Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion....why ?

markst33

Hi there,

I am currently running Snow Leopard on a 21" iMac and am aware that there is an option to upgrade straight to Mountain Lion.

As I am completely new to Mac OS can anyone tell me what are the advantages of doing this ? I know that Snow Leopard does not support iCloud and Mountain Lion does so maybe this would be a reason to upgrade later on whenever I get round to buying myself an iPhone but are there any other compelling reasons as to why I should upgrade now ?

Cheers,

Mark S.

Zimmerframe

markst33 wrote: »

Hi there,

I am currently running Snow Leopard on a 21" iMac and am aware that there is an option to upgrade straight to Mountain Lion.

As I am completely new to Mac OS can anyone tell me what are the advantages of doing this ? I know that Snow Leopard does not support iCloud and Mountain Lion does so maybe this would be a reason to upgrade later on whenever I get round to buying myself an iPhone but are there any other compelling reasons as to why I should upgrade now ?

Cheers,

Mark S.

There are no really compelling reasons imho, I use Mountain Lion on my macbook air, and I have the Mountain Lion disc since it's release and I never got around to installing it on my mac mini.

whiterebel

To be honest, I'm really starting to think Apple have taken their eye off the ball with regard to the Mac OS. Copying operations are just painful and seem to be getting steadily worse. Changes in all sorts of little ways to the way the OS works, seem to be changes for changes sake. Unfortunately stuck with ML on the MBA, but thinking seriously of going back to Snow Leopard on the Mini if I can. Bugger, i can't it came with Lion.

Stay with SL if you can.

Graham

any other compelling reasons as to why I should upgrade now ?

Here's whats useful for me (YMMV)

Airplay
Messages (especially if you, your friends/family use iPhones)
Sharing
Full screen mode
Reminders/Notes

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html

whiterebel, can I ask why you'd recommend not upgrading?

whiterebel

Graham wrote: »

Here's whats useful for me (YMMV)

Airplay
Messages (especially if you, your friends/family use iPhones)
Sharing
Full screen mode
Reminders/Notes

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/features.html

whiterebel, can I ask why you'd recommend not upgrading?

As I said above, small things which are annoying, i.e. you can't turn off the preview icon in column view, only turn off preview completely, which means you can't see files details easily.
The sliders bars at the side of the column to move up and down disappear and reappear.
Trying to resize the columns seems to end up with one 12 foot 6" across, and the one beside it 2 inches.
When you have a column open, and you delete a file from it, it goes back to the original width, and back to the top again, not where you actually are.
~Too many beachballs even with 2 new machines with 8GB of RAM each. Copying across to a NAS is a nightmare, and I'm not the only one according to google.

I'm getting really fed up with it, I think SL with the peak, dropped 6GB of useless crap and ran like a dream. It seems like its getting worse with every version, and trying to copy iOS. Don't get me started on their implementation of Bluetooth and WiFi.

Zimmerframe

I agree with Whiterebel.
I have two identical mac mini's, both with 8gb ram.
I put Lion on one and then Mountain Lion and never got around to installing either on the other machine.
The Snow Leopard one (admittedly I mostly use it as a media centre) has been rock solid and totally reliable.
The Lion/Mountain Lion one (clean installs), although it hasn't really given me too much hassle, often has beach ball syndrome, frequently the wifi disappears and won't return without a reboot. It also seems sluggish at times, and many of the "improvements" like "launchpad" and "mission control" do nothing for me.
I always upgrade to the "latest" as soon as it's released, but looking back, I'm inclined to think, that I didn't gain much with the upgrades and the one I didn't touch, seems to run best.

markst33

Based on the above I won't be upgrading to ML unless I have to so. I find Snow Leopard (although it is my first exposure to iOS) perfectly fine. No problems, nothing frustrating or annoying happening

Mark S.

WanabeOlympian

I upgraded from lion to mountain lion during the summer. To be honest, I'm still wondering why... a few odd bits and bobs are different (insignificant to me anyway) and not worth paying for an upgrade.

Sad Professor

I haven't experienced any issues with ML. It was a fairly small upgrade featuring incremental improvements, basically what Lion should have been. The biggest feature of both Lion and ML was iCloud, which obviously only appeals to people with iOS devices.

However, the annual upgrade cycle may end up backfiring on Apple because I don't think most people want to be upgrading their system software every year. Personally I'd rather pay €20 once a year than €120 every 3 years, but most computer users probably don't upgrade at all until they buy a new machine. Anyone coming from Windows has a built-in nervousness about upgrading because it tends to take MS a couple of years to make their new OS stable. Apple isn't as bad, but they need to tread carefully.

Anyway, I think Lion was the beginning of an gradual and somewhat bumpy move to the next generation of Mac OS. There won't be a single massive upgrade as there was with 10.0. So SL is to this new cloud-based OS what Mac OS 9 was to Mac OS X.

Liameter

"Upgrading" from Snow Leopard means not being able to use AppleWorks and many other useful applications. I won't do it.

Apple should put its resources into producing decent applications (such as the above) instead of fiddling with the OS.

banquo

As usual, Sad Professor nails it.