So Mountain Lion drops in about a week. Apple's been pushing it hard, naturally: $19.99, full-screen apps, notifications that actually work, some tweaks to how iCloud integrates with everything. On paper it sounds fine. On paper Lion also sounded fine, and I spent months fighting with that cat.
That's not to say Lion was a disaster. I didn't have the catastrophic issues some people reported, but I noticed enough rough edges that I couldn't just shrug and move on. The new gestures took forever to internalize. Finder felt weird. Scrolling direction backwards felt stupid then and still feels stupid now. I get the idea—it matches iPad scrolling, make everything consistent. But I've been using a trackpad that scrolls the content toward me for years. No amount of OS design philosophy changes the fact that my muscle memory is built into my hands, not my philosophy.
Mountain Lion looks like it's mostly refinement. Notifications finally borrowed the right ideas from Mountain Lion (the OS, not the release, god, they named it after the same thing twice, didn't they). Gestures are staying, so that's not going away. iCloud is getting tighter integration. Facebook and Twitter are baked in now, which honestly I'm skeptical about but won't affect me much since I barely use those from the OS anyway.
But here's the thing: I'm not in a rush.
I know people who update the day of release. I admire their confidence, genuinely. For me there's always this gap where the first few thousand users hit all the weird edge cases, and then a 10.7.1 or 10.7.2 lands a month later that quietly fixes a dozen things Apple didn't realize were broken. I've learned to just... wait. It costs nothing except impatience.
Plus my 2008 MacBook Pro still handles my dev work fine. Sure, it's not winning any speed contests, but everything I actually need to do (code, notes, SSH, occasional video calls) runs without complaint. I've seen enough version updates introduce slowness on older hardware that I'm genuinely nervous about how Mountain Lion will feel. Lion was a decent improvement on Leopard performance-wise, but that doesn't mean the pattern continues.
The other thing is I haven't even looked at what breaks for development tools yet. Xcode definitely gets an update. I'd need to check if any of my usual command-line stuff has compatibility issues. Ruby, Git, all that stuff. I use Homebrew to manage most of it, which usually handles upgrades cleanly, but I've had enough weird surprises to know I should at least check before committing to a new OS.
I've got friends who work at places that standardize on the newest OS the week it ships for "security and consistency." I think that's nuts for personal machines, and even for companies it seems like cargo-cult thinking. The security thing I get—patches matter. But Mountain Lion isn't a patch, it's a whole new OS with new behaviors. You don't smooth out the weirdness in that first week of living with it.
So I'll wait. September, probably. Maybe October. Let other people find the bugs. Let the blog posts accumulate with workarounds for whatever's slightly broken. Let me keep being productive with what I've got now.
Also I've got too much going on this month to have my OS be in flux. That's the real answer, if I'm being honest.