OS X Lion: Apple’s Vista moment | Hacker News Reader

OS X Lion: Apple’s Vista moment

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First, I think that to be fair, if you're going to say someone is having a "Vista Moment", they have to have bet a significant chunk of the company on the OS. When iOS 7 blows up, talk about Apple's "Vista Moment".

Second, I think there's an implication here that prior releases of OS X have been great. They have not been great. Snow Leopard was solid, because that was its only goal. Much of what Apple has attempted with each release of OS X has been unsuccessful; remember when people were upset by Spotlight's mdimport grinding machines to a halt, or Filevault messing up home directories?

The reason these things don't stick in our head like Vista is that Mac OS X is a lot less important to Apple than Windows is to Microsoft. And Vista wasn't that bad! We just obsessed on the market's poor reaction to it. The market for the most part doesn't care about OS X.

I also like "OS X Kitten" as the next OS name. That, or they should switch to Pokemon.

Additionally, let's remember that lion's a $30 upgrade, which makes things sting quite a bit less.

I tried it for a bit, then happily re-imaged back to Snow Leopard. There's just too much goofy laptop oriented crap that I don't want. I was laughing out loud reading that article. And grimacing, as someone who works late in a quiet house, at the loss of fine volume adjustment from the keyboard.

I will have to test software on lion, but I'll just dedicate a partition and drop into it when necessary.

The worst thing for me was Mission Control. I miss the proportionately-scaled windows of Tiger(?) Exposé, but I utterly refuse to completely disrupt my flow with the clusterfuck that is Mission Control. Re-fuse.

I'll freely admit that I'm on a Mac Pro in a sea of laptops, but I have work to do, and it's just easier in Snow Leopard than it is in Lion.

Lion is not for you.

Snowpard will continue to work without being a liability for probably the next 12 months, at least.

Giving up on Lion isn't a moral failing. Give the pioneers some time to absorb the arrows. By next March, I'm betting that (suitably tuned) Lion won't be anywhere nearly as annoying as it is today.

Yeah, I'm so happy with Snow Leopard, that this is just not a big deal to me, and let's face it, unless it's mind-blowingly good, like an XP or a Tiger or Leopard, a set of big changes is bound to make a chunk of people unhappy.

My Mac Mini on Tiger is still seeing updates for iTunes, so Apple seem to be supporting older stuff at least partially.

It's not the cost of the upgrade that matters. It's the cost of lost productivity and regressions.

I fail to see why I should lower my expectations from my Operating System because of the price.

Are you sure you're not just nerding out on the notion that you (need to be running/are entitled to love) the latest version of an operating system? People are going to take products in directions you don't love. Try falling in love with a car series sometime. :)

Nobody asked you to, but if we're going to talk about expectations, then people would be much happier lowering theirs for major OS revisions or changes to any complex system for that matter. Every time a car line gets a new engine, you just know there are going to be issues for the first run that comes off the assembly line. No one was forced to upgrade from 10.6.8 to 10.7.0, or 9.x to 10.0 for that matter, or buy a new computer with it pre-installed. But people do and did because there's a perceived benefit. Early adopters always pay some sort of price though.

It's still the next major OS release, regardless of the price.

If Lion is actually worse than Snow Leopard (obviously this is debatable), any price is an insult.

This is an interesting perspective.

Come to think of it, Leopard did frustrate me a lot. I think I just got really fat and happy on Snow Leopard, and now that rug has been ripped away from me.

By the time Snow Leopard becomes a real liability, geeks will have beaten Lion into submission. It's like a month? out from Lion's release. Nobody who likes Snowpard has any business running Lion right now.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that you rolled that rug up and threw it away to make space for the new and shiny rug. Too bad the new rug still has some moths.

I do not like this metaphor.

Ok, how about, you built a porch, and you liked the porch, but then bees built a hive on it, and you're scared of bees, and before you were able to eradicate the bees they created a new version of your operating system that had behaviors you didn't like.

Much better.

I don't experience any of the issues the guy mentions in his article.

Sometimes I wonder how some people's configurations get so wonky that they have all these issues. It's clearly an atypical case.

I've experienced my own set of issues (oh god the kernel panics), but really, you haven't experienced anything he mentions? You don't feel like Mission control is a pretty big step backwards from even the old spaces UI (on a single monitor, it is)? You really haven't had problems or questions with the new fullscreen behavior? You think Launchpad is not pointless? You've _never_ had action misses on drag-and-drop to the browser?

Sometimes I wonder what people think they could possibly do with legacy configurations to cause problems like the ones described. Is there a com.apple.absurdly-slow-on-3-year-old-hardware.plist you're expecting to find hidden in their ~/Library/Preferences? Pebcac is real, but if the problem exists between the majority of computers and chairs for a given OS release, then maybe it's time to redefine the problem.

"I've experienced my own set of issues (oh god the kernel panics), but really, you haven't experienced anything he mentions?"

I'm in basically the same boat. I have experienced some issues, but none of the ones he mentions. Further, in my experience anyway, this has been the smoothest major OS version upgrade I've experienced. Obviously that won't be true for everyone, but it is for myself.

