Point of view on running Mountain Lion on a late 2011 Mac Book Pro?

I have a late model 2011 mac and I ran mountain lion on it for a few months. It ran ok but I ended up reinstalling lion on it about a week ago just because I found lion ran better. I don't think it has anything to with the "slightly" older hardware. I think mountain lion is just a resource pig. One thing was very noticeable and that was the shut down time. With lion my mac shuts down in a second or 2. with mountain lion it took 5-10+ seconds and that was with a clean install of mountain lion.

If you don't need any of the newer feature, whatever they are, then just stay with lion. I read a article this morning that apple is coming out with 10.9 in a couple of months. So I'll try that, in a separate partition this time, when it comes out and see how I like it.

I run ML on a current 2012 MBP, a 2010 MBP and a 2008 pre-unibody MBP...it works fine on all three, except for very specific HW related issues (eg, the 2008 MBP lacks the HW necessary to support Airdrop). I don't have any issues with freeze-ups or delays.

Sounds like the sort of issues often found with corrupt preferences files or old third-party plugins/extensions/add-ons...perhaps some troubleshooting of those is in order.

I run ML on a late-2011 MBP and haven't had any problems with it, although as LowLuster said, the shutdown time is a little longer. I sometimes wonder what it's doing when I tell it to shut down and the pinwheel spins for a minute or so before the screen goes dark. That's really the only performance difference I've noticed.

I have a late 2011 MBP. I upgraded from Lion to Mtn Lion in July. So far, except for slower shutdown times, I have not seen any real difference in performance between pre-Mtn Lion and post-Mtn Lion.