This screen shot shows the sneak peak of Apple's new operating system "OS X Mountain Lion," to be released this summer.
AP Photo/Apple Inc.
Four ‘wow’ features in Apple’s Mountain Lion OS
Shane Dingman
Globe and Mail Update
Published
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The latest upgrade to the Mac operating system has some revolutionary potential hidden away in its features, which may disrupt several businesses
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To use AirPlay, you will still need the Apple TV set-top box launched in 2007. But for how long?— Paul Sakuma/AP
Putting AirPlay on Macs is hugely disruptive to broadcasters
Rather famously Apple doesn’t support Flash on iOS, and you may have noticed a lot of television producers or broadcasters use Flash to stream their content on the web, so you can’t watch it on your tablet or phone. Some even lock down their websites and tell you to download an app if they detect you viewing them on mobile devices.
If we weren’t already full of rumours that suggested Apple is getting closer to making its own television, we’d know for sure something was up with Mountain Lion’s ability to use AirPlay’s WiFi mirroring function to display what’s on your computer screen on your television.
Why is this a big deal for TV companies? Business Insider’s Jay Yarow breaks it down:
If you can easily beam Safari to your TV, it makes pirated video streams that much more attractive.
It will also fluster Hulu ... [which in the U.S.] blocks Boxee and GoogleTV from broadcasting Hulu, even though both of them are web-based. There is code in GoogleTV and Boxee that tips off Hulu about what people are using.
Why does Hulu do this? We're not entirely sure, but it seems like Hulu's corporate parents don't like the idea of people watching free shows on big screen TVs. It's too similar to regular TV,
Hulu isn't alone in blocking Google TV. ABC, CBS, NBC and all other media sites block it too.
With AirPlay, they won't know what's what. It will just be a Safari or Chrome or Firefox browser. And users will be able to get the big screen experience.
All of which is to say, it will be really easy for your Mac to help you view content that was never intended to be watched on television. That's huge.
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Screengrab of the Twitter integration currently on iOS 5, soon to be on Mac OS X
Twitter is Apple’s social network, now and in the future
Mountain Lion weaves in the ability to tweet from almost most of your Mac’s proprietary apps and services, and will be extended to third-party apps as well. Guess who's absent from this easy drop-down or point-and-click social integration? Try the biggest player on the block and the new tagalong: Facebook and Google+.
As Mike Isaac from Wired’s Gadget Lab writes, there’s a pretty big reason for that. “As Ross Rubin of NPD Research told me, ‘Unlike Google, Twitter isn’t making a competitive phone platform.’ ”
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“Twitter integration, of course, is a no-brainer for Apple. With less than half the user base of Mark Zuckerberg’s 845-million-strong social behemoth, Twitter’s reach pales in comparison to Facebook’s. Furthermore, Twitter has begun shifting its product positioning – it’s now less a social network than a self-described ‘real-time communications network.’ ”
In short, out of the world’s three major social platforms – Facebook, Twitter and Google+ – Twitter is both the least threatening and most independent. Think of it as the Switzerland of information sharing.”
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This heralds the end of Macs
Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz is being funny when he suggests "Mac is dead," but he is also kinda right when it comes to the future of "the desktop experience." OS X Mountain Lion drops the reference to Macs, making this version of its desktop software more and more like its mobile device platform iOS. Why? It’s as plain as the beautiful line of data in this chart from Asymco's Horace Deidu:
Here is a plot of each major computing product Apple sold throughout its history shown as a cumulative total since product launch.
As you can see, Apple sold 156 million iOS devices in one year compared to 122 million Macs in 28 years.
As Tim Cook said about the also-insane iPad growth: “This 55 is something no one would have guessed. Including us. To put it in context, it took us 22 years to sell 55 million Macs. It took us about 5 years to sell 22 million iPods, and it took us about 3 years to sell that many iPhones. And so, this thing is, as you said, it’s on a trajectory that’s off the charts.”
It’s more than just form factor that makes these devices so popular, it's the document-free app-icon iOS platform. As Mr. Diaz says, after 25 years it's about time:
“This, the death of the desktop metaphor, is just the last step of getting rid of an antiquated way to manage our information. Good riddance. Because it was never designed to support the gigantic amount of information that we have to deal with every day. We've changed. Our information has changed. The Mac, the desktop—has to die.”
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One Cloud to Rule Them All
TechCrunch makes the case the iCloud is going to be so deeply integrated into Mountain Lion that it’s not just an attempt to kill remote-storage services like DropBox, but it’s aimed at Google Docs and a future Google Drive cloud-storage service.
Cruncher Sarah Perez writes Apple’s doing this by reversing the current work flow of telling your cloud service to synch files across programs and devices, but rather “bringing the capabilities of the cloud to the richer, more robust native apps. This includes not just office apps in iWork, but through the use of developer APIs, it will extend to any apps that need to be iCloud-enabled.
"The cloud is not actually a “hard drive in the sky” (hello, Microsoft). It’s a fabric that allows us to maintain a single computing environment, no matter where we are or what device we use."
That puts it Apple on a collision course with the Google's less functional, but (currently) more-easily shareable Google Doc products. Game on.
iCloud signs at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Monday, June 6, 2011.— Paul Sakuma/AP