"You don't feel like Mission control is a pretty big step backwards from even the old spaces UI (on a single monitor, it is)?"

I don't personally, but to each his own. I think it is refreshing that they cleaned things up and consolidated what was once multiple disparate UIs (dashboard, expose, and spaces) into a single UI. Formerly, I didn't even try to explain to my wife how to use Spaces because it was just too confusing for her. Now that it's all basically one UI, it is easier to explain and requires no manual configuration. I am a bit annoyed at some minor quirks, like the inability to manually rearrange desktops, but I don't consider it a step back.

"You think Launchpad is not pointless?"

I just simply don't get this complaint. They added a new feature. If you think it's pointless, ignore it, but what is the point of complaining about a new thing which you are not forced to use which does not deprecate any old feature?

Anyway, everyone is certainly welcome to have their complaints, especially someone who has experienced some poor issues, but I agree with the grandparent comment that often someone's configs can get mangled and they can lash out at, in this case, Apple, as though it is entirely their fault. I would be extremely surprised if all of these complaints were entirely valid and the writer of the article were not tinkering with their system intensely to have all these issues pop up.

Having owned an iPhone before owning a Mac, I appreciate Launchpad. I know there's quicker ways to launch, but it feels familiar to me and I like having it available.

I didn't use Spaces before Lion. It's still not perfect but I like it better now with Mission Control. The full screen behaviour is annoying. What if I want to go full screen on a secondary display? Huge oversight and who knows when they'll fix it. (fwiw The reasoning is that if there's only one app the menu bar should be above it or something so you don't have to move your mouse to the second display to show the menu bar. I think it's a lame reason since people w/ multiple displays are typically not grandma types that get confused about such things.)

Maybe old configurations don't mess things up. I had nothing but great experiences with Migration Assistant and upgrades since I started using Macs in 2005 until Lion, even through the PPC-Intel transition. I had a problem with my upgraded Lion machine though, it no longer connected to my Windows 7 machine's SMB shared volume. After doing a fresh install I was able to connect again and I had tried connecting from 10.6 so I know Lion was at fault. That's the only issue I had but it does lend some credibility to the fact that old configurations can be problematic, in my eyes.

Man, this beggars belief.

I've never had a kernel panic, ever, except when playing with bad kexts, and when everyone was all gung-ho getting XP running on the first Intel Macs.

I used spaces before and prefer mission control. I also have an external monitor so I am not sure what he is talking about it not supporting a second screen.

Pre-Lion, the spaces interaction with second screens was outright bad. It was wrong, it did not work well, it simply wasn't even considered in the design.

Now, each set of spaces is segregated by monitor, instead of every set being paired. If you're actually trying to manage lots of simultaneous tasks on multiple monitors, this state of affairs is radically better (and is the default for many Linux window managers, which have long ago addressed and solved multi-monitor problems because their user constituency is full of people in that space). In this regard, Lion is much better than Snow Leopard.

Yeah I'm not sure I love Mission Control, and full screen mode definitely has its issues, but I used Spaces for years and it insurmountable problems (windows disappearing, difficulty moving windows/apps around). Likewise, Exposé was almost useless to me with the volume of windows I had.

Mission Control has its issues, but it already seems much more powerful. Four finger swipe and control arrow integration makes it at least usable. I'm still figuring out how space reorganization works, but I'm at least as productive as I was with SL Spaces.

His having had such problems with XP that he was looking forward to Vista [1] certainly supports that idea.

[1] Two assertions I have never, ever heard before.

I wonder if his issues stem from using Lion on older Mac hardware, the same pain point most Vista users had when upgrading on hardware that was clearly not capable of handling it.

With that said, Lion runs sweetly on my MBP without any serious issues to date. I bought it brand new with Lion and there haven't been any weird events aside from WiFi cutting out on wake up. 10.7.1 fixed that for me.

I have an iMac from 2007. And after upgrading I experienced most of these issues. Even thought I love most of new Lion features.

I am happy to know, it works fine for most people. May I try to make a clean install. But if it doesn't work better, I'll have to downgrade.

I don't think I have a "strange" configuration. I don't remind playing with the kernel or using very specific configuration.

Try a clean install. As always, this is the preferred method for upgrading. (This is because there can be user-installed software that had explicit dependencies on the older environment.)

And just FYI, to do a clean install with only one download of Lion you need to burn a disk or create a USB stick before you install it because it deletes the installer.

See http://lifehacker.com/5823096/how-to-burn-your-own-lion-inst...

I never experienced any of the Vista issues either. That doesn't mean the issues didn't exist or that Vista was a good product.

I agree, I haven't had these issues either. Lion has worked very well for me and my old MacBook Pro is actually faster because of it. The one persistent bug I have is opening files/links into full-screened apps. For example, clicking a link in Twitter won't switch the screen to Chrome if it's in full-screen and I've had worse problems on that front.

Me either. He specifically mentions Steam, and I was just playing TF2 last night on my 2008 MBP with no issues.

I have not personally experienced any of the items that that he is reporting on either of my home systems, both of which are running Lion. This article smacks of link bait.

I would have to disagree. Have experienced at least 5 of the things that he mentions on two separate Macs.

