Off topic: I don't know why Apple is so against showing the size of the update. For something like firmware it's trivial but they don't show it for anything until after you hit Update.

PowerNap is definitely one of the biggest features I've been waiting for in Mountain Lion. Backing up at night while the mac's lid is close is a big deal.

Now you've done it. Just wait for the haters to claim that this is nothing new and that all other OSes would allow you to close the lid and still work in the background.

Glad to see this in my updates list!

ihate

 

This site and the content on which it reports? That's evident.

Intel Smart Connect will likely work for most OSs no?

Doesn't the Dell XPS 13 already do this? And that's probably on Windows I'd imagine.

I think that this is an awesome update. I cannot wait to just plug my computer in and get emails and other updates. I'm confused as to why it isn't done when on battery though. Hmmm. Maybe they could update to do that sometime?

I'm not sure I understand your question. The only thing Power Nap doesn't do on battery is the Time Machine Backups. Could they enable this later? Sure, but it isn't likely they will. If they haven't enabled it this time around it is probably because their tests revealed it would consume too much power. Imagine if you just did a huge update spanning several GBs, Time Machine could take hours (depending on your Wifi connection) and so you would wake up with a pretty dead battery. Best to just leave that one out and give everything else, as they did. Or are you asking why Power Nap isn't enabled on battery power by default? My guess there is they would want people to realize this uses of a little bit of extra battery power. But no big deal, you simply enable it once and it's good.

I think the difference between power nap and "closing the lid and updating" is that power nap will actually put the computer to sleep and still update/backup. Practically every laptop can update with the lid closed (as long as you set it to 'do nothing' instead of sleep or hibernate). The computer just stays on all night and can update or backup. Power nap seems to be able to do more