Apple Releases First Developer Preview of OS X Mountain Lion, Public Launch in Late Summer

Mac Rumors ^ | Thursday February 16, 2012 5:54 am PST | by Eric Slivka

[2ndamendmentpa]

Curious, how long does Apple provide support for their OS versions?

Are their still updates for 10.4?

[Vinnie]

just more money the Apple faithful will gladly pony up for the latest/greatest.

I've turned into an Apple fanboy and I'm still running Snow Leopard on our 3 Macs. Didn't see anything in Lion that I couldn't live without.

And if I wanted to upgrade, $49, not the $$$ Microsoft charges.
And no 'phone home' typing out a 26 digit serial number nonsense to activate.

If you want to spend your time running Regedit, antivirus, scandisk, defrag, adaware, malware and diagnose the BSOD have at it.
I got tired of it.

[Tribune7]

Snow Leopard will be running on my MacBook Pro 2.1 the day before Mountain Lion. And it will be running on it the day after Mountain Lion.

Life won't change.

And aren't mountain lions the same as pumas?

[martin_fierro]

THIS THREAD

IS PERTINENT TO MY INTERESTS

[Chipper]

What? Wait!! Shouldn’t everyone want to have diagnosing PC problems as a hobby?

[TheStickman]

I hope Mountain Lion doesn’t mess my Logic 9 up like Lion did. Snow Leopard ran great for me from the beginning but I lost a lot of hours fighting with Lion. After the recent firmware update for my iMac things started running right again.

Not going to rush to get Mountain Lion till I learn what, if anything they broke this time.

Still love Apple & my Macs. Just not a fan of Lion right now.

[dfwgator]

I’m ticked at Apple right now, because I purchased a book on iTunes, thinking I could read it on my MacBook.....WRONG!!!! You can only read them on an iOS device.

[af_vet_rr]

Curious, how long does Apple provide support for their OS versions?

Are their still updates for 10.4?

10.4 - last update was November 2007. 10.4 was a weird OS, since it was their PPC -> Intel transition OS and a lot of people still use it because it's easy to get running on a lot of machines, and it runs a lot of the older "classic" Mac apps, pre-OS X.

Apple has about a 2-3 year support cycle on their OSes, as the past few OSes have required certain hardware features not present in earlier Macs.

People piss and moan about it, but the hardware development under Intel and under Apple's CPU design people is moving at a fast pace and the stuff Apple is doing requires newer hardware. It would not surprise me at all if the Mountain Lion cutoff is due to either graphics or networking.

The Apple haters forget that not only do their existing Macs still work, but it's up to third party developers whether they want to support older Macs or not.

I can afford to upgrade my hardware every three years or so, and I've never been bitten by any Apple updates, just Adobe dragging their feet. While I maybe old, I've found that I don't like old hardware.

[af_vet_rr]

Nor is Apple the only one doing this. Windows 8 anyone? I fail to see what is bad about cross-device consistency.

While I don't care about cross-device consistency for the interface since I got my start on mainframes back before personal computers even existed, I am interested in having all of my data easily available on any of my computers or iPhone. That is what I like about Mountain Lion.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Older Macs voted off the Mountain Lion island

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/02/which-macs-will-os-x-mountain-lion-support.ars

Inasmuch as nothing they've announced in 10.8 really seems "must have," I might be tempted to stand pat at 10.7.

But then, if OS 10.9 denigrates some more machines than 10.8 is already doing, it looks like Mountain Lion could possibly be the last update for my iMac (which I told my wife was my Christmas present when I bought it back in late 2007). If such be the case, I might as well do the last upgrade when 10.8 comes out. I made the mistake of not upgrading my 800MHz G4 to Tiger, and when I handed it down to my daughter it would have been more useful to her with Tiger.

[Swordmaker]

Great news. Apple making their own platforms obsolete to make a buck. I wonder if there is any sympathy for those that bought overly expensive systems only to be left out in the cold now. This is the same old story over and over again yet people still fall for this trick.

Every product has an end of life... these are computers that are five to six years old. Many of their components are at the end of their life expectancy. It is time to upgrade.

[kevkrom]

Considering that 5-year-old iMacs will be able to use Mountain Lion, I don’t see how the “obsoleting hardware to make a buck” argument can fly.

[Swordmaker]

Considering that 5-year-old iMacs will be able to use Mountain Lion, I don’t see how the “obsoleting hardware to make a buck” argument can fly.

Since when has logic and facts been in the arsenal of the anti-Apple fanatics? That's what we use against them... every time.

[Blue Highway]

XP still running on 30% or more of peoples PCs still even in the business sector. Not bad for an OS that debuted in 2001, still chugging along 11 years later which is unheard of in the fast changing times of technology and computers. Microsoft tried to end it in 2006/2007 but the fiasco of Vista made them support it against their own wishes. Power to the people!

[Blue Highway]

I have a Dell Dimension 4700 from 2003 about as long as I have been on FR. It’s running Windows 7 and pretty sure there will be no problem with Windows 8 either. Again I am saying a 10+ year life span and still staying current is a remarkable feat. Find me a 10+ year old Apple running Mountain Lion.

[af_vet_rr]

I have a Dell Dimension 4700 from 2003 about as long as I have been on FR. It’s running Windows 7 and pretty sure there will be no problem with Windows 8 either. Again I am saying a 10+ year life span and still staying current is a remarkable feat. Find me a 10+ year old Apple running Mountain Lion.

Congratulations, you are running a Pentium 3 or Pentium 4!

Me, I have no desire to ever go back to such old single-core CPUs on the desktop. I take too many pictures and do too many other things that would waste my time on such an old CPU.

By the way, you better be aggressive about backing up. If you haven't already replaced the hard drive by now, you probably will be sometime in the near future.

[Blue Highway]

I swap around hard drives like underwear. And yes it isd Pentium 4. No problems. I have newer laptops but still use the Dell without any issues. Also not much difference with a single core and my dual core AMD laptops.

[2ndamendmentpa]

It all depends on your needs.

I’ve been using an AMD Duron 1300 since around 2003. It just blew on me a few months ago - replaced with an old Soyo Dragon Ultra MB that was loaded with...another Duron 1300. Its a XP w/2GB box - just to run an Apache server and few older image editing packages that I prefer (Micrografx Picture Publisher Ulead Photo Impact, Swish). So - more cores isn’t going to make a ton of difference running software that old or serving pages across my network.

Nothing archival. I dont use it on the web - but I do have it networked so I can access the edited files on my newer, faster Zotac/Linux box that I do the majority of my work on. And I have a nice stack of IDE drives. I still get some real work out of that Duron machine - but not sure having it up to date with SP3 makes any difference.

For the record - I do have 2 Macs - Power Mac G4 that runs 10.4 that I use for checking web layouts in Safari. Got that at a garage sale for 5 bucks! I can’t update to the latest Safari or Firefox on that system. I think there is a security update or something that needs to be run. And an iBook G4 which gets stuck at boot asking for “Disk 2” with some message I can’t recall.

[aMorePerfectUnion]

“XP still running on 30% or more of peoples PCs still even in the business sector. Not bad for an OS that debuted in 2001, still chugging along 11 years...”

One of the few stable OS Microsoft put out. I’m still using it on two pcs I have to have.

[moehoward]

“Yeah, they are dropping support for my Macbook Pro. “

---

Odd. Apple just placed a new motherboard in mine, free of charge. AppleCare expired 3 months ago too. If that’s dropping support, I’ll take it!