Apple’s got big plans for iOS 12, and we’ll tell you all about them this week on The CultCast. Plus: New details tell us more about 2018’s iPhone X Plus; Nintendo says a new Mario Kart is coming to iOS; Apple works to bring iPad apps to Mac; and don’t miss our review of the Elgato Stream Deck, a must-have accessory for you Twitch, Mixer and YouTube streamers.

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As a Christmas present, hackers over the holidays released two great jailbreaks. For the majority out there running iOS 7, Team Evad3rs released the much heralded Evasi0n jailbreak, while for the holdouts, p0sixninja released a working jailbreak for iOS 6.1.3, 6.1.4 and 6.1.5 called p0sixspwn. It’s the latter jailbreak which has been updated today with support for OS X Snow Leopard, and numeorus bug fixes.

Some users of early 2009 iMacs who have upgraded to OS X Snow Leopard or higher are still reporting issues with a kernel issue that seems to be due to the Nvidia GeForce GT 130 graphics card that came with the machine, with nary a response from Apple proper. There’s a thread on Apple’s support discussion pages that is now around a year old that mentions the problem. According to the posters there, there was a faulty kernel extension released in one of the later Snow Leopard updates that can cause graphics glitches and even kernel panics when there’s a heavy load on the video card, like when playing games. Apple has not yet responded in the official forums.

Apple’s newest version of OS X – 10.8 Mountain Lion – has been the fastest adopted Mac operating system in history and it’s continuing to dominate. A new web traffic survey has concluded that Mountain Lion is now the most popular version of OS X used to browse the web.

Microsoft may have the numbers, but one thing Apple is really good about is getting people to shift their Macs over to the latest and greatest version of OS X in a timely manner.

For example, even though OS X Mountain Lion was only released in July, over 25% of all Macs ran it by October. OS X 10.5 Leopard hovers at a little less than 10%, while OS X Lion is on about 30% of all Macs.

What’s most surprising, though, is what operating system ties OS X Lion for the most popular version of OS X: OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard.

So, Apple likes to change things; this much is a given. The software developers behind the operating system, OS X, are no different. They’re constantly changing the way things work from iteration to iteration of Apple’s computer software.

In Snow Leopard, when you made changes to a document and tried to close that document, you’d be asked by your Mac, in essence, “are you sure you want to do that?” and you could tell it to save the changes you made, or discard them. It was a way to let us know that there had, in fact, been changes to the document, whether we meant them or not.

In Lion, that little “feature” went away. Documents in Lion were always saved, regardless. This is a neat feature, in some ways, but it keeps you from knowing if you’ve made any unintended changes.

Luckily, Mountain Lion lets you choose the way you want it to work. If you want to have that failsafe “are you sure” save changes dialog, you can enable it. If you don’t want it, you can disable it.

Everyone knows that the “upgrade” to OS X Mountain Lion severely reduced the battery life in Mac laptops by up to 38%. And while OS X 10.8.1 helped things some, the fix was still meager compared to the oceans of juice you comparatively got on the same machine running OS X Lion.

OS X 10.8.2, though? Much, much better. In fact, according to The Mac Observer, in the latest Build 12C35 of OS X 10.8.2, not only does the latest development version of Mountain Lion give users a bigger upgrade in battery life than OS X 10.8.0 or OS X 10.8.1, but their test system — a 2011 15-Inch MacBook Pro 2.0GHz i7 — now has more battery life than it did running OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, the previous champ Mac operating system when it came to conserving juice.

In fact, while their test system lost 105.5 and 80.5 minutes of battery life compared to 10.6.8 in OS X 10.8.0 and OS X 10.8.1, respectively, it actually gained eight minutes against OS X 10.6.8 in OS X 10.8.2. Now those are some impressive results. Results I’m now off to test for myself.

Source: Mac Observer

Apple’s latest desktop operating system, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, launched just over a month ago, but its usage is spreading like a raging forest fire. 48 hours after its release the OS was already running on 3.2% of all Macs, but new data is showing that 10% of all Mac users are now running Mountain Lion on their machines.

Chitika has been tracking the adoption of Mountain Lion via their ad network, and says that the usage of Mountain Lion has been increasing steadily with no sign of letting up. The new OS is on track to outpace OS X Lion, which took three months to gain 14% use on all Macs.

The year is 2012, and the March of the Big Cats continues. Apple is about to release Mountain Lion, the latest iteration of (Mac) OS X, and citizens of the Appleverse are eager to explore what this new feline has to offer. How far we’ve come in just over a decade.

Back in 2001 Apple introduced their new, long awaited replacement to the Classic Macintosh System Software: Mac OS X. As Mountain Lion goes on the prowl, Cult of Mac reviews the Evolution of OS X and once again presents our look back at Apple’s Big Cats over the years – from Cheetah and Puma through to Apple’s current Felidae offerings.

If you rushed off to the Mac App Store to download OS X Mountain Lion as soon as it was released this morning, then I hope you like it. Because once you’ve handed over your cash, there’s no going back. Apple has now pulled OS X Lion from the Mac App Store, and once you’ve purchased Mountain Lion, it will be removed from your “Purchased” list.