What you need to know about OS X Mountain Lion

Apple’s OS X Mountain Lion is available in the Mac App Store this morning and, like always on first release, getting in the queue to download it is a challenge! Once in this morning it will likely take some time to download since the installer is over 4GBs and there are undoubtedly hundreds of thousands of people downloading it concurrently.

So while you wait, here is a list of resources I found and sent off to a buddy this morning…and thought it would make a good post as well:

• Apple: Video of Mountain Lion and its new features
• Lifehacker:
  • How to Prepare Your Mac for Mountain Lion
  • How to Burn OS X Mountain Lion to a DVD or USB Flash Drive
  • Everything You Need to Know About OS X Mountain Lion in Five Minutes
• Gizmodo: 
  • Check Here If Your Mac Is Eligible For a Mountain Lion Upgrade
  • OS X Mountain Lion’s Best 10 Tricks: The Video Guide
• The Verge: OS X Mountain Lion Review
• Engadget: Apple OS X Mountain Lion 10.8 review

My own take on Mountain Lion? Apple is clearly moving toward merging OS X and iOS so that the Mac experience is more like that of an iPad or iPhone. Since most hacks, cracks and malware on computers comes from the capability to install unsafe and insecure code in the bowels of your operating system, Apple knows that the only way to scale security is to build it in. Here are all the security features Apple touts in OS X Mountain Lion.

Power users and developers are clearly upset about the constraints being placed on them by Apple. But think about it: it was one thing when a family had one computer with multiple user accounts and was somewhat easy to manage. Now many families have multiple computers, each family member with a smartphone, and many families with multiple iPads or tablets. Without a fundamental rethinking and reimagining of computing device security models, our increasingly always-on and always-connected device use is in considerable jeopardy.