OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: the Ars Technica review

Apple's traditional desktop computing business has suffered many indignities over the past decade. Once Apple's flagship product line, the Mac first found itself playing second fiddle to the iPod—a mere music player—in the early 2000s. Today, matters are worse; on a graph of Apple's revenues, the Mac now appears as a thin strip of earth while iOS devices are the mountain that sits upon it.

Apple presented last year's release of OS X 10.7 Lion as part of a turn "back to the Mac." Ostensibly, the tagline was Apple's promise to bring innovations from its mobile operating system back to Mac OS X. But more broadly, it also meant that the Mac would receive more of Apple's attention.

That attention resulted in some dramatic changes to aspects of the operating system that had not been reconsidered in decades: application launching, the document model, process management—even basics like window resizing and scrolling. As Apple's newly refocused gaze fell upon its desktop operating system, many parts of it were deemed archaic and unworthy of continued existence.