Juan Monroy

Apparently, in the time I left my apartment (9:30 AM EDT) and rode my bike to work (10:00 AM EDT), Mountain Lion went live in the Mac App Store. Athough I had promised myself that I would wait to download it until tonight, I had brought my MacBook Pro to work and could not fight my impatience.

At 10:05 AM, I bought the thing and began the download.

And at 10:29 AM, the download was complete.

The last time I downloaded a major OS update was iOS 5, and that took nearly six hours to download. Clearly, this was much better.

Good luck, everyone!

Update

Although the download was very quick, it took well over an hour to install. This was despite the “Time Remaining” indicated 34 minutes when the installation started.

Once the installation was complete, running Mountain Lion was pretty slow. However after an hour or so, my MacBook Pro was operating at its Lion pace…maybe even a little faster. It seemed as if there was some behind-the-scenes configuring and finalizing that needed to take place.

The upgrade to Mountain Lion still needed to update several of my Apple apps, such as Aperture, iPhoto, iWork, and iMovie. Those updates weighed in at over 2 gigabytes but were done downloading and installing in less than 15 minutes. Finally, Aperture and Mail needed to update their internal databases for photos and messages, respectively. That process was pretty fast.

The only problem I had with the installation came when I was testing Dictation. For some reason, the Sound control panel preference pane was not registering any audio in or out. To solve this problem, I resorted to a rather primitive solution: rebooting the machine fixed the problem. Dictation works pretty well and pretty fast, much faster than when I was trying it with my mom’s iPhone 4s last fall.