As you’ve surely heard, Apple announced that the next Mac OS X iteration — 10.8, codename Mountain Lion — will be available in summer, and earlier today released a Developer Preview of Mountain Lion (Apple press release).
Of course, such announcements usually ‘make the Internet explode’, like someone said on Twitter. Suddenly everyone in the tech world was talking about it and the list of unread articles in my RSS feed reader skyrocketed in a matter of hours. To avoid being overwhelmed by information in cases like this (and especially by the often idle chatter), I tend to filter the intake, trying to locate good broad pieces that give me a fair amount of information without having to rush here and there fishing for possibly interesting bits.
So today the only articles I read from top to bottom are the following, and I highly recommend you read them too:
1. Hands on with Apple’s new OS X: Mountain Lion, by Jason Snell (Macworld)
2. Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion preview, by Nilay Patel (The Verge)
These two articles give you plenty of information about the main new features in Mountain Lion.
3. Mountain Lion, by John Gruber
Gruber at his best.
4. About Gatekeeper, by Steven Frank (Panic)
Steven Frank does an excellent job at explaining in plain English what code signing means, and what is the role of Gatekeeper, a new security feature in Mountain Lion.
One more thing… Apparently, Mountain Lion will leave other older Intel Macs behind. Topher Kessler at MacFixIt writes:
Unfortunately Apple has not yet officially released the system requirements for the new OS, but the developer release that is being issued to members of its Mac development community does contain a list of supported devices:
iMac (mid-2007 or later) MacBook (13-inch Aluminum, 2008), (13-inch, early 2009 or later) MacBook Pro (13-inch, mid-2009 or later), (15-inch, 2.4/2.2 GHz, mid-2007 or later), (17-inch, late 2007 or later) MacBook Air (late 2008 or later) Mac Mini (early 2009 or later) Mac Pro (early 2008 or later) Xserve (early 2009)
Since these systems will run the developer preview, it is fair to assume they will also run the final release. It appears that this list leaves out a few systems that currently do run Lion, which include the following:
MacBook Pro from late 2006 (models 2,1 and 2,2) MacBook from late 2006 through late 2007 (models 2,1 and 3,1) Mac Mini from mid-2007 (model 2,1)