Address book, which he doesn't mention, has also been redesigned and had a number of very useful features removed.

Which five things?

Also, did you do a clean install recently, which would indicate that configurations should still be fine, or did you upgrade from a previous OS, which could (but shouldn't) have an unusual/broken configuration?

Sticking to his article:

"Mail crashes all the time." "Fullscreen apps have a habit of just vanishing. They’re running, but they’re not showing." "Finder periodically decides you don’t need to see all your windows any more." "iTunes boot time is measured in aeons." "The “Something has crashed, send a report to Apple” window might as well be your Desktop Picture."

Happen to agree that Launchpad and Mission Control aren't great but that's just my personal opinion.

On both machines I upgraded from the previous OS.

Me either. I've upgraded about half a dozen Macs with Lion at this point with no problems at all. The rating for Lion on the Mac App Store is 4 starts with over 150 reviews so it seems to be working well for most people.

I agree, I haven't had these issues either. Lion has worked very well for me and my old MacBrook Pro is actually faster because of it. The one persistent bug I have is opening files/links into full-screened apps. For example, clicking a link in Twitter won't switch the screen to Chrome if it's in full-screen and I've had worse problems on that front.

I have to agree, I'm not having any issues with Lion. Everyone I know that has a Mac or Macbook has updated to Lion without any issues and I've heard no complaints. The biggest issue I did see was one friend that had problems with plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator (i think it was) which was fixed within days.

Maybe he is having small hardware issues. Sometimes you won't notice them until you upgrade lets say your video driver (or parts of the OS using them different).

I'm guessing he upgraded an older mac. I have a new macbook air and don't have any problem.

I have a 2007 white MacBook. Lion runs just great for me.

Literally the only issue he listed that I've experienced is the super-slow Mission Control opening. But I'm on a 4 year old laptop so I'm not surprised.

> Sometimes I wonder how some people's configurations get so wonky

Warez. Many expensive applications (especially audio/3d editing software) comes with a dongle. To "crack" the apps people write kernel extensions that simulate such dongles.

Mix that with a new kernel and you get the perfect disaster.

I'm pretty disappointed with Lion. Though, I don't see the problems this guy mentions... There are wireless problem on my iMac.. even after the update to fix the wifi problems... but I'm most disappointed with the complete "FU" Lion gives to multi-monitor support... using mission control is really really painful in a multi-monitor setup. Not to mention I don't actually get to use the new fullscreen apps because Apple hates that I have a second monitor I'd like to use (Just guessing here... why else would these blatant multi-monitor issues exist if not to intentionally hurt me?).

why else would these blatant multi-monitor issues exist if not to intentionally hurt me?

I'm using Lion with multiple monitors, too, and have been annoyed by this. But the company that sells https://www.apple.com/displays/ definitely didn't do this to intentionally hurt users with multiple monitors.

My assumption is that, because of the dramatic changes to the desktop workflow in Lion, they needed to cut some features to meet summer deadline. Since relatively few users need multiple monitors, that's one area where they skimped.

We'll probably see some sanity restored in a minor update to the OS.

I think some of the issues border on intentional. A particularly infuriating example is how DVD Player really did go BACKWARDS. There used to be an option in DVD Player's preferences for whether to black out the other screen when in fullscreen or to leave it usable. DVD Player was perfect before (I used to watch a movie on one monitor and code on the other). They actually went in and removed this. DVD Player now has the "new" behavior of 1) forcing me to full screen on the right hand screen regardless of where the DVD window was originally, and 2) Putting felt all over the other screen. Its incredibly annoying even when I DONT want to use the other screen, because I certainly don't want distracting full brightness felt on the other screen. I simply cannot understand this choice. Who went in and DELETED those lines of code?

I don't think we'll see any sanity return to this BTW. The very foundation of Full Screen is made in such a way to make it conceptually difficult to fix. All these problems stem from the decision that full screen should ALSO throw you into another new space, which makes it incompatible with the old workflows of having other apps running on the other screen.

It was such a silly decision (to support "swiping" I guess?) Full screen already existed before, all they should have done is update the iLife/iWork apps to support the old full screen and encouraged developers to do the same. Instead they over engineered this complex system of spaces (a feature that only PRO users are used to BTW) and broke old features. I really don't understand it.

I doubt it was intentional. DVD Player went from using their own custom full-screen code to the new system standard full-screen mode (as evidenced by the full-screen button in the title bar). This probably let them delete hundreds of lines of code; it also causes the problems you mentioned.

Be patient; I'm sure they'll fix it soon.

Hah! I don't actually believe it was to "hurt" anyone, It was just a bit of hyperbole. I do, however, think that Apple's vision for the future of desktop computing is sans multiple monitors.

> I do, however, think that Apple's vision for the future of desktop computing is sans multiple monitors.

Which is very weird considering their Thunderbolt monitor is specifically marketed for use with their laptops, and for chainability (so not just 2 monitors but at least 3).

Yup. This image (from Apple's marketing material) makes me optimistic: https://ssl.apple.com/displays/images/overview_hero2.jpg

> I do, however, think that Apple's vision for the future of desktop computing is sans multiple monitors.

