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The new OS of Mac OSX, Mountain Lion, will finally come in July at a price of $19.99. You may already preview it in Apple official site. But the question is will you upgrade to Mountain Lion or not?

Let’s face it. Mountain Lion do succeed Lion, Apple’s best selling release, and properly named OS X Mountain Lion. It offers over 200 features at $19.99 upgrade cost---$10 less than the upgrade to Lion at $29.99. And it’s not very likely that users of previous operating systems will see the new features cause faster, cheaper OS updates from the company means less time to integrate newer apps with older operating systems; if you’re still holding back on upgrading, you’ll have to forgo the newest features.

But you may worry the incompatibility issue between Mountain Lion with current apps, though most developers already made effort on it. Luckily, Mountain Lion makes each updating smarter and easier:  Notification Center reminds you if any updates available and Power Nap will work on the updates even in sleep mode. Meanwhile, you still hold a chance to downgrade to previous system like Lion or Leopard if you’re not satisfied with OS X Mountain Lion anyway. So why not? Now let’s see how to upgrade to Mountain Lion:

Which Macs will be able to run Mountain Lion?

As per its official site, the following models are supported:

• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

To find out if your Mac qualifies or not, just click the Apple icon at the top left of your screen, choosing About This Mac, then clicking More Info. You can also check more details at Techinique Specifications of Mountain lion.

Can I upgrade straight from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion or should upgrade to Lion first?

As per statistics, only 40% of Mac users have upgrade to Lion yet, and Apple surely consider it and make below two options avaliable: 1) If you are running Lion (10.7.x), you can update to Mountain Lion direclty when it's available on Apple Mac Store in July.2) If you're running Snow Leopard system, make sure you install the latest version of Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.8) to upgrade to Mountain Lion. Meanwhile, it will be available at no additional charge from the Mac App Store to all customers who purchase a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller on or after June 11, 2012.

Something before upgrading to Mountain Lion

1. Installing Mountain Lion on a spare partition. If you're using a normal partitioning scheme on your hard disk, you can dynamically shrink the size of your main boot partition and then create a new partition from the freed space. Creating a partition of 20-50 GB should be enough to play around with Mountain Lion without major constraints, and you can keep all large documents on the Lion partition. Then if you want to remove Mountain Lion later, you can do that easily.
2. Do a stable back up of your files using a tool such as Time Machine, SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner, so you can restore it when you need to go back to 10.7 Lion.

Tips for Multiple Macs

If you are an Apple household, you can install Mac OS X Lion on any Macs authorized with the Apple ID you used to purchase the Operating System.Meanwhile, if you buy a Mac after Mountain Lion comes out, it usually already be installed onto the Mac.

By the way, there has been rumors that Apple's release date for OS X Mountain Lion is Thursday, July 19. Stay tuned with us, we will update more news.