Install Snow Leopard on 2011 MBA, STILL no way?

[KnightWRX]

Yep, they're helpful for the blind as well.

I think backlit keyboards are functional and nice to have. I think if you can't touch type, they're also pretty nifty.

I wish my DAS Ultimate had backlit keys. That way, I could see the blank keys in the dark.

Anyway, OS X Lion is very nice, I especially love Mission Control. Quite happy with it on my 2010 MBA and frankly, I've not noticed any problems with battery life.

 

[jdechko]

The most advanced OS 10.7 should at least compete with 10.6.x at its first release version. It is Apple's duty for this.

Snow Leopard has had 9 releases vs. Lion's 3. Leopard had 9. Tiger had 12.

Snow Leopard had some serious issues when it was released as well, as in massive user data loss. Leopard had some serious issues too with APE (a common piece of software) crashing the system.

When you go in and re-write an entire operating system, there are bound to be bugs. And if you stick around long enough, Lion will be just as stable as SL. And then 10.8.0 will be released and people will complain about how awful it is compared to 10.7.whatever-the-latest-point-release-of-Lion-is.

So Chill, there's a lot worse bugs than slightly worse battery life.

 

[eeptman]

If no one talk about it, typically, I dun expect any improvement will be released. Just look at what we got so far. Their first version of products become unreliable. We have to wait for at lease three or four update according to their past credit.

Did I mention the inconsistence of gesture while Lion first came out? When you enable Lion's new gestures, the original back-and-forth gesture in Finder suddenly doesn't work anymore…neither in iTunes nor in Mac App Store.

The devil is in the detail, isn't it?

What I mention before are those product reviews won't tell. They are also part of user's experiences. I do glad to see some Lion's new features. But some great feature could be kept among OS's iterations.

Would it be hard to implement Quicklook's PDF zoom-in in full screen mode?
Would it be hard to provide a spotlight setting to set higher priority of Dictionary look-up result?

These are features ever exist... we haven't even talk about those never exist. I am not asking for big features.

 

[cathyy]

I used Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard & Lion. Lion is the only OS which I heavily dislike. Feels slow and sluggish and ruined some things about SL which I liked. I especially hate how it handles Spaces & Expose.

I'm just glad that I decided to buy a 2010 Refurb MBA instead of a 2011 MBA and therefore I have the choice to use SL.

 

[newdeal]

...

I especially hate how upon booting it loads all these windows I don't want open just because they were open when it shut down. That is really irritating

 

[Vantage Point]

It's threads like this that keep my using SL. For myself, it ain't broke so I had no reason to fix (upgrade) it.

 

[ddong]

Thread is about SL on 2011 MBA. Not 2010.

 

[2IS]

My battery life on LION vs SL on my 2010 MBA is virtually the same. SL was a bit better because I was able to run CoolBook on it and lower the processors voltage which I can't do on Lion, but without cookbook running the battery life is a wash.

That said, "instant on" worked much better and was far more "instant" under SL.

 

[monkeybagel]

I felt the same way with Lion when it came out. However, with the full screen applications and being able to swipe to Fusion, Terminal, or whatever else, I must say I could not go back now. If you only used Lion long enough to play with it and reverted back, I would encourage you to do a nice clean installation of Lion. Particularly on an SSD Air, it runs excellent, gets good battery life, and the full screen apps with the trackpad are wonderful. To be able to swipe over to Windows Server 2003 to do Windows administration tasks is an excellent feature.

Give it a shot. I am more productive in 10.7 than I was 10.6 after using it a while.

 

[prumm]

Down with Lion, Apple's Vista.

Ok, you guys wanna know why people want Snow Leopard back?

Change for change's sake isn't innovation.