Because they fudged support in the initial release of Lion? Get real. If you're so effected by it, downgrade until there's an update that fixes it. But don't assume that the workstation of choice among graphic artists is going to completely drop multi-monitor support just because it isn't exactly how you want it right at release.

Apple will take money from pro users but doesn't care about them at all from a strategic perspective. See Final Cut Pro X and the total lack of consideration for businesses running the previous version. No, Mac OS X won't suddenly drop support for multiple monitors, but I don't expect Apple to devote much time to making new features work well with them.

It seems like the guy is just trolling/venting, but I've had the same thoughts of "Apple's Vista".

I don't want to add to alarmist dirt tossing, but I've been running Lion since the first public betas.

My thoughts each release as it evolved, long before Jobs resigned, were "I don't think Jobs is around anymore, if he were, he wouldn't let this crap go".

LaunchPad, Mission Control -- these things were neat at first, but then they got annoying and cumbersome.

The new concept of scrolling is not intuitive, whenever I use it, I still get this momentary interrupt in my brain.

It would be intuitive if my fingers were on the screen scrolling, but since they're on a trackpad that's about a foot and 90 degrees away from the screen, it's not intuitive to me.

The UI is getting more Windows control panelish, things are needlessly being abstracted or hidden, but I need these things regularly, so now I have to sort through 2 more views before I get to what I need, or worse, launch Terminal and use 'defaults write'.

I'm not sure why the Dock is there anymore. It feels superfluous with Spotlight search and the non-suck portions of LaunchPad and Mission Control around.

Instead of an elegant transition between Mac OS X and iOS, it seems like clunky patchwork.

"My thoughts each release as it evolved, long before Jobs resigned, were "I don't think Jobs is around anymore, if he were, he wouldn't let this crap go".

LaunchPad, Mission Control -- these things were neat at first, but then they got annoying and cumbersome."

Yes, exactly what I thought. Too much junk stuffed in. A more Jobsian-approach would have cut features ruthlessly.

Even the Time Machine-ish file saving time travel is full of holes. I wrote a critique of it whilst wrestling with it was still fresh in my mind.

http://userxperience.posterous.com/document-versioning-inter...

Bits of it are great, but there are so many gotchas and bit of too small UI, it's hard to believe it got much love.

There's a lot of nice under-the-hood stuff (separating stuff into processes, autosave, that kind of stuff), but the UI doesn't look compelling.

I upgraded my Macbook from Snow Leopard to Lion, then gave it to the girlfriend. She'd never used a Mac before. She didn't even notice that the scrolling was the opposite way round to other devices. Not until I pointed it out to her after she'd been using it for a while.

I now use a Lenovo Thinkpad T420 with Ubuntu instead. It's come a hell of a long way over the past few years.

I'm having the same experience. I got a 2011 Air (my first Mac) and Lion seems pretty decent. Scrolling feels natural, and everything seems to work as it should.

My only complaints are the keyboard (as a programmer I really miss home/end/page up/page down), and that I can't reopen closed tabs in Safari.

What I really like about OS X is that almost all text controls in system use old Unix shortcuts for moving around text (same as Emacs is using), so you might just learn them: ⌃a, ⌃e, ⌘<, ⌘> for line/document begin/end respectively. There are more of them, you can go through Emacs tutorial to learn them.

Reopen closed tabs is, afaik, Command-z

That only works immediately after I close the tab. If I close one tab, close another tab, navigate to some other site, browse it for a while, and then decide to reopen that two closed tabs, then I can't do that.

The lack of a right mouse button is my biggest Mac pet peeve (yes, I know you can gesture on, but I find I often screw up the gesture).

How do you screw up tapping with two fingers?

fn+arrow keys do home/end/page up/page down.

I know about that, but those arrow keys are so tiny. It becomes even more awkward if I want to select text (e.g. shift-fn-left).

In firefox and chrome, reopening tabs is cmd-shift-t.

How's the battery life as compared to Windows?

What this article doesn't mention is the horrendous problems with Lion Server. Permissions (via Get Info) that you can set, but that magically don't get set for no apparent reason. Server app that can't do something so simple as assign users to groups (Poof, your assignments are gone. No reason, no explanation). SMBX is a steamy pile of sh!t that is nearly unusable. It constantly drops Windows clients for no apparent reason. Didn't save? Tough cookies. It renders many applications unusable that worked fine in Samba. It retains file locks, so that after you close a document you can't open it again.

I abandoned SMBX and compiled Samba 3.6.0 It's stable. Doesn't drop connections. No retained file locks. The apps that SMBX broke run again. But it also ignores Mac ACLs. Only recognizes Posix permissions, so this comes with its own set of problems. There's no way to force AFP to use a particular umask when creating files, and by default, Mac clients have a umask of 022, so even if you enable set-GID to force a group assignment, you can't force group permissions without re-configuring every Mac on the network to use a umask of 002. Very painful.

The only redeeming thing about this whole experience is that we have a blazingly fast Thunderbolt RAID array (something that is only possible on Lion unless you really want to use a Macbook Pro as a server). If you ignore their Server app, use Workgroup Administrator instead, and set all permissions from the command line, AFP works like a dream.

