I’ve got a four year old Macbook Pro on which I’m still using OSX 10.6.8 (two versions behind current). I have, however, used 10.7 and 10.8 at work, and while there were a few things about it that annoyed me (like the default hiding of stuff I use at home to do backups), I could also look up how to get around those pretty nicely.
I saw some of the negative reviews of Mountain Lion on the App Store, but I don’t use a lot of the features they were missing, like the four finger app swipe (I didn’t even realize you could do that). Plus, I figure I’ll upgrade one way or another, when I get my next computer if nothing else (although I plan to hang onto this one as long as possible), so now might be the time.
Any reason not to? What should I consider when making this decision?
If it works the way you want right now, why mess with that? I have 10.5 on an iMac in my kitchen, and that’s waay long in the tooth and I keep thinking I should upgrade it, but I keep seeing no good reason to. Which sounds like you, right?
I get your point, and I do agree to some extent, but if your iMac’s in your kitchen, how much do you really use it? I mean, this is my primary home computing platform. Eventually, time’s gonna catch up to the OS, and I figured I may as well “train” myself in the new stuff.
Plus I wonder if performance will be better with the newer OS.
If you want someone to say “ohnos, don’t upgrade”, I’m not that guy. I don’t find 10.7 or 10.8 tres sexy vs 10.6. They’re just this year’s flavor. I get OS-X upgrades for free via work, so I just upgrade because I must to do my job. I liked 10.6 quite a lot, I grudgingly liked 10.7, and 10.8 is also fine. 10.9 is pretty crashy so far, but I’m sure they’ll shake it out.
Consider if your applications support the new version. And consider if you really want/need anything in the new version.
I had a major pain upgrading from (I think) 10.6 to 10.7 a few years ago. Everything seemed to get slower. I had a bunch of kernels panics for a few days until I found some webpage that told me how to fix some broken kernel extension. The VPN software I used to connect to work needed to be upgraded, and the new one had a weird bug in it that I spent several hours sifting through mailing lists and trying things before I found the fix. I had to buy a new version of Parallels, since the version I’d been happily using no longer worked on 10.6. The new version of Parallels was total shit. Moved at a crawl. Actually unusable. Never did find another good solution there, so I gave up playing the one old game I used Windows for.
Other upgrades had always been quick and easy, so I just blindly did them when they came out. I don’t do that any more.
All in all, it took probably 20 hours of my time and an extra $60 for the crap version of Parallels, and I don’t even remember if there was something in 10.7 I really wanted. When 10.8 came out, I didn’t bother. I didn’t need any of that stuff. I am planning to upgrade to 10.9 when it comes out, since the battery life savings and full-screen not being totally stupid with multiple monitors are worth the upgrade to me.
Computers are complicated. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.