Mountain Lion: Making Friends By Bringing Us All Together

Across every announcement made by Apple during their 2012 WWDC Keynote, from new Retina Display Macs to new Maps in iOS 6, one element remained: Unity.

In every Keynote and in every press event, there are always little holes Apple leaves in their stories to be filled later with new advancements or products. And yet, this year’s keynote seemed more like they were gathering all of their things together and stacking them by the door so when the time comes, they’ll be able to leave at a moment’s notice.

This year’s Keynote was a calm and subtle warning to us all: We’re on the move, and if you want to come along, best you follow our lead.

From the beginning, Tim Cook made mention of 400 million iTunes accounts, complete with credit card information, used to purchase things like apps in either store, music, movies and more. Craig Federighi boasted Apple’s 66 million Mac users, a number which, according to him, is 3 times greater than what they had just 5 years ago.

Since Lion released electronically last summer via the Mac App store, it’s sold more than 26 million copies. In fact, 40% of all Mac OS X users are now running Apple’s latest and greatest, and it only took them 9 months to get there.

Scott Forstall hailed the mobile operating system, saying more than 80% of all iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch users are running iOS 5. With these pieces in play, Apple’s newest software offerings are able to do much more than they currently can. What’s more, they will begin to work together and become even more seamless, thanks to the glue that is iCloud.

Apple has long strived to be more than a computer and electronics company, but an ecosystem. In the early years, Steve Jobs talked about the Mac becoming the “digital hub” for all your media, allowing it to be stored elsewhere, such as the iPod. Now that iOS and OS X are becoming more and more like one another, one can’t help but look at the holes in the story and wonder where Apple is going next and what new things they will add to their ecosystem.

As it stands, they are pushing the Mac hard into iCloud, making sure everything syncs and works “like magic.” In addition to bringing over a few familiar iOS apps to the wildcat’s lair, they’re also trying to teach the Mac a few new tricks they’ve been learning during their growth spurt in mobile.

It’s a brilliant move, really. Apple has more than once released a great product or innovation into the world, only later to reveal that they’ve been viewing it less as a way to make money and more as a form of informal education. For instance, Apple has plenty of reasons to run and operate their own stores: They control the content, the experience and the message. But as they run these stores, their also able to see how customers interact with their products, learn what customers are asking for, and even quietly test out new technologies on their retail stores before rolling it out elsewhere.

For nearly 5 years, we’ve been playing with our iPhones, taking them everywhere we go and putting them through their paces. We didn’t know Apple was learning about how we like to interact with our devices, how we like to get information to these devices, and how we like to consume our content. Mountain Lion is the product of all this research and rolls some of iOS’ best features into our Macs.


This article comes from:http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1112554397/mountain-lion-making-friends-by-bringing-us-all-together/