Apple Releases Mountain Lion, Quarterly Financials

As expected, Apple released OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” on Wednesday in the Mac App Store. The new version of OS X costs $19.99 and can be installed on top of Lion or Snow Leopard. It includes the new apps Reminders, Notes and Messages and new functionality such as notifications, game center and dictation. You can see our look at the new features in Mountain Lion in this video.
It seems that updates are going smoothly with the exception of users who had purchased a Mac in the last few weeks and were given a free redemption code to get Mountain Lion. Some of those codes have not been working and Apple has moved quickly to hand out new codes. Some users are also complaining that OS X 10.7 “Lion” is no longer available which could be a problem for those wanting to update older machines that will run Lion, but not Mountain Lion.
In addition to the OS X release, new versions of many Apple apps such as Pages and Keynote have been released to support new Mountain Lion functionality. Pages, for instance, can now save and open documents from iCloud and use dictation.
This week Apple also released its quarterly financial report. Although they increased sales year-over-year and beat their own guidance, Wall Street showed disappointment that they did not beat analyst expectations.