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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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