And for those who would say, "Why don't you use Linux then?" We used to. Both Netatalk and Samba get horribly slow when you are working with very large file systems. Netatalk because the CNID DB gets unwieldy, and Samba because of problems running case-insensitive sharing on a case-sensitive filesystem.

Some issues I've noticed with Lion (on shiny new iMac hardware, fresh out of the box):

- Can't install XCode 3.2.6 without a workaround (I need to be on the same version of XCode as my co-workers). I had to use this:

http://catacombae.blogspot.com/2011/07/installing-xcode-326-...

- Awful flash support in Chrome (browser of choice) on day one. Now working thankfully. If I loaded up a new tab in Chrome that used flash, literally the entire tab was transparent (wouldn't render at all). It was nice that flash-based ads wouldn't render though ;-) looked like a newspaper after someone cut out a few coupons.

- Spotlight couldn't even find pre-installed applications (e.g. Safari). Took a few days for this to work itself out.

- Finder was completely screwed. Had to go hunting for "Macintosh HD" and manually add a shortcut in the left pane in Finder (needed to look into the hard drive directly to rectify the XCode issue above).

- NTFS USB drives (MS Windows file format) no longer supported at all. This worked fine in Snow Leopard. Incredibly irritating, as I intended using my USB drive to move over files from a Snow Leopard machine. Disk utility refuses to mount the USB drive.

All this made for a poor out-of-box experience. Would love to have the option of getting the same new iMac, except running Snow Leopard.

When 10.5.0 Leopard came out an replaced 10.4.x Tiger, it was quite buggy until around 10.5.3. Aside from Snow Leopard which was a special case, new OS X releases are typically buggy for the first few months.

Vista was a dog because it was slow, resource intensive, and Microsoft never issued any updates to fix it.

The only thing I thought was a bad idea in Lion was Time Machine snapshotting your local HD every hour, to itself, when your backup drive isn't available (like on a laptop). That would kill I/O whenever it ran, slowing everything. Shutting that off fixed 90% of the problems I had.

>Vista was a dog because it was slow, resource intensive, and Microsoft never issued any updates to fix it.

That's somewhat disingenuous. RTM Vista and Vista today are hardly the same thing, and Microsoft was pushing out updates to fix updates within the first couple of months it was on the market. The infamous slow file copy bug being a great example of this:

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2007/04/17/222983/Mic...

You're correct; they did patch and update it to fix various issues. They didn't abandon it or anything.

The thing which bugged me the most about Vista was that it was slower than XP. Significantly. And for no apparently good reason. From a user perspective, it did mostly the same stuff, but required so much more resources in terms of CPU, RAM, and GPU. Going from Win 98SE to XP wasn't like that at all. XP did need more RAM, but it ran faster and was less buggy. Apps and games ran on it fine.

IT shops I worked at avoided Vista like the plague, and so did many businesses. The general consensus was that it was slow, something I and many fellow IT workers experienced whenever we used it. All of us waited for SP1, and when it came and did really nothing, everyone basically went "Well, XP until Windows 7 comes out!".

Plus its UI was annoying. "You just told me to do something. Are you sure you want me to do what you just told me to?" YES/NO dialog boxes everywhere. Great for someone whose never used a PC before. Terrible for anyone who has more than a year's experience. UAC was a mess. Yes, you could fix most of that by tweaking the OS, but there was no way to get your settings to easily follow you around PC-to-PC outside of roaming profiles via Active Directory. The default out-of-the-box experience was terrible compared to XP.

Microsoft never issued a patch to fix any of that. They can't; once they ship an OS they sign an unwritten agreement with IT shops and developers saying "this is the standard until Windows 7 comes out". That's a good stance to take sometimes, but not if your root standard is terrible.

The OS should have been delayed another year before release to make it good, but they didn't do that. It's hard to convince IT shops to renew their expensive MVL OS-upgrade contracts if it's been 5 years since the last OS release.

I never really had any issues with Time Machine snapshotting when I don't have my external drive attached. It's worked pretty well for me.

I had a lot of problems when I first installed Lion, but I also had a lot of crap installed on my machine. I did a fresh install of Lion and everything is great. I don't have any of the problems described in the article and I didn't really have many to begin with.

Comparing Vista with Lion is dumb and the article reads as though the author knows it but decided to stick with the idea so that they could get some traffic for their dumb article title.

Might I ask, how did you shut that off? I don't see any configuration option in the System Preferences - Time Machine about snapshotting every hour. Thanks.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3236857?start=0&tst...

I use Lion every day for at least 8 hours and I'm just not seeing all the problems this article talks about. There are problems and Lion is NOT ready, it's a good beta basically. It feels like the author got all of their friends niggles together in to one massive article where as in reality only a few niggles affect him.

I've had problems getting one of my side projects to work well with Lion (MiniTune, on the app store). There is currently a fix going through app store approval and things are slow I guess because Apple have a lot of apps going through the store atm.

It's amazing and infuriating how almost each OS X release breaks many existing applications. They may cost 30$ or 60$ bucks a pop, but then you have to upgrade other vendor's app and it ends up costing you hundreds of dollars.

In Lion, I've read they changed the time machine format. Another reason for me to not upgrade is I'll have to buy something else to replace my MediaSmart server that centralizes all my backups (among other awesome features).

