Except for the members of the media who received copies of Mountain Lion ahead of the Thursday launch, few suspected that Apple would get out another Mac OS X upgrade so quickly. After all, to some at any rate, Lion still needs work. Why would Apple rush headlong into completing a successor?

Well, Apple isn’t about to follow anyone’s conventional wisdom, and maybe it’s true that the arrival of Windows 8 later this year, with integration between desktops and tablets, might have spurred Apple on. Or maybe not, because Mountain Lion seems such a natural progression from Lion that it’s hard to believe that it was somehow rushed.

With Lion, Apple got attacked rather severely in some quarters for somewhat clumsily moving iOS features into the Mac OS. In particular Launcher, which provides a display of your apps that closely resembles the iOS version, comes across as one large miss. Reverse scrolling, though it can be turned back to the traditional Mac (and Windows) method via a simple preference checkbox, didn’t earn Apple many plaudits either.

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This article was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2012 at 12:00 AM and is filed under News and tagged with: Apple Inc., iOS, Launcher, Lion, Mac Os, Mac Os X, Microsoft Windows, Mountain Lion, Windows 8.