Because Mountain Lion and iOS6 are by far the most underwhelming updates yet in terms of features.
It actually makes for a nicer development model than the 'everything doesn't work for a year and then miraculously comes together 4 months before release' development model. For example, with Snow Leopard, XCode became garbage collected and was unusable for like 50 releases in a row.
Ultimately, while you get a slightly less buggy release that comes out on time more or less, the features seem less ambitious.
Also, it's twenty bucks.
The direction appears to be cheap upgrades, and merging feature sets between IOS and OSX so eventually there's one operating system that changes in unison.
It is believed by some that Apple will not be pushing their operating systems in this direction:
http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion
Specifically: "Mountain Lion is not a step towards a single OS that powers both the Mac and iPad, but rather another in a series of steps toward defining a set of shared concepts, styles, and principles between two fundamentally distinct OSes."
My point was whether there had been a movement of developers to a new iOS/OSX based project e.g. like an AppleTV. Because it seems that iOS6 and Mountain Lion combined seem to lack the combined punch of previous releases.
I think they have gone quite carefully on iCloud.
Beyond that, actual UI enhancements are minimal.
It's more iClouding Apps. Or App improvements. Less to do with the OS itself.
[1]: http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/143731/mac-os-x-mountain-li...
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/44444/mac-os-x-updates-yearl...
Small features like VIP whitelists for Mail.app, the Finder "share" button, and bigger features like Power Nap are significant improvements for many users.
I'm all about the future made into reality, but what kind of features do you see in other recent OS updates that are a) successful and not buggy as hell and b) ambitious enough to be not considered "underwhelming"?
But I completely agree with your first point. iWork hasn't been updated since 2009... I just can't believe it. It's still not on iCloud so if you want to share files between iOS and iWork on Mac, you have to manually copy and upload them. It's disgusting.
Proper Mail.app plugins. Not limiting the notification system to App Store apps. Finder replacement. Maybe with something like semantic tagging replacing folders, complete with proper filesystem level unix support.
Even bigger pie in the sky features: distributed process migration. If you are at home and have multiple computers, why not borrow your desktops CPU to do heavy processing (say for photos or video?)
In other words, features targeting professionals, the opposite of Apple current strategy.
edit: these would be overwhelming to me
Every app can use the notification system. They only can’t use push notifications if they are not in the App Store. Not terribly relevant for the desktop.
It probably opens and lists people on the left with their details on the right. It looks like a book. Can you group people? It's certainly not obvious that such functionality (which is useful!) exists.
Now click the red bookmark thing on top. Not very intuitive. It looks like a bookmark, not something that switches to a different view. Anyways, viola! The grouping interface! But now I can't see contact details. I need to "flip the page" back to see the details. This is a huge step backwards and is so inefficient that I completely stopped using groups when I moved to Lion.
Now consider Mountain lion: http://6.mshcdn.com/wp-content/gallery/apple-os-x-mountain-l...
Hey! It's the three column view from the old address book! Now I can see my groups, contacts, and details, just like before. Not as skeuomorph though. Now it's just an app that is skinned to look like a book. It doesn't function like a book. There are no pages to flip. It still has the dimensions of a book I guess, but that only makes that left page looks mighty constrained.
UI is about displaying and working with information, and this skeuomorphism is arguably not a very good way of doing either. I can lodge similar complaints about iCal. For instance, why are months always on separate pages? When I'm near the end of a month, I have to keep switching back and forth (with a slow unneeded animation on top). It's a computer, surely we can come up with an interface that discards this old page limitation of paper calendars! Not if you are thinking with skeuomorphism though.
If it’s only looks it doesn’t matter and is only about taste.
Further, looks are about much more than just taste. Designs affect how easy it is to understand the information being displayed, or to understand how to use an application. Skeuomorphic design is typically used to try to improve the latter: help people to understand how to use the app. It mimics a physical object because people already know how that object works. This benefit disappears if your skeuomorphic design doesn't actually work like the object it mimics though.
Skeumorphism that doesn’t affect functionality is purely about taste. Anything beyond that is bad. End of the story.
I would also argue that a lot of their designs look downright ugly to be honest.
The bookmark thing is a bookmark, and it works like one. It saves your place on a page in a book and you use it to go back to one. The little familiar groups icon on the tab tells you where it goes.
I'm not going to argue that some of the functionality of Address Book has been reduced or gone, but it has to do with a decision that Apple made about what they wanted, not directly tied to the fact that the interface is skeuomorphic now.
You can do this in Compressor.
Lion was a bit of a dud. Mountain Lion doesn’t add much but it improves massively on Lion. It corrects its mistakes. I’m very much ok with that, I don’t need flashy new features. I really don’t want Apple to start pulling features out of there ass (especially now that they switched to a yearly update cycle), mere refinements every year for something mature like OS X would be awesome.