One begins to see the value of Windows backward compatibility approach when your always able to keep using the software you own...

If Apple wants to improve OS X here are 2 basic suggestions: 1- fix this Finder POS; if you want to do anything productive managing more than a few files, you're currently better off using the shell. Not so with Windows Explorer which is actually productive. Heck, I had to resort to using Windows the day I wanted to visually classify in folders thousands of pictures. 2- fix multi-monitor support: the insistence on keep that top menu bar sticking to a single monitor is awful. It hasn't changed since my Mac SE. I find menus sticking to Windows more useful especially when wanting to use more than one screen. Then, in Lion fullscreen, they decide to kill the second monitor? Come on. Show some multi-monitor love for once in your life. Using more than one screen on OS X is a total mess.

Wait, which applications make Lion support a paid upgrade? I haven't run into a single one yet.

I'm the first to lambast Apple when they push some crap but Lion is a minor improvement to the previous incarnation. I don't see any of the things he mentions. Those crashes make it sound like has faulty RAM because aside from Chrome crashing once I've never had an issue.

I agree. I just RMA'd some ram that was causing very similar issues to his (kernel panics, random apps crashing, etc). I'd never seen bad memory on OSX, so it was difficult to diagnose (besides the fact that it was a very recent upgrade).

Really don't agree with his assessment. I'm loving Lion - Pretty much all the little updates have improved my experience of OS X.

I agree. In particular:

1. Airdrop is great. 2. Full screen apps make me happy. (I only use one monitor, though.) 3. I love being able to group items by date last opened in multi-column view.

My biggest gripe: Why doesn't the finder automatically extend the width of the rightmost column to use up the remainder of the window? I'm always adjusting column widths to see long file names.

Yep Yep, same here. I was hating on the scrolling for the first couple of hours, but now I'm completely use to it and it works great.

I haven't hear anyone complain about Lion in my office or on a personal basis and the people I know would complain if they saw an issue.

Has this guy ever used Windows Vista?! I agree Lion is a bit underwhelming, but that's nowhere near the disappointment (Microsoft did promise a lot at PDC 2003) users had when Vista actually showed up years after schedule, bloated, slow and ugly.

BTW, his crashes may be hardware (memory) related. I'd advise him to run memtest or to take his Mac to the nearest Apple store to have it checked.

Out of curiosity, why was Vista such a big disappointment?

It was years after schedule, there were broken promises (which end users weren't aware of) and ugly is subjective, but I never found it to be slow.

Windows 7 only seems slightly faster than Vista, but is much, much faster (both in GUI responsiveness and disk/network IO) than Snow Leopard and Lion on the same hardware.

It seems like more than actual disappointment in Vista, people didn't really see a pressing need to upgrade to Vista, as XP, with all its warts, worked fine for their purposes.

It was disappointing for me because of the broken promises - the PDC 2003 video shows a very impressive GUI with skillful use of animation. WinFS would also offer vastly improved file management. Finally, being heavily based on managed code would make it both more secure and easier to develop for. But I agree most prospective Vista users were not aware of any of this. I, however, was.

FOr most users, the disappointment came from the "Vista Ready" sticker on computers that could run XP very well, but were barely capable of running Vista at acceptable speed and the Aero look.

Ah yes, now I remember the Vista Ready fiasco. That was a pretty big mistake on Microsoft's part.

My personal Lion problems have been Chrome and TweetDeck.

1) Chrome crashes all the time to the point of almost being unusable. I've tried removing extensions, and Flash and it doesn't seem to matter. I also have a problem where typing in Chrome's address bar is like typing in molasses. Each letter take about a second to appear. This problem started after my upgrade to Lion.

2) TweetDeck seems to throw the entire windowing system into disarray. Weird things like if I try to minimize the app, it'll sometimes automatically pop back up. If TweetDeck is running in the background, and I'm typing in the Chrome address bar, my system will sometimes bring-forward an entirely different application to the foreground. If I close TweetDeck, these problems all go away. I've tried re-installing both TweetDeck and AIR and neither seems to fix the problem.

I love OSX and my MacBook Pro, but I hate the fact that an OS upgrade I paid for made my overall experience using the device worse.

I am on the chrome dev channel and have had zero problems. Hope this helps.

Thanks. I'll give it a try.

The last two or three releases on the dev branch of Chrome seem to have cleared up all the Chrome crashes for me. It was however unusable for a few weeks right after the Lion release.

Things broken in Lion for me - 1) Flash is broken very badly in Google Chrome. Slightly lesser broken in Firefox. 2) Resizing a video playing window will show artifacts. 3) There is a lag in the desktop showing up after credentials are entered into the login screen. 4) A small number of apps appear to start automatically on bootup. I dont know if Leopard is trying to remember what I was running before I shutdown.

All things being said none of them is a major issue. Then again I was a Vista user back in the day and I was just as satisfied with it. My only nitpick with Vista was that copying directories with lot of small files was very slow.

Try flushing your Browsing Data in Chrome. Fixed flash for me.

What really annoys me is that they broke all my development tools for no good reason (where did gcc go?), broke my wireless, and the new features are underwhelming at best. If I had it to do over again I would definitely not upgrade.

