> The advantage of having access to I lcloud. Is that sufficient to justify the expense of having to buy new software to be able to use Mountain Lion? I do not think so.
Opinions will vary. To me it is very important to have access to iCloud because of the syncing for one.
> Four reasons why installing Mountain Lion is a big mistake.
> 1. Most of your existing software won't work with Mountain Lion, forcing you to buy expensive new software.
I have the same machine as mentioned by AboTarikand it came with Leopard. It has 4GB of RAM, I planned for the future. Over the years I have updated and upgraded the OS and, as a consequence, the applications where needed. Now I am at 10.8.3 and very happy with it. So I have spread out the costs that came with going from 10.5 to 10.8 over the years. AboTarik considers doing it in one go. Same difference methinks, certainly less hours.
> 2. Once the Mountain Lion is installed you can't uninstall it unless you format your hard drive.
I can't see a problem with that, a format gives you a clean drive, Good Thing ®.
> 3. Using two hard drives you can't switch from Mountain Lion to Mac Leopard and viceversa. Once Mountain Lion is installed in one of the hard drives your computer frezzes when you try to star with any other system.
Not my experience. At work I have a Mac Pro from the 10.5 generation with four drives which I use to do tests with various versions of the OS. We are at 10.6.8 at present and preparing to move to 10.8 during the summer. Holding down Alt gives me the drive selector at boot time and in the preferences of all versions I can select the drive to start from next.
> 4. Once you go back to Mac Leopard for obvious reasons, you can't use the data that was used with Mountain Lion. It tells you that "it was created with a newer System", and therefore, if you want to use it you have to reinstalled Mountain Lion.
True. I migrated all my files to their latest app versions and no way I can go back. I maintain a 10.5 boot partition on an external drive with some apps I thought I wanted to keep, in patricular Deep Space Explorer and Voyager III. But guess what, I haven't booted from there in the last few years, because I didn't need to. Better and more advanced software has come along to take their place. 10.5 is now just nostalgia for me.
So I guess that I would be against such a big OS upgrade if it concerns a one-trick pony machine that performs its duties well while not needing any app updates for the job at hand. Having to upgrade memory (4GB being the absolute bare minimum) may be a factor too, but what does memory cost nowadays?
In the meantime technology moves on and I like to go with it for the ride. For instance I like Apple's security setup in Safari, near real-time blocking of zero-day exploits as we saw recently. Also there is iBooks Author to mention just one app.
