Upgrade to Mountain Lion... or no?

1. Yes, your Mac can run Mountain Lion.

But am I right that you're already familiar with ML? In which case, try out SL and see which you prefer. Or not.

For a thorough review of the features and capabilities of ML, read this review:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/ (It's quit long. Get a cup of tea and a biscuit.)

Only you can know what features you value and which faults or failings (in BOTH 10.6 and 10.8) you are prepared to tolerate in the balance.

You should have an installer disk for Snow Leopard. If not, then at least make a clone image of your 10.6 installation, so that you can trial ML for a bit and decide whether it runs OK on your hardware.

FWIW, I have a 2009 MacBook which runs ML faster than SL. My 2006 iMac also ran Lion faster than SL, with only 3GB of RAM.

For me, it seems mountain lion is about the same speed as snow leopard. Snow leopard definitely puts my notebook into sleep instantly, and it's hibernate function doesn't drain battery. But mountain lion takes 10-15 seconds to go into sleep, and it never seems to hibernate.

I'd keep snow leopard unless there is a program or game that requires mountain lion. Safari for mountain lion seems no different then the snow leopard version.

I have an old Core2Duo MacBook Pro just like yourself. The important thing is to put an SDD into it. With an SSD, the performance improvement is so great that you often don't feel you're missing anything with the latest models.

Lion and Mountain Lion are adapted for SSD, whereas SL isn't. Before you upgrade, it is almost mandatory to install an SSD first.

I upgraded to L/ML for these reasons:

- iCloud for syncing Calendar and Contacts.

- All disk encryption with FileVault 2 ... did you know that, even if you password protect with SL, and you lose the computer, a thief can easily access the data? Won't say how, since I don't want to give ideas to thieves, but it is really easy.

- Lion 10.7.5 and 10.8.3 seem fairly stable, unlike their earlier iterations.

When you do upgrade, I'd be interested to know of how you found the performance.

Everything else with L/ML, I could not care less. In fact, I resent that Apple forces OS upgrades for such trivial changes. It causes a lot of grief having to also update all other software that I use, just to get stupid ML features like Messenger, Facebook integration. For me, only about a handful of ML were of interest - the rest where nonsensical, when linked to requiring its user population to change OS, affecting all other software from 3rd parties. Why can't Apple just give us Apps that do these things? Why can't Mail be a stand-alone app that doesn't require upgrading the entire OS? Why couldn't Apple let ML be installed on older Macs, with certain graphic-intensive features not being activated on those older models, rather than totally forbidding the installation on those older Macs? Oh, I see, it is so that Apple can update the OS, thus incrementally making older Macs to become obsolete before their time, so they can force us to buy new Macs. Sorry for the rant, but Apple didn't get its big pile of cash by thinking of the customer. No, it got that money by thinking how they can force the customer to spend more money. Fair enough, but let's call a spade a spade.

Krupke said:

I don't know in the future if some software I might want would not run on SL. But I don't think I'll be investing in ram for this thing, so 4gb it will remain. That's key, because I've read a number of people now say SL takes less RAM (officially: 1gb min.), when they compared with ML (2gb min.). I was nearly ready to install MountainLion when that little factoid convinced me to keep SL on the machine!

Click to expand...

Mountain Lion uses the RAM available. If you have lots of RAM, it will use lots of RAM. If you have a little RAM, it will use as much of your RAM as it needs.
Using RAM is a Good Thing™. It doesn't mean ML is "inefficient".

I've said before there's a great analogy about computers in the form of a kitchen. Your disk storage is the cupboards. Your RAM is the work surfaces. When you want to do some cooking, you get everything you need out of the cupboards and onto the work surfaces. If you haven't got much work surfaces, you need to put stuff back in the cupboard more frequently.
Ideally, you want to lay everything out on the surfaces so it's where you can get it easily.
That's what ML does. It lays it all out on the table, so you can get to it easily.

Stripping the Snow Leopard/Mountain Lion debate down to its most basic level, there are 3 cases for staying with Snow Leopard:

1. A distrust of the cloud and of the perceived "iOS-ification" of OS X.
2. Hardware incompatibility.
3. The need to run PowerPC-only applications under Rosetta.

Since you're happily using Mountain Lion already and the 2008 iMac is perfectly capable of running it, the only reason to hold back would seem to be a necessity to run legacy applications.

Personally, the only reason I'd stay on Snow Leopard would be hardware incompatibility. Indeed, I sold my 2007 Mac Pro 2,1 and bought a 2009 4,1 model specifically to upgrade to Mountain Lion and haven't regretted my decision for an instant.

My "old, fast & reliable" Snow Leopard 10.6.8, remains my favorite hands down.

That, despite the fact that I'm running the latest rev of Mountain Lion on my newest MBPr's.

I have spent two years on MobileMe, and now iCloud. Sadly I'm still of the mind that Apple just doesn't get cloud services. Problematic, not well liked by developers iClouds got a lot of issues that need to be sorted out.

Perhaps despite lip service by Apple, they're spread too thin to address it with a degree of urgency. Who knows. All I _do know_ is I use Drive, Dropbox, Sky Drive & others without the annoyances, time wasters & general poor experience of iCloud.

Therefore the fact that iCloud is built into iOS & OS X is of no advantage for my purposes.

I'm not fond of the "Mac Store" & iOS App model Apple has forced on OS X users either, but it's no surprise. Apple does what will line it's pockets first & foremost. Something that one must put up with if you like OS X as much as I do.

Krupke said:

Not when your operating system requires twice the amount of RAM as the older one, giving you less RAM for running applications. ™.

Click to expand...

OS X has clever memory management. It has been designed to cater for launching applications and having a finite amount of RAM.
I have run ML on my 2009 MacBook with 4GB, and it works fine. It may be maxed out most of the time. It may ... gasp ... swap out. But performance is absolutely fine and certainly no worse than SL.

Krupke said:

Snow Leopard is faster on bootup and processing than Mountain Lion (according to several benchmark comparisons I’ve seen), and an older core2duo iMac like this needs all the help it can get.

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Benchmarks, Schmenchmarks. Test it yourself and then stay with it or go back.

All the best

Mountain lion is better than Snow Leopard.

I'd stick with Snow Leopard. I totally regret the upgrade. ML is ****; they messed up exposé, removed the sometimes essential scroll arrows... It's also slower, the video drivers are worse (on SL I could watch a video on a screen and play a game on the other, I cannot on ML - and I have a quad with 16gigs of ram).

Edit: it's also buggier than SN.

I'm running ML on a late 2008 MBP C2D 2.4gHz with 8gb RAM and HDD (7200rpm); I haven't noticed any slow down in how it performs vs. SL, except for a slightly longer boot time.

Some quirks about ML I'm not loving but overall, I'm pretty satisfied. If you don't care about iCloud integration, etc. I would suggest leaving it on SL.

RedRaven571 said:

If you don't care about iCloud integration, etc. I would suggest leaving it on SL.

Click to expand...

Even SL can use some of the iCloud features. And there are 3rd party apps that can get you in some kind of cloud system.

My biggest reason right now for staying on ML would be Messages. Never realized how much I used it.