It comes with apps for sending email and messages, managing your schedule, setting reminders, making video calls, and backing up your Mac automatically. It even comes with an app for shopping for new apps. With OS X Mountain Lion, your Mac is more than full-featured, it’s fully loaded.
Just like shopping the App Store on iPad and iPhone, the Mac App Store offers endless possibilities to browse and purchase apps on your Mac. New apps install in one step right to Launchpad. And the Mac App Store lets you know when app updates are available, so you always have the latest versions. Learn more about the Mac App Store
It’s faster, smarter, and more than just a browser. View web pages full screen on every inch of your Mac display. Save articles to your Reading List and read them later — even without an Internet connection. And peruse pages from the clean, uncluttered, ad-free Safari Reader. Safari works great with iCloud. It keeps your Reading List up to date across all your devices. iCloud Tabs makes the last web pages you looked at available on all your devices, too.1 So you can always pick up browsing, reading, shopping, and doing just about everything wherever you left off.
Mail makes it easy to manage all your email from a single, ad-free inbox. It features powerful search capabilities, with search suggestions and tokens built in. It works with the free me.com email account you get when you sign up for iCloud, as well as most email standards — including POP3 and IMAP — and popular email services such as Gmail, Comcast, Time Warner, Charter, Cox, Yahoo! Mail, and AOL Mail. Mail supports Microsoft Exchange 2010, too. If you have more than one email account, no problem. Add your accounts to Mail and you’ll be able to access all your email from one place. And Mail looks as great as it works. It makes full use of your display with a gorgeous widescreen view featuring a full-height message and a message list that includes snippets. With Conversations, messages from the same thread appear in an elegant timeline showing each communication as it was sent while hiding redundant text.
Messages on the Mac replaces iChat. It does everything iChat does, and so much more. For starters, it comes with iMessage. So you can send unlimited messages to anyone on a Mac — and on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 5 or later, too. You can even start a conversation on your Mac and pick it up on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Send photos, videos, documents, and contacts. And send messages to a group. You can see when your message has been delivered and when someone’s typing a reply. Turn on read receipts, and friends can see when you’ve read their messages. With end-to-end encryption, your messages stay safe and private.
Keep track of your busy schedule and share it with others using Calendar. Create separate calendars — one for home, another for school, a third for work, and so on. See all your calendars in a single window or choose to see only the calendars you want. Calendar lets you create invitations using information from Contacts, update your guest list, keep track of responses, and receive the latest status information. When you or another Mac user receives a Calendar invitation via Mail, it’s automatically added. Calendar also works with iCloud, Yahoo!, and Google. And when you use iCloud, every Calendar edit you make on your Mac automatically appears on your iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. So no dinner dates are missed, no meeting goes unattended, and no anniversary is forgotten.
Contacts is a flexible and convenient place to store information for everyone you know. It’s easy to import names, numbers, addresses, and photos from other applications. And it’s designed for Facebook, too. Contacts automatically includes your friends’ profile photos and information. And when friends update their information, Contacts updates your Mac. You can create smart groups for clubs, activities, and business purposes; print address labels and envelopes; and more. iCloud updates your contacts on your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and Mac — so when you enter someone’s contact info once, you have it everywhere. And since Contacts is built on vCard, an industry standard for storing contact information, your friends can send you cards that you can add simply by dropping them into your contacts list — no typing required.
Reminders helps you get all your to-dos done — on the Mac and on your iOS devices. Make as many to-do lists as you need and easily add to them. Set due dates and you’ll get alerts as deadlines approach. Check items off your lists as you go and keep track of what you’ve completed. And to be sure you don’t forget anything, iCloud keeps your reminders up to date on your Mac, iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.
Time Machine works with your Mac and an external hard drive or Time Capsule (sold separately). Connect the drive, assign it to Time Machine, and start enjoying some peace of mind. Time Machine automatically backs up your entire Mac, including system files, applications, accounts, preferences, music, photos, movies, and documents. But what makes Time Machine different from other backup applications is that it not only keeps a spare copy of every file, it remembers how your system looked on any given day — so you can revisit your Mac as it appeared in the past.
FaceTime for Mac makes it possible to talk, smile, and laugh with anyone on an iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, or another Mac from your Mac.2 So you can catch up, hang out, and stay in touch with a click. Just find who you want to see in Contacts and start a FaceTime call. And when someone wants to reach you, the call rings through on every Mac you own, even if FaceTime isn’t running. So you never have to worry about making yourself available. If you don’t want to receive calls, just turn FaceTime off.
Take fun snapshots and make short videos in Photo Booth. Right from there, you can share what you shoot on Facebook and Twitter. Use photos as your Messages icons. Assign them to friends and family in Contacts. And add photos to your iPhoto library. But the real fun starts when you use the effects and backdrops. Snap a photo of yourself at the Eiffel Tower or in outer space. Choose from nine effects that use facial tracking technology so effects look great whether you’re front and center — or left of center. Snap single photos or shoot multiples in a four-photo burst. You can even shoot and trim video clips, complete with effects. And see your Photo Booth photos full screen.
