this dichotomy should be enforced to the point where content consumption (i.e., iBooks) is not even offered for OSX, what's next? The removal of web browsers for OSX computers?

The dichotomy I like is a different one:

Computers: content creation AND consumption
Tablets: content consumption with added portability