Mountain Lion is officially available. At $20, it should be a no-brainer. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you’ll already be prepared for the iOS experience. There are tons of new features and some reasons to forgo third-party apps for Mountain Lion. We’ll do a quick run-through of the notable features and why you can even use the new Mac OS update over third-party apps.
Why go for the Mountain Lion upgrade? Here are a few reasons why?
- Game Center – You have this on your iPhone and now it’s on your Mac for easy blackjack and poker playing with friends.
- Notes – Jot down some info and it syncs across all your devices for easy access.
- Sharing – Share emails, messages, facebook, and other sections very easily with the share button.
- Best backup yet – Time Machine has kicked it up a notch by allowing you to save to multiple external hard drives for redundancy. Say good-bye to data recovery!
- Text – Send a text message from your Mac to an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, iPad, or another Mac.
- Voice type – Dictate what you want to type just like Siri.
- Notification Center – A page from the iPhone once again, you’ll be notified of the latest email, calendar, and social media updates.
Mountain Lion trumps some third-party apps out there too:
- No more Software Update – This is all taken care of now in the App Store.
- No more Evernote – Notes has taken over for note-taking.
- Remember the Milk – Apple’s Reminders trumps this reminder app.
- Mac antivirus? – Gatekeeper allows you to tweak your security settings so antivirus software is even less needed.
- No need for DropBox and Sugar Sync – Just use iCloud integration for sharing and saving files to the cloud.
- Bye-bye Adium – Hello Messages which does a great job of providing iMessage integration.
- Instapaper – Safari has a read later option that does what this Apple support app did.
