Mac OS X Lion

I'm debating. I just bought a new Mac Mini with Snow Leopard a month ago and am pretty happy with how it all works right now. But I hear you can upgrade for $30. It might be worth it.....
 
I'll be upgrading my old iMac next week sometime. For £21, I really can't complain about the price of the upgrade. All the programmes that I use day-to-day are going to be compatible (at least on my iMac) and I'm looking forward to giving it a try. I will be making an installation disk for myself because I prefer to have a physical format to use.

I won't be upgrading my MacBook Pro (which I'm typing on at the moment) because the drivers I use for my audio interface probably aren't compatible with Lion. Line 6 (who make my interface) are notoriously slow at releasing updates and there is no guarantee that Lion will work with my interface (if past form is anything to go on with Snow Leopard). That is always my concern with these upgrades. I'll try my iMac and if it works then I'll upgrade my MacBook Pro.
 
I'm not in a hurry. I'll probably upgrade my home iMac in a month or two, but as far as the Macs I manage at work, I'll take my time. Everything's working fine on Snow Leopard and there's no compelling reason to change yet.

But for people that are in a hurry... my usual advice is to first do the research: see what other "bleeding edge" users are saying re: compatibility and potential problems.

Then, do your install on a separate drive or partition. That way, if anything goes wrong, you can always fall back and boot off your old system. Once everything seems to be working, you can clone the new system back to your original drive/partition if you like.

You will never lose any time or work if you follow my advice!
 
I have upgraded my iMac and my Laptop. I am still discovering things and haven't found any dislikes so far.
 
I only use my Mac to run protools, and it's running smoothly on Leopard.

I don't really feel this need to screw it up.
 
I updated my MacPro and some laptops of my daughters.

The not so new iMac of my wife and the also older iMac in my Drumroom didn't accept the update ( both intel - but one not enough RAM, the second not core duo ....

The very new Laptop Pro of my daughter is running fine, the second one - mine for traveling needs - doesn't have Airdrop working (only newest Hardware supported).

On my MacPro i banned the new system on a second partition, because some older programs i still need and have, don't work anymore without Rosetta, these are: older versions of Photoshop with Image Ready, SoundStudio, Filemaker and Golive CS2 (Golive 9 and Dreamweaver are not useful tools for a site like Drummerworld), Mac the Ripper, and my very loved Racing Game 4x4 Evolution....Also my old Microsoft Crap like Words and Excel are not working anymore, and beware: i never will buy an update for these...lol

So the new things are not so important, just a little bit nicer, beside the adressbook and calendar, which i find ugly and old fashioned now - and i see no other layouts....hmm - so there is no need for me to work with lion.

By the way: i Put the installer on a stick, so i can update all machines...but there many more tricks to find on the net, not to loose the installer, because he tends to dissappear after installation.

Bernhard
 
Windows 7 all the way for me! I made the switch from Mac to Windows in 2001 and I haven't looked back once. I purge all Apple software like QuickTime from my computers too.

Ok, but this thread is not about that. It's about Mac OS X 10.7.

I also have Windows 7 and it's not terrible.
 
But for people that are in a hurry... my usual advice is to first do the research: see what other "bleeding edge" users are saying re: compatibility and potential problems.

Yep, I don't use a Mac but I always like to be at least one version behind so the bugs are ironed out. This may be especially a good idea for MS users like me :) Or are Mac OSs the same as Windows - full of bugs at first that require a bunch of fixes in service packs?
 
Yep, I don't use a Mac but I always like to be at least one version behind so the bugs are ironed out. This may be especially a good idea for MS users like me :) Or are Mac OSs the same as Windows - full of bugs at first that require a bunch of fixes in service packs?

There are usually a few bugs. There were certainly a couple when Snow Leopard came out, e.g enabling Guest Accounts in some situations could lead to data loss. Apple release updates every now and then and add them as a 'point' version. Snow Leopard is currently on 10.6.8. These updates sometimes enable features as well (like the App Store). Ironically, a few years ago 10.4 (Tiger) got to 10.4.11, which in itself caused a bug because some systems couldn't cope with the update going over .10!

