After my Up-to-Date morning hiccups cleared up and I installed Mountain Lion on my Retina MacBook Pro (took less than 20 minutes!) the first thing I noticed was just how similar my desktop looked. With the clean install option gone, no longer is my wallpaper replaced with the new OS’s default galaxy picture, so there isn’t much to distinguish from the prior release. At least not at first glance.

But before diving into the newness, I noticed one main visual difference: the Dock. It hasn’t been overhauled, but there are enough subtle changes to make it feel new. Apple has toned down the overall glossiness of the tray, giving it a cool, matte finish that doesn’t reflect the apps as much. The open-app indicator has been moved to the edge;  gone is the garish dashed separator, replaced with a thin line. I’m not sure if these changes make much of a difference on any other Mac, but on the Retina screen, the Dock looks better than ever.

As with every release, Safari is smoother and snappier using Mountain Lion, but scrolling on the Retina MacBook is remarkably improved; it’s not so much that it was stuttery or laggy before, but it always felt like it was dragging slightly, likely due to pushing all those pixels. Now, windows scroll as effortlessly as they do on the iPad. And another subtle improvement, the progress bar, which now fades at the end and speeds to a finish as the site loads, helps Safari feel more refined.

I’m an avid Pages user and was secretly hoping Apple would add Retina support when it updated the suite to take advantage of Mountain Lion’s iCloud syncing. It did, and now I can erase those three horrible low-resolution weeks from my memory once and for all. Pages looks predictably great and iCloud synced all of the iOS files without a hitch.

I don’t use it all, but the new Notes app that popped up in my Dock is quite nice, with the torn paper looking especially crisp on the Retina screen. Before I deleted it, I could kinda make out the opening lines to “The Crazy Ones” in messy handwriting on the icon, presumably scribbled by Steve himself.

I couldn’t find a setting for Power Nap, but Apple’s website indicated that a required firmware update would be forthcoming. Waking from closed-cover sleep, however, was noticeable improved, and my Mac sprung to life almost immediately; on Lion it always took a second or two to get the cursor moving.

Dictation works well, too. (That was dictated.) To bring up the Siri-like microphone, tap the function key twice. This, and other iOS cross-overs are much more apparent than in Lion, and with Retina support across all three devices, everything looks shart, clear and, for the first time, very consistent. Notifications, iCloud, Game Center--everything is built to sync quickly and quietly across all devices (though I had some trouble with Notification Center), and the move to a unified OS is quite apparent. My guess is that by OS X 10.10, Apple will have one OS that scales and caters to whichever device it’s installed on.