It’s official: Mac OS X Mountain Lion coming to Mac App Store Wednesday
Apple CEO Tim Cook made it official in an earnings call Tuesday: Mac OS X Mountain Lion will be available for download Wednesday.
“We’re thrilled with record sales of 17 million iPads in the June quarter,” Cook said. “We’ve also just updated the entire MacBook line, will release Mountain Lion tomorrow and will be launching iOS 6 this Fall. We are also really looking forward to the amazing new products we’ve got in the pipeline.”
Mountain Lion will bridge the gap between iOS and the Mac operating system. With familiar apps such as Reminders, Notes, iMessage and Game Center finally coming to the Mac, along with stronger iCloud integration, all devices in your Apple lineup will work even better together.
Apple’s next-generation operating system will cost $19.99 and be exclusively sold through the Mac App Store. Those that purchased one of the new Macs that Apple announced in June are eligible for a free upgrade through Apple’s Up-to-Date program. After filling out a redemption form, Apple will provide those users with a redemption code that the must enter into the Mac App Store to begin the free download.
Apple’s terse announcement of Mountain Lion came during the company’s 3rd quarter earnings call. Apple earned $8.8 billion profit on $35 billion in revenue. That number is up from revenue of $28.57 billion and profit of $7.31 billion in the year-ago quarter.
Apple executives said on the call that the current quarter will be comparatively weak because the company is on, what company officials are calling, “Fall transition.”
“‘Fall transition; that I spoke about is driving most of the decline that we see sequentially in gross margin,” said Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer. “Not something that we’re going to talk about in any level of detail today. We could not be more confident in our new product pipeline.”
In the coming fourth quarter, Apple is expected to announce and release a bevy of products, including the iPhone 5, a smaller 7.85-inch iPad, a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display and a completely re-designed iMac desktop computer.
