Everything Apple's Trying to Kill with OS X Mountain Lion
Apple's OS X Mountain Lion brings a lot of new features to the table. It's the future of instant messaging, for one thing, and probably more than a few other things as well. — But with the update, Apple's also moving to push …
Context & Ripple Effects
Mountain Lion lands eight months after Lion, a release that drew a hostile verdict even from sympathetic outlets — Gizmodo itself judged Lion 'not the future we were hoping for' — while Macworld asked whether Lion could roar in the enterprise. The 2012 refresh doubles down anyway: Apple has already shipped a Messages beta for Lion, and the full update folds iOS-style services deeper into the desktop.
What makes this story travel beyond the usual keynote recap is who it steps on: the same-week syndication runs from Growl's pointed response ('welcome to the party') to AppleInsider's note that Mountain Lion drops X11 and deprecates Carbon Core — meaning the 'killing' in the headline is aimed at both rivals and long-standing parts of Apple's own platform.
First-order effects
- Growl, the third-party notification utility, is directly displaced by Notification Center — its own same-day response concedes the category Apple just absorbed.
- Messages, previewed via the Lion beta, replaces iChat and positions Apple against rival instant-messaging services; whether it actually kills them remains an unconfirmed claim rather than settled fact.
Second-order effects
- Developers whose Mac software depends on Carbon Core or X11 face forced migration work after this release, since AppleInsider reports both are deprecated or dropped — a cost pushed onto Adobe-class apps and scientific tools alike.
- Every independent Mac utility maker now prices in the risk that Apple ships their product as a free OS feature within a year, chilling investment in small system-level add-ons.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, OS X converges on iOS service-by-service on an annual cadence, shrinking the independent Mac-utility ecosystem to gaps Apple hasn't noticed yet — and sharpening the enterprise-adoption question Macworld raised about Lion for every subsequent release.
The trend: Apple is folding its mobile platform's services into the Mac on a yearly rhythm, absorbing whole categories of third-party utilities as it goes.