You have to install the new version of XCode. That should pull in all of the relevant development tools. They're not a part of the standard OSX install.

That's fair enough, and thanks for the tip. I think my larger point is that I don't like that they actively removed something that was working fine for me. If it was a fresh install I'd be fine with it, but upgrading a previous install shouldn't be equivalent to "uninstalling stuff randomly" to me.

It does that every OS upgrade. I think the reasoning is that that particular developer toolchain was tied to that OS. Now that you're using a new OS, you shouldn't use the old toolchain. This particularly mattered in the 10.5 to 10.6 upgrade, because they extended gcc to support "blocks," which were tied into the Grand Central Dispatch implementation in the kernel.

It would be nice if they automatically detected, "Oh, you have XCode installed, so you would probably like the new version, too."

I haven't had any of the problems mentioned. It's certainly been smoother than upgrading to Snow Leopard was.

I also think think the backwards scrolling will catch on - Windows will be copying this in about 5 years. More often than not, Apple's "weird" UI changes turn out to be good ones.

From TFA: "You know when you used to have no choice but to use Windows XP ... Well, you must remember, then, how annoying it was to have the same bugs and weird glitches happen over and over again;"

Nope .. I must have used a different Xp.

I don't know what this guy does to his computers, but considering his Windows claims (I maintain that Vista was a significant improvement over XP, with some very poor publicity), I find it hard to believe his Lion experiences are typical.

People who are lamenting the loss of "Front Row" should spend an hour and download, install, and configure PLEX.

It is, without a doubt, a great piece of software. Just being able to serve _all_ my movies to my iPad (without having to jump through iTunes HomeSharing issues), Android phone, or stream through the internet (something that iTunes won't even do).

You forgot to mention the constant kernel panics, there's a 70 page thread about it in the Lions discussion forum on apples website.

This is what got me to switch back to Lion. I probably could have lived with most of the other issues (the biggest: multimonitor setups), but the fact I could get to my desktop after login without kernel panicking was an issue.

I do presentations rather frequently, and the thing I feared was that it would KP during one of those. I plan on upgrading back up to Lion in another point release or two.

I had many similar problems, so many, in fact, that I asked for (and got) my money back for the Lion purchase. Things are a little better if you do a clean install instead of an upgrade from Snow Leopard, and a little worse if you have been upgrading from before Snow Leopard to SL to Lion.

Yesterday my SSD died (writes failing in parts of the disk), and Lion seems more stable after restoring from Time Machine (which boggles my mind). It's all very weird and I've been calling it OS X Vista for the last four weeks or so. I hope 10.7.2 fixes the rest of the ugly bugs; most of the lost features and weird defaults can luckily be fixed on the commandline or with third party tools (but this, too, feels like Windows of old - "Sure, you can simply edit this 400-character registry key to get sane behavior!")

Another vote for not seeing any of these problems.

Also, I think it should be mentioned that Lion cost me 10 bucks per machine to upgrade. Vista did not.

I agree with about a third of this. I like the new gestures, but some of the new UI animations are gratuitous. Launchpad seems pointless, and I've had a couple issues with Spotlight. One thing that REALLY bugs me is that pinch and zoom in Safari randomly stops working.

I had had an issue where some gestures quit on me. I found that if I went to the settings, unchecked, and then rechecked the broken gesture, it worked again. Hasn't happened again.

He forgot to mention how completely and randomly broken Launchctl is under Lion. Unless you are root, about half the time when you invoke launchctl load, you get a crash with debug output. And any vagrant user can tell you how frustratingly off-kilter NFS has become.

He also forgot to mention that a very large number of people were getting kernel panics from using flash in a browser. How that regression got out the door, I will never understand. It does not inspire confidence.

Doesn't surprise me. ptrace() on the first version or two of iOS would panic the kernel with TODO messages.

Generally, XNU calls panic() at the slightest sign of trouble, while Linux tends toward more fault resilience (through the oops system, etc).

What is up with GarageBand? This thing wants to near peg CPU often. I thought it was just my sister's config. But then I hear on the This Is My Next podcast that Josh Topolsky is having the same problem. And Nilay says he's not having a problem as its using 13% of CPU ... on an 8-core system. It totally brings the system to its knees.

Lion is not Vista. Vista (IMHO) had a rotten core where as Lion doesn't. There are, however, issues that I suspect will be fully resolved via another update or two.

When I upgraded to Lion I experienced a few minor stability issues (particularly with Finder) so I performed a clean install. Have had no issues since. I would be curious to see stability of a machine that has been upgraded from 10.5 -> 10.6 -> 10.7 vs one that has simply had a clean install of 10.7.

[EDIT as I got downvoted presumably for knocking on Vista]

Vista shipped with the version 6.0 kernel. This was known to be a fragmented, "consumer grade" kernel largely based on Win XP. The 6000 kernel build had so many issues that SP1 completely upgraded the kernel to the improved 6.0.6001 which was essentially the Server 2k8 kernel. It was an improvement but too little, to late.

>Vista (IMHO) had a rotten core

Windows 7 would suggest you're dead wrong about this. W7 is largely Vista with some polish and a rebranding.

