John Gruber takes a look at the broader implication of Mountain Lion:
Mountain Lion, and the incremental approach Apple has taken with recent OS X updates, highlights the growing schism between Apple’s and Microsoft’s philosophies. Windows 8, in contrast to Mountain Lion, is a radical update — years in the works and it introduces a slew of truly disruptive changes to the user experience. Mountain Lion and iOS 6 certainly share a slew of features and code, and through iCloud are growing to support a single cross-device experience. But they are very much two different and distinct systems, one for traditional keyboard and pointer device personal computers, and another for touchscreen mobile devices. One for trucks, one for cars, to borrow Steve Jobs’s analogy.
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That mindset and development schedule — “What can we do to make this nicer by next year?” — may well be the most important thing from iOS that Apple has taken back to the Mac.
I agree completely. People do not like change. By introducing incremental changes - largely in lock-step with iOS - Mac OS X is becoming a much more friendly experience for users. Many will disagree1, but I like the approach that Apple is taking with their annual development schedule.
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One being John Siracusa. The thought of writing an annual 26,000 word review would drive me nuts. ↩︎