It's simple: OS X Mountain Lion is going to be a big success
Apple is famous for the phrase "Think Different", but when it comes to its own products I reckon "Think Simple" would be a better description. In an industry where all too often the value of a product is judged by the number of acronyms on its spec sheet, Apple takes a very different approach. To Apple, what matters isn't what the product contains but how well it works. If keeping things simple means skipping supposedly must-have features, then so be it: the iPhone didn't get cut and paste for the best part of three years.
When Lion was released, I thought it was the first stage towards a single, integrated operating system. Now, though, I think something subtler is happening. Apple isn't merging the operating systems just yet; it's using iOS to find ways to make Macs simpler.
Apple has been trying to make Macs simpler for some time. The process really gathered momentum in 2010, when Apple developed Lion. When Steve Jobs showed it off at Apple's "Back to the Mac" event he explained that Apple felt "inspired" by some of the things in iOS. "We want to bring them back to the Mac," he said, showing off OS X's new multi-touch capabilities, full-screen apps, automatic saves, Launchpad and the App Store.
I don't think Lion was entirely successful. Launchpad annoys me, upside-down scrolling annoys me even more, and on a 27-inch iMac full-screen mode renders many programs unusable. And if that's not bad enough, Lion appears to believe that I'm Danish (seriously). But you can see what Apple's trying to do, and where Lion was a shuffling step in the right direction, Mountain Lion is a big, confident stride.
iCloud integration is a big part of that. In Lion, iCloud integration's half-baked: it's great for calendars and contacts, but iWork doesn't even know it exists. Mountain Lion changes that, and it's clear that Apple would rather you saved your stuff to iCloud than to your Mac. That's fine by me: I've been doing much the same thing in Dropbox for ages, and it would be nice to have automatic syncing and storage for important files as well as music. What Apple's doing here, of course, is making iCloud, not an individual device, the center of everything. That's why it's making the interface more consistent between iOS and OS X, and it's why it's been building the Death Star out there in North Carolina.
There's one big flaw in all of this, though, and it's the iPad. I share my house with two people and a dog, and only the dog gets less time on the iPad than I do. If iCloud's the future then that's a problem, because right now the iPad remains a single-user device with a single-user OS. Thanks to my four-year-old daughter the iPad is already stuffed with kids' films and stupid apps, and it's locked down more securely than Fort Knox, with lots of standard apps and features switched off. If the iPad doesn't get multiple user accounts, that means for me at least, iCloud on iPad is off limits.
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