(If you purchased a new Mac on or after June 11, 2012, you can upgrade for free through Apple’s Up-to-Date program.) Your Mac will need to be running Snow Leopard or later to launch the Mountain Lion installer. But it comes at a discount from its predecessor: Mountain Lion costs $20, while Lion cost $30 when it arrived a little more than a year ago. Like Mac OS X Lion, Mountain Lion is available exclusively through the Mac App Store as a 4.34GB download. Read Jason Snell’s full review of Mountain Lion. Mountain Lion adds several iOS-inspired apps and features, wholly embraces iCloud, and, of course, drops support for some older Macs. Apple on Wednesday released Mountain Lion, the operating system otherwise known as OS X 10.8.
