Source claims to have learned the exact launch date of Apple’s next Mac OS

Jun 21, 2012 08:08 GMT  ·  By

A source in the San Francisco Bay Area informed T-gaap that “Apple's release date for OS X Mountain Lion is Thursday, July 19, 2012.”

Although the site in question doesn’t have a proven track record, the date makes sense if we’re to take into account Apple’s annual refresh cycles. In this respect, Mountain Lion would arrive exactly 364 days after the debut of OS X Lion.

At WWDC 2012, Apple already set the launch for July. The company, however, didn't specify an exact day.

Mountain Lion will be a downloadable upgrade available exclusively through the Mac App Store. It will support Macs that are not older than 2007 and, certain features, such as Power Nap, will only work on SSD-based notebooks, like the newer MacBook Airs and the retina Display MacBook Pro.

“The pace of innovation on the Mac is amazing, OS X Mountain Lion comes just a year after the incredibly successful launch of Lion,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, during WWDC 2012.

“With iCloud built right in and the new Notification Center, Messages, Dictation, Facebook integration and more, this is the best OS X yet.”

Just like Lion, the new Mac OS X 10.8 further brings mobile features to the desktop, including Notification Center, which lets you see all your notifications from OS X and third-party apps in one convenient place.

System-wide Sharing will be integrated throughout Mountain Lion to make it easy to share links, photos, videos and other files with the click of a button in supported applications.

It also brings full integration with Facebook and Twitter, Dictation, and the new Messages app which replaces iChat. Users will be able to text with their Mac like it was their mobile phone.