What I do like about the update system is that it is actually quite transparent. A menu appears and will tell you precisely what is being downloaded and what it's meant to do; with a file size. A little like the Ubuntu's (and other Linux Distributions') Synaptic Package Manager - which does much the same thing. I don't like that Windows just downloads updates without telling you what they are and then decides to take twenty minutes shutting down whilst it re-configures. That's one of my biggest annoyances with Windows 7 (which I have on both my Macs).

Usually though, Mac users are much quicker to update because the OS updates sometimes cheaper (the last two have been very cheap, £25 and £21) and are usually fairly stable. Apple do cut off old hardware, so typically if your hardware is around five years old, it won't accept the now software. I have a 2006 iMac that will accept Lion, but I suspect that it won't accept any more systems after Lion.
 
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Thanks for this thread. I am also really interested in how this turns out. Been a Mac guy for 20+ years.
 
I upgraded on Saturday on my iMAC and well the upgrade was seamless...all seems to be working. Interesting point though users of Pro Tools 8 on the Forums are all saying Pro Tools with Lion and sure enough when I upgraded it stated Pro Tools will not and places it in a Unsupported Software folder but Pro Tools fired up and ran just fine.

I'm even finding the display is crisper than on Snow Leopard, I thought it was just talk improving the display but it's true...

I work in IT so I did this just for the sake of it, if you have a Macbook I'd do it but iMac users it's not really worth it..............but then again for $31 (AUS Dollars) hell that is three pints of Stella so why not ha ha
 
I liked the fact that is was a CD-less upgrade from the Mac App store. No waiting for the shipment of software. Just click on the upgrade button and sit back. The mail is better, Launchpad is great and I am still discovering. I converted from anything Gates, and have not looked back. Other than Windows at work, it was just part of me growing up.
 
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I downloaded Lion know my DAW does not work ( Motu DP6 ) and there is no updates to make it work from apple or Motu. I cannot revert back to snow lepord either. I am Furious that I did not do my homework be fore upgrading. Time to bring my mac to the doctor and have them put it back the way it was.
 
I downloaded Lion know my DAW does not work ( Motu DP6 ) and there is no updates to make it work from apple or Motu. I cannot revert back to snow lepord either. I am Furious that I did not do my homework be fore upgrading. Time to bring my mac to the doctor and have them put it back the way it was.

That happened to me when I upgraded to OSX. My M-Audio firewire 410 stopped working... Actually, I think the old firewire port stopped working altogether. I was bummed. But then I spilled soup on the thing about 3 months later and just ended up getting a new macbook pro anyway.
 
I just upgraded on my '09 macbook and I'm rather enjoying it. I love the multiple desktops/ full screen apps feature and so far I haven't found any complaints.

I noticed internet pages were loading slightly slower and I thought it was the update, but then I tried using my home's wifi with some other devices and it had slowed for all of them. Not Lion's fault, but I'm still not pleased haha
 
I was able to upgrade my iMac memory to 4GB which was recommended ahead of the Lion upgrade. Bought the memory modules from OWC, Macsales.com for half of the price that Apple wanted. My Macbook is at 2GB and seems to work fine.
 
Is it possible to run OSX through a virtual machine like VM Ware or Virutal Box (or something else)? I'm not at all familiar with Apple's stuff outside of iOS, but maybe that would be a good way to run the Lion without breaking some of the compatibility everyone's having while on Snow Leopard. Just a thought.
 
Is it possible to run OSX through a virtual machine like VM Ware or Virutal Box (or something else)? I'm not at all familiar with Apple's stuff outside of iOS, but maybe that would be a good way to run the Lion without breaking some of the compatibility everyone's having while on Snow Leopard. Just a thought.

It's probably possible but I'm not sure that you'd necessarily be able to check all of your compatibility on a Virtual Machine because it may not have access to all the low-level driver functions. Virtualisation is great, but it's definitely a compromise.

You're better off partitioning your HDD and then running Lion on a minor partition to check compatibility.
 
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