If you’re a hard­core Apple nerd, you’ve prob­a­bly already bought and started installing Moun­tain Lion. For the rest of you, here’s a col­lec­tion of reviews that I’ll be read­ing once I have a chance, roughly in this order, that might help in your deci­sion of whether to upgrade:

John Siracusa’s epic 24 page review on Arstechnica

The most in-​​depth review you could pos­si­bly find of Moun­tain Lion.

But hang on a sec­ond. For a desk­top OS in the year 2012, which direc­tion is “for­ward,” any­way? The obvi­ous answer is “toward iOS,” but Lion proved that it’s not quite that sim­ple. And really, there has to be more to it than com­pul­sive imi­ta­tion, oth­er­wise why con­tinue devel­op­ment of the Mac plat­form at all?

Moun­tain Lion is Apple’s answer to all these ques­tions. It is the dig­i­tal man­i­fes­ta­tion of Apple’s belief that the Mac is still rel­e­vant, that it can be made bet­ter than it was before. In some ways, I feel the same as I did over a decade ago when con­sid­er­ing a new ver­sion of OS X: I want to believe.

Related: Read Marco Arment’s review of John Siracuas’s review if you want some truly meta-​​review level reviews in your head.

The 10.8 review main­tains Siracusa’s stan­dard at approx­i­mately 26,000 words, an impres­sive feat given that the inter­val between 10.7 and 10.8 was much shorter than most pre­vi­ous OS X update intervals.

John Gruber’s Review on Dar­ing Fireball

But Moun­tain Lion isn’t billed as a block­buster release, and it isn’t priced like one. It’s just nicer. And it’s the lit­tle things, the atten­tion to detail, that show it best. I’ve spent most of my time test­ing Moun­tain Lion on a 2010 11-​​inch Mac­Book Air. I’ve noticed that wake-​​from-​​sleep times have got­ten faster over the course of the beta period. And the Mac­Book Air woke from sleep just fine on Lion, by the his­tor­i­cal stan­dards of Apple note­books wak­ing from sleep. But “faster” isn’t fast enough, and the Air now feels like it’s get­ting pretty close to the instant-​​on wake-​​from-​​sleep feel of an iOS device.

Shaun Blanc’s Review, Titled ‘Moun­tain Lion and the Sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of OS X’

iOS is both the learn­ing ground and the excuse for the sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of OS X.

TUAW’s Review

I am not going to attempt to exhaus­tively work my way through all two hun­dred plus fea­tures and write in detail about each and every one. The plan is to hit the high­lights, tell you what’s changed, and let you know why that’s a good thing — unless it isn’t. In which case, I’ll tell you why not. Think of this as the amuse-​​bouche to Ars Tech­nica and John Siracusa’s no-​​expense-​​spared tast­ing menu.

Send them all to your Instapa­per cue for reading.