To be fair, there are a lot. FileVault 2 is a massive improvement over the (hackass) first version. In 10.7, Mail got dramatically better at dealing with huge volumes (hundreds of GB, dozens of accounts) without crashing. Buttons finally became roughly rectangular. The OS supports Retina displays, one of the most significant general advances in recent history. Menlo beats Monaco. Resizing windows from any edge was only 20 years too late.
Most importantly to me, (since for all my bitching, I spend a lot of my work time writing Mac software) Xcode went from 'spectacularly awful bag of suck' to just 'kinda sucks', and ARC, blocks, Objc-2, non-insane literal syntax are all forces for Good.
And yes, I love inverse ('natural') scrolling and it is enabled on all my Macs. :)
It's not that Apple does nothing at all good, it's that their focus has become even more relentlessly "systems that the average shopper at walmart can use" at the expense of those users who have a stronger grasp of general computing concepts.
When they disable all the extra screens in fullscreen mode, the chances of my dad getting confused and looking at the wrong monitor are reduced. But at the same time, the amount of data I can see at once, and my ability to manipulate it, are also reduced.
Well I love share sheets, iCloud syncing, and AirPlay, personally. Gatekeeper is a great compromise between a fully locked down system and a fully vulnerable one. And the new Safari is the best Safari ever, as the saying goes. So I count 4.5 on my end.
Anyway, an OS is more than the sum of its newest features. On the whole, OS X 10.8 is a stable, polished, powerful, fully-featured operating system. There might not have been a big feature like Time Machine or Exposé in a couple versions, but I'd much rather use 10.8 than 10.5.
Gatekeeper is an okay compromise. I'd feel better about it if they didn't include restrictive app policies. What if I want to run apps that are signed by a certificate from some third party CA? I'd feel great about it if it would also inform me what permissions are being granted and let me disable arbitrary permissions like internet access.
I think 10.7 and 10.8 bring more irritations than anything else. iCloud sync and Gatekeeper are the only things I think are worth upgrading for, but the Gatekeeper implementation is still lacking and unfree, and I use other services to sync my files (I also think the implementation of iCloud leaves something to be desired... and it's another form of lock-in). I'm still using 10.6 and shall use it for the foreseeable future; at least until my next computer, which will most likely be running Linux.
Most importantly to me, (since for all my bitching, I spend a lot of my work time writing Mac software) Xcode went from 'spectacularly awful bag of suck' to just 'kinda sucks', and ARC, blocks, Objc-2, non-insane literal syntax are all forces for Good.
And yes, I love inverse ('natural') scrolling and it is enabled on all my Macs. :)
It's not that Apple does nothing at all good, it's that their focus has become even more relentlessly "systems that the average shopper at walmart can use" at the expense of those users who have a stronger grasp of general computing concepts.
When they disable all the extra screens in fullscreen mode, the chances of my dad getting confused and looking at the wrong monitor are reduced. But at the same time, the amount of data I can see at once, and my ability to manipulate it, are also reduced.