It’s surprising that Apple has released two new versions of its operating system since Microsoft first let the world know that Windows 8 was baking. The Redmond software giant announced plans for its upcoming desktop and tablet operating system in January 2011 at CES. Meanwhile, Apple released Lion, a major update, in July of that same year, and then Mountain Lion, a more incremental update, this past July (see our review of Mountain Lion here). In some ways, however, this fact isn’t quite so surprising: Windows 8 is a major re-imagining of the operating system, combining a touch-centric tablet OS with the traditional Windows desktop environment.
Apple's strategy has been to more cautiously insert features from its mobile operating system, iOS, into the Mac's. It's also added multi-touch gesture input support that assumes a touchpad for laptops or desktops. The result is ever-closer integration, with a minimum of dislocation to users – but no evolutionary leaps, either.
While Lion and Mountain Lion have been at large in the wild for months, we've also gotten a pretty good look at Windows 8, thanks to three publicly available pre-release versions: Developer Preview, Consumer Preview, and Release Preview. At this point, there's little mystery about Windows 8's final shape when it's finally released on 26 October, and developers and journalists have even already reviewed the RTM – release to manufacturing – version (we posted our first impressions of RTM here).
So how do these two new operating systems stack up against each other? I'll take a look at some key areas with head to head comparisons in this feature. If there are important contrasts you'd like to point out, please do so in the comments section below; this list is by no means exhaustive!
Without further ado, let's begin with:
Mobile-inspired interfaces
Windows 8's mobile-like UI
Windows 8's new interface is more influenced by Windows Phone than OS X Mountain Lion is by iOS. Window 8's large, touchable "live tiles" give quick access to and display info from your apps. Swiping gestures actually make a better job of letting you do everything using your thumbs than iOS does – which makes sense, since you mostly hold a tablet from both sides.
The legacy "desktop interface" looks a lot like Windows 7, though the eye candy of the latter's translucent Aero Glass effects has been banished. Also gone is the Start button, replaced by the tiled Start page.
Mountain Lion's mobile-inspired elements
With a couple of important exceptions, most of the traits Mountain Lion has inherited from iOS arrived with Lion or even before. These include the App Store and Launchpad, which duplicates iOS's app icons, even letting you group them just as you would on an iPhone. Unfortunately, most of the Mac users I talk to never use Launchpad, preferring the traditional dock icons.
New for Mountain Lion is iMessage – iOS's messaging service that can take the place of SMS text messaging. It's pretty cool to be able to simulate an SMS text chat with one person on an iPhone and the other at his or her Mac desktop.
Another gift from iOS is the Notification Centre, which acts just like the mobile OS's notifications, which you see when you swipe down from the top of the screen. In Mountain Lion, you can swipe in from the left on a touchpad, and it shows an entry for each new email, message, software update or calendar alert.
Cloud services
iCloud
With Mountain Lion, iCloud becomes more important for Apple's desktop operating system. When you sign into your Apple account on a Mountain Lion Mac, all your mail settings, contacts, Safari bookmarks, messages, iTunes backups and other features will be synced via iCloud. And when you launch the App Store, all the apps you’ve already purchased are available for downloading and installation.
Mountain Lion also builds cloud-based file storage into TextEdit, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Microsoft simply makes SkyDrive available to any app developer, and many Windows 8 apps already take advantage of this.
SkyDrive
I covered Microsoft's SkyDrive service extensively in my article on Windows 8 and SkyDrive. Like iCloud, SkyDrive can sync all your devices' settings; in fact, Microsoft likes referring to SkyDrive as a "device cloud." In addition to this function, the service can serve as simple online storage, and actually works with Macs and iOS devices as well as Windows, Android, and Windows Phone. Just as with iCloud, SkyDrive remembers which apps you've purchased and lets you download and install them on another machine.
A big difference between SkyDrive and iCloud is that the former offers web access to any files you've stored on it. But SkyDrive becomes more than just a service for Microsoft products: Any Windows 8 third-party apps can make use of it as well, storing files in the cloud and retrieving them. Another cool capability of SkyDrive is Fetch, which lets you grab a file from a PC running the SkyDrive software even if the desired file hasn't been uploaded to the online storage system.
App stores
The Mac App Store
Apple's mobile OS showed the value inherent in the platform maker offering its own app store. The store owner can control which apps are offered, and more importantly, collect a premium from the software maker.
However, the user gets something out of this setup, too: You can install purchased apps on any of your other Macs, and updates are handled uniformly, with notifications when they're available. The Mac App Store launched with about a thousand apps, but some estimate there are now around 10,000.
The Windows Store
Microsoft finally got hip to the app store concept and decided to build it into the upcoming hybrid tablet/desktop OS. In many respects, the Windows Store works nearly identically to Apple's: It lets you install apps you've purchased on multiple machines you sign into, and handles updating in a unified manner. Although the terms for developers are a bit more generous than Apple's.
The Windows Store isn't as rich in browsing options as the Mac App Store, since you have to page through the categories. It’s estimated that the Windows Store will launch with about a thousand apps, and there are millions of legacy Windows apps that will still run on Intel-based Windows 8 machines
Read more: http://www.itproportal.com/2012/09/10/head-to-head-windows-8-vs-os-x-mountain-lion/#ixzz29PCMVs00
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