But to understand what Mountain Lion really is, you really need to look at it not as a standalone OS release, but as a step in a series of releases. Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion — none of these have been radical releases of Mac OS X.1 But taken together, there have been some radical changes to the Mac experience over the last five years: the App Store, sandboxing, and iCloud to name a few. Apple has introduced these features incrementally, which I think has been a win for them engineering-wise, allowing them to roll features out annually rather than queue them all up for one blockbuster major OS release. But it’s also been a win for users, introducing significant changes at a relatively gradual pace.
Reading this part of John Gruber’s review of Mountain Lion made me wonder if I was reading about OS X or WordPress. Both have frequent releases that focus on incremental improvements that help both users and engineers alike. I’m downloading Mountain Lion as well. Let’s see if I like it as much as John Gruber.
I’m liking the new look of the dock. Very clean.