Is updating to Mountain Lion worth it?

Might as well a couple of months to see if you can upgrade directly to Mavericks

 

Depending on the MacBook, it may not work. Even if it does I would not recommend. Snow leopard IMHO is the most stable operating system and it works great. I would suggest sticking with SL.

 

I downgraded to Snow Leopard with my 2009 Macbook Pro after several problems with Lion. I won't change IOS without actualizing the hardware too.

 

I wouldn't upgrade unless you are at least at a 2011 system and even then I would wait for 10.9 in case they offer a direct upgrad path.
It was possible to skip Lion and go directly to ML. It may be possible to skip ML.
Given that 10.9 should finally fix that idiotic multi monitor lacking support of Mission Control it would be better than ML just for that IMO.

But if you have SL stay with it. Spaces and Exposé beat Mission control any day and actually worked fine with multiple monitors.

 

Meh...I got it for the AirPlay improvements. I mean, the notifications are kind of cool I guess.

That's about it improvement wise....

I don't see Mavericks improving a lot above Mountain Lion either.

 

I'm waiting to see what happens with Mavericks in the general release before I upgrade my 2009 MBP. I've been running SL for about a year since I got some AppleCare repairs done (Leopard before that). Basically my reason for upgrading would be iCloud since I can't use it on SL.

 

I did upgrade to ML for icloud and regret it since. I though icloud is more than it is. It is really rather useless and so limited. Now I am using skydrive, dropbox and other sync tools. icloud is simple to set up but pretty bad in any other respect.

 

Nope, ML won't give you any speed-ups, if anything, it might slow your system down.

 

Snow is fine ML is fine..

 

To speed up, upgrade to 8MB of memory. Then upgrade to latest OS approved for your machine.

We put 8MB in my niece's white MB and it made a huge improvement in boot time.

 

Yeah 8MB of memory is great is practically double the L3 CPU Cache.

 

Then the answer is no.

Learn to always consider the source. If you're having performance issues then identify the bottleneck(s) and address. Don't just randomly toss solutions at the problem.

 

The reason I want iCloud is so I can use more features on my iPhone 5 like Find my iPhone and maybe iTunes Match (although I'm not sure I want to pay for it...). Plus I'm a college student, and it'd be nice to not be three OS generations behind the freshmen.

 

Don't do it without cloning your drive to a backup in case you change your mind.

I went from SL to ML and things were definitely slower. Logic stopped working correctly as well (problem with Core Audio still unfixed). I went back and now everything's snappy again.

If you want to upgrade your OS, at least wait until 10.9 Mavericks (and still do a backup before you upgrade).

 

My dad has a 2010 MBP and went from Lion to Mountain Lion. To be perfectly honest it took ages to install (about 2 hours from what I can remember if all the messing about) and it runs slower on his machine than Lion did.

If you don't need to upgrade, don't want the updates. Stay where you are now it would only make your computer slower updating from my experience.

 

If you don't need any of the new features, I say stick with what you have.

And of course with a 3 year old system, one question you need to aks yourself is when are you going to replace it? The answer could be soon or it could be a couple of years. If the answer is soon, then why bother upgrading your current system when you don't need the new OS X features.

 

no need now to upgrade to ML that MAVERIKS is coming

 

i would say get an ssd and 8gb of ram and mavericks