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Why I won't be upgrading to Apple's Mountain Lion OS X

As a MacBook Pro owner who upgraded to Lion last July, I'm not interested in Mountain Lion. Here's why.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

One year after the release of OS X Lion, Apple is already gearing up for the next version: Mountain Lion, which was revealed at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday morning.

As a MacBook Pro owner who upgraded to Lion last July, I'm not interested. Here's why.

Let's go over a bit of background first. Lion was a huge departure from any of the previous versions of OS X, including the immediate predecessor, Snow Leopard. My 13-inch MacBook Pro was running just fine (and quite fast) on Snow Leopard, which came pre-installed on the laptop.

However, I made the (now regrettable) jump to upgrade to Lion for a few reasons.

At $29.99, it was the cheapest operating system upgrade that Apple had offered to date. Also, as I mentioned, it was a huge overhaul for the platform, and I wanted to have and see the most cutting edge software that Apple had produced to date. (Also, being a Leo, I happen to like lions, but that's just a silly additional reason that makes no sense whatsoever but feels necessary to include anyway.)

However, right from the beginning, I discovered that I was not a fan of Lion and wanted to go back to Snow Leopard immediately. The most immediate difference I noticed was that Lion slowed down my computer considerably. A major software upgrade is always going to do that to a computer, but it was to the point where my MacBook has never recovered and still bothers me to this day.

Furthermore, with the exception of full-screen mode (which, I admit, I really do love), I haven't really been impressed by what Lion can do for me. Although it came with 250 new features, it ended up being that most of them just didn't do anything more me.

I also didn't like the option of viewing the desktop screen basically like you would on an iOS device. That works on a smaller screen as seen on the iPhone perfectly, and even on the 9.7-inch iPad. But on a MacBook, it just looks like clutter.

Now with the introduction of Mountain Lion, I just don't see the point. First of all, I already shelled out $30 for the upgrade last year. Mountain Lion comes with an even cheaper upgrade price at $19.99. That's nice, but it's annoying because Snow Leopard users can bypass Lion altogether and upgrade for a much cheaper price. If I chose to upgrade again, I would end up paying $50. No thanks.

Furthermore, I didn't see anything mentioned during the keynote demo yesterday that really piqued my interest. It's a modest update, at best, along the lines of what Snow Leopard was to Leopard. Some of the bigger additions that come with Mountain Lion include Game Center for Mac and system-wide voice recognition dictation -- although it doesn't look like anyone referred to this as Siri for Mac. However, unless you're a serious gamer on your Mac, that doesn't seem all that necessary to upgrade for either.

Apple is also continuing to build the bridge between iOS and Mac OS X by tacking on another notifications center to the desktop, but I already get enough notifications on my iPhone and my iPad that I really don't need this in another place just yet.

I see the usefulness in it being that you wouldn't have to even look up from your computer (or whatever Apple device you happen to be using) to receive notifications. But I'm OK with waiting for this and the other aforementioned features until I completely upgrade to a new computer (likely in the next year or two) before I jump to the next version of Mac OS.

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