I couldn't find a whole lot of material that talked about installations of OS X 10.8 on the oldest supported Macs, so I went ahead and pulled the trigger on an upgrade. Felt safe doing it, since I have a bootable backup of my Snow Leopard installation sitting on my external via SuperDuper.
I'm currently using 10.8 on a Macbook Pro 3,1 (2007), which is the oldest Macbook Pro officially supported.
My impressions so far:
+ Like the UI changes, generally feels like a more "slick" operating system.
+ Especially the scrollbars, those are nice and unobtrusive.
+ I know this is a feature from Lion, but I like that all my stuff re-opens at basically the point I was at when I restart or shutdown.
+ Javascript performance feels smoother, although this could just be an update in Google Chrome.
+ I like the concept of iCloud, although I haven't had much of a chance to use it. I own a WiFi iPad, but not an iPhone.
+ Another Lion thing, but Mail looks lovely.
+ I like Notifications, and that's the main reason I upgraded, but I don't get many of them, so this doesn't seem like a big deal anymore.
- Generally, everything feels a hair slower than it did in Snow Leopard. Probably because my machine is 5 years old.
- My computer randomly shut itself off while I was at the coffee shop today. Had plenty of battery power left. Maybe this will be resolved in an update, but it doesn't inspire confidence.
- I can't resize icons directly in a finder window with that slider like I used to be able to.
- I'm missing my little "pill" button in the upper right. I use this constantly at work when I want to open a couple windows and drag-n-drop from one to the other: I'll have a finder "browser" window open, click the pill to turn it into a "basic" window, then right-click the title bar to select a folder higher up in the directory, which also opens as a "basic" window. This is killing me.
- Mission Control doesn't reveal minimized windows; you have to use the App Expose to get those (didn't used to have to).
- This isn't really the Operating System's fault, but I feel myself wanting to use all the gestures available, and my trackpad doesn't support anything more than two-finger scrolling. I love multitouch gestures on my iPad, and it's sort of frustrating to not have them here. I don't see much utility in having to carry around a $70 Magic Trackpad either.
So generally, I want to like it, but it's just not working for me as well as Snow Leopard did. I'll give it another day, but I'm probably going to revert to my 10.6 installation and chalk it up to having an old Mac. She started on 10.4 Tiger when I first bought her, so I guess it's cool that she's able to make it this far, but 10.6 put her at her best.
I have a newer iMac at work that I might use it on, but then again, probably not, since I'll still be missing my "pill." Plus, I'm on Outlook at work, so all the notifications stuff won't work at all (only works with native Apple apps thus far). At least it was only a waste of $20.
Anyone else have experiences with older (supported) Macs they wanna share? We already have a thread for the unsupported ones.
I'm currently using 10.8 on a Macbook Pro 3,1 (2007), which is the oldest Macbook Pro officially supported.
My impressions so far:
+ Like the UI changes, generally feels like a more "slick" operating system.
+ Especially the scrollbars, those are nice and unobtrusive.
+ I know this is a feature from Lion, but I like that all my stuff re-opens at basically the point I was at when I restart or shutdown.
+ Javascript performance feels smoother, although this could just be an update in Google Chrome.
+ I like the concept of iCloud, although I haven't had much of a chance to use it. I own a WiFi iPad, but not an iPhone.
+ Another Lion thing, but Mail looks lovely.
+ I like Notifications, and that's the main reason I upgraded, but I don't get many of them, so this doesn't seem like a big deal anymore.
- Generally, everything feels a hair slower than it did in Snow Leopard. Probably because my machine is 5 years old.
- My computer randomly shut itself off while I was at the coffee shop today. Had plenty of battery power left. Maybe this will be resolved in an update, but it doesn't inspire confidence.
- I can't resize icons directly in a finder window with that slider like I used to be able to.
- I'm missing my little "pill" button in the upper right. I use this constantly at work when I want to open a couple windows and drag-n-drop from one to the other: I'll have a finder "browser" window open, click the pill to turn it into a "basic" window, then right-click the title bar to select a folder higher up in the directory, which also opens as a "basic" window. This is killing me.
- Mission Control doesn't reveal minimized windows; you have to use the App Expose to get those (didn't used to have to).
- This isn't really the Operating System's fault, but I feel myself wanting to use all the gestures available, and my trackpad doesn't support anything more than two-finger scrolling. I love multitouch gestures on my iPad, and it's sort of frustrating to not have them here. I don't see much utility in having to carry around a $70 Magic Trackpad either.
So generally, I want to like it, but it's just not working for me as well as Snow Leopard did. I'll give it another day, but I'm probably going to revert to my 10.6 installation and chalk it up to having an old Mac. She started on 10.4 Tiger when I first bought her, so I guess it's cool that she's able to make it this far, but 10.6 put her at her best.
I have a newer iMac at work that I might use it on, but then again, probably not, since I'll still be missing my "pill." Plus, I'm on Outlook at work, so all the notifications stuff won't work at all (only works with native Apple apps thus far). At least it was only a waste of $20.
Anyone else have experiences with older (supported) Macs they wanna share? We already have a thread for the unsupported ones.
