Os X Lion

[clemso]

So has anyone bothered to download it? Seems to be a lot of complaints about it on the apple site. My concern is that it is down load only. My broad band is very slow and there is no way it will cope with a 3.74 GB download, that will take forever.

[Brazoo]

I believe it's going to be sold in disc form too - no?

I haven't bothered even looking into it yet. Personally, I usually hold off on these things because I use my Mac for work and I can't stand interrupting my workflow.

[MicromanZone]

It will be sold on a Flash drive for about twice as much.

But I downloaded it, and then within hours downgraded back to Snow Leopard (I kept a clone of my hard drive on another drive and just wiped out the Lion upgraded disk.)

It’s really beta quality software. If you just use your machine for simple desktop use, it might not be a big deal (checking mail, surfing the web, etc…) for you but I had scanner software stop working, other webdev software I use act odd and tons of the UI changes were giving me a headache. Not to mention the way “Mail” looks/behaves in Lion is ridiculous. Apple is trying to make everything on the desktop behave like an iPhone/iPad full screen app but it’s a disaster. Some folks compare it to Windows Vista as in how bad a change it is. It’s not that bad, but I definitely do not recommend the upgrade unless you are compelled to do so. In fact this is the first time I have downgraded a Mac OS since the first release of Mac OS 9 nearly 10 years ago. So hey, it’s “bad” as far as I am concerned.

[jacoblb]

The deal breajker for me was that my Quicken software wasn't compatible. I've no interest in upgrading Quicken just to give 10.7 a trial run. I guess I'll wait until 10.8 in hopes everything is fixed by then.

[Mawni]

I put it on our laptop but not the desktop. The lappy is used mostly for internetting. My wife doesn't really like the new way Safari is set up.

[Hector]

I'm happy with my current OS X 10.6.4 setup...no need for upgrades at the moment.

[MicromanZone]

FWIW, I genuinely believe that Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) will be the Mac equivalent of Windows XP on Windows machines; old but extremely stable OS that a large base of users will still use in a few years.

[Mawni]

I dunno, I think Apple will be pretty motivated to fix any problems as soon as they can. (I hope!)

[MicromanZone]

Well, you know Apple released a “Mac OS X 10.6.8 Supplemental Update” this past week. They won’t stop updating and bug-patching Snow Leopard for a while. As for Lion they can’t fix what’s conceptually broken and for me unless they give options that override the arse-backwards U.I. tweaks they made to “Mail” and other apps, I could care less. The other bells and whistles are not that compelling enough for me to screw up my workflow.

[emeraldknight47]

Hmmmmm. As an avid MAC user, this thread has been very helpful. Looks like I won't be diving into "Lion" until a later version when they indeed get the bugs out. I want an iPad, too, but I'm using my superhuman willpower to hold off for a third or fourth generation version. Eventually in the MAC/Abode Flash War, somebody's gotta blink....!

[LadyZod]

I run Fedora Linux on my iBook.

[Brazoo]

I talked to a friend of mine yesterday who is one of the most insanely rabid Mac people on the planet - like, he seriously judges people's intelligence based on what computer they use - and he's not upgrading right now either.

[Mawni]

We haven't really noticed anything on the laptop we upgraded but I'm still going to wait on our desktop.

[MicromanZone]

Just so folks understand the apprehension on my side, here is what I did. At first I upgraded my Snow Leopard install and then reverted. But after a few days I decided to install Lion as a clean install on a 100% blank hard drive. I wanted to do it for developer purposes so I have a Lion setup ready for simple testing if need be. What could go wrong?

Okay, the main Lion install was fine. Then I went to install XCode, which is the developers tools for the OS. Everything went fine until it stopped installing and asked me to quit iTunes. Huh? What? This is a 100% pure setup. I never even launched iTunes once?!? So I launch the terminal and check the running OS processes via “top” and see the iTunesHelper in the list. It can’t be that right? It’s a part of Apple’s iTunes install but it’s 100% standard and if anything should be able to get around that an Apple XCode install should right? Well, on a hunch I killed off that process and then the XCode install continued. Utter baloney! And that is for a developer package!

This OS has clearly not gotten basic quality control reviews. And it’s not like there is a clear map of what can choke, I don’t like the feeling of working on a setup where any moment some oddball hitch will get in the way of basic use.

I bet anything that 10.7.5 will be called “Mountain Lion” and that will be the stable version of 10.7 that behaves correctly.

[megoapesnut]

I got a Macbook Air a few days ago with 10.7 installed and it works fine, no problems so far. One cool thing is browsing the web with the touchpad. If you swipe two fingers left or right it takes you backwards or forwards in the browser, instead of having to click the back or forward arrows in the upper left. It moves the browser window left or right as you swipe, exposing the previous site underneath or bringing the new site over top. It reminds me quite a bit of Tom Cruise operating the display screen in Minority Report.