I'm not suggesting that at all. I think W7 is arguably the best OS Microsoft has released (except maybe for Win2k). At the time of Vista Microsoft was managing 2 seperate Kernels, one for consumers and one for servers. The 6000 build Vista was based off was (IMHO) a more bloated XP build.

They made a great move by consolidating to their Server kernel. Windows 7 reflects this in its speed and stability.

Vista SP1 and Server 2008 shipped with the same kernel:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463415

MS has also very explicitly said that the W7 kernel is built on top of what they did with Vista:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2008/05/ms-no-new-kern...

W7 is nothing more than an evolution of what they did with Vista. Vista and W7 have far more in common with each other than either does with XP.

> Vista (IMHO) had a rotten core ... I think W7 is arguably the best OS Microsoft has released

You are overly negative on Vista and overly positive in Win7. I think you fell for the hype. The differences between them are minor.

Vista shipped with 6.0.6000. Build 6000 = BAD Vista SP1 RTM shipped with 6.0.6001. Build 6001 = GOOD

http://apcmag.com/microsoft_replaces_vista_kernel_in_sp1.htm

I've been using Mac OS X Lion as my main development machine for the last month or two, and it is absolutely fantastic. I have had none of the issues he mentioned. Mail has been faster than ever, I don't have random windows closing (when in full screen) and when I drag and drop to Safari there is no issue what so ever.

Do I like the new Mission Control UI over Spaces? No. That, and multi-monitor support being particularly broken makes me sad, but I have learned to live with it for now.

I have no idea why this guy is seeing all of the issues he is seeing. I didn't do a clean install either, so far my files have come from:

10.2 -> 10.3 (PPC) -> 10.4 (Intel, used migration tool) -> 10.5 -> 10.6 -> 10.7.

Without any major issues.

Articles like this take the experience of one, and all the variabilities within that experience and try to apply it to everyone. I have Lion on all machines. I beta tested it, and the service packs.

It's fine. It's progressive and additive not subtractive on the user experience side (i.e., I never use Launchpad).

A Vista moment?

Try to find Microsoft in any fashion doing anything as ambitious as iCloud is right now. In fact, try to find a company right now doing anything as ambitious and tightly coordinated as Lion/iCloud/iOS5. The engineering going into it is staggering in scope.

Vista was a major problem for MS because users stayed away from it in droves. This article makes no mention of that happening to Apple with Lion, which effectively cuts off the comparison at the knees.

Everyone thinks Jobs was a perfectionist, when in reality, he just made sure stuff worked. Vista was that "Gates Moment" - the first major release of Windows since he left...

Linkbait.

Really ? A Vista Moment? Microsoft puts ZERO innovation into it's products. They are boring and unimaginative. Stagnated metaphors and stale esthetics. Lion, on the other hand, is a natural progress for OS X, and form me, an amazing one.

It defiantly boosts my productivity. Not that Snow Leopard was bad, but I upgraded all of our computers while I was still beta testing Lion. It is simply a very useful upgrade,

Mail crashes a lot? It's been more stable than Snow Leopard's, for me. I generally leave it running for a few days at a go, consuming >1000 emails per day, and it's even starting and searching and everything more quickly than the previous version with less than 1/4 of the messages.

Mission control and launchpad - generally a miss, but not horrific. Address book, on the other hand...

I have to say that this post hits the mark. My older mac that received the lion upgrade is now a piece of crap...i get the beach ball effect every few minutes.

Thanks for the Vista Moment Apple.

As someone who has a three year old MacBook Pro that doesn't support multiple finger gestures besides scroll and right-click, I will happily be running Snow Leopard for the foreseeable future.

I had a few funny moments before I did a clean install of Lion. I've never had great success upgrading any major OS change, Mac or PC. Fresh installs always work best for me.

I haven't experienced a lot of the issues he mentioned, but the amount of times that Mail has crashed on me during an auto-save is probably approaching triple digits now.

Been a windows guy since I found out what a computer is. Two days ago, I purchased a Macbook Air for school. This is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I don't have a single problem that the author mentioned. He probably upgraded an old Mac to Lion and is having all these problems. I haven't had a single crash. Launchpad is a good thing to happen. There's no clutter when you are trying to look for an application. If you are thinking about purchasing a Mac with Lion or upgrading to Lion, don't believe this guy.

isn't 2 days a bit too early to speak?

Please post again after 1-2 years.

I've upgraded from Lion to Snow Leopard and havent looked back. After using it for a month, switching back was a breath of fresh air.

The most annoying thing to me is that there is no longer a 'sort by kind' option for arranging files within a folder. WTF.

Don't Finder's View > Sort By and View > Arrange By options do the trick? There's also the View > View Options for tweaking all of those options per folder.

I really really really hate the new square buttons.

He had my attention until he brought up Front Row.

I don't experience these issues, but some of the Lion eye candy is downright wall-bangingly stupid. I want a vegan option for iCal.

Thankfully, someone else did too:

http://macnix.blogspot.com/2011/07/change-mac-os-x-107-lion-...

FWIW, I've completely given up on iCal in favor of Fantastical.

Linkbait.

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