1 - Speed. SSD to SSD, Snow Leopard is quicker. Until Lion is quicker, I literally do not give a ***** about it. Lion is bloated.
2 - Rosetta support. It's not the user's fault their software is written in PPC. Doesn't mean we should be forced to stop using it.
3 - LaunchPad. The retarded love child of iOS and AtEase Items (think back people, 1996). I have a Dock, Applications folder and Spotlight to find anything I need far quicker than LaunchPad.
4 - Library (or Libraries). I don't wan't to have to hold an Option key to make it visible in the menu.
5 - Gestures. I don't like them in Lion. I like them in Snow Leopard. You only added Pinch and Spread, but you ruined everything else.
6 - Full Screen Apps. The whole concept of 'maximise' and 'full screen' has been argued as inefficient by Apple for many many years with the green Expand button, which makes a window as big as it needs to be to display the content. Super stupid for anyone who forked out for a THUNDERBOLT DISPLAY which is rendered TOTALLY USELESS WHILE IN FULL SCREEN MODE.
7 - Battery life. Kids, on a 2010 MBA that dual boots between Lion and Snow Leopard, Snow Leopard always sees 1hr+ better battery life under general usage. This is something I've tested personally, besides all the anecdotal evidence I'd see at the bar with customers that have recently upgraded (this includes MBP's also, particularly 17").
8 - Mission Control. DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED! Putting all my windows that are clustered behind windows, and putting them in even smaller clusters where I still can't see them properly?
9 - Repeating keys. I'm sorry, but I'd rather have quick access to repetitive characters than an accented è for every time I write souffle. Oh wait, I'm not French, I still wouldn't use the accent!
10 - Distribution. I don't want to download 4GB worth of data the next time my recovery partition craps out. The EFI partition of a machine becomes corrupted more often that you'd think, and as you cannot use the internal recovery partition to reformat the drive, only the visible volumes, that means you need to use the full-blown internet recovery. Would it cost that much to throw in a USB stick like you used to? Or even CD media?


These are just a few of the multitude of sore spots I have with Lion. After working at the Genius Bar and dealing with the horror stories for so long, I could never offer my personal recommendation for a customer to upgrade.

Change for change's sake isn't innovation.

------

How are we going to get a stable copy of Snow Leopard running on these brilliant machines that are being crippled by Apple's Vista?

 

[oneMadRssn]

How are we going to get a stable copy of Snow Leopard running on these brilliant machines that are being crippled by Apple's Vista?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1352079/

 

[prumm]

Nice

My project for the weekend

 

[Cheffy Dave]

well

I especially hate how upon booting it loads all these windows I don't want open just because they were open when it shut down. That is really irritating

upon rebooting, in the shut down screen uncheck, load all open windows

 

[winterlocked]

9 - Repeating keys. I'm sorry, but I'd rather have quick access to repetitive characters than an accented è for every time I write souffle. Oh wait, I'm not French, I still wouldn't use the accent!

Not to mention the loss of front row. It's nice to have music playing while making souffles.

 

[prumm]

Good try, but...

upon rebooting, in the shut down screen uncheck, load all open windows

In Applications as well! Text Edit, Safari, Logic! I closed them before I shut down! I closed all the windows in the App but no! Everything comes back! I closed down that window full of porn BECAUSE I WAS DONE WITH IT!

It's ***** annoying!

Even worse, to turn it off you have to go digging through preferences and have previously noticed that option was placed NEXT TO THE TEXT SMOOTHING OPTIONS!!! Who the F$%# put it there?!?!

 

[elppa]

When you go in and re-write an entire operating system, there are bound to be bugs.

10.6 was very likely more of a rewrite. Even if it didn't look like one based on the user facing features.

 

[MichaelLAX]

Need Rosetta in Lion? Try: Installing Snow Leopard (and Rosetta) in Parallels 7 in Lion:

Full instructions here

 

[Cheffy Dave]

In Applications as well! Text Edit, Safari, Logic! I closed them before I shut down! I closed all the windows in the App but no! Everything comes back! I closed down that window full of porn BECAUSE I WAS DONE WITH IT!

It's ***** annoying!

Even worse, to turn it off you have to go digging through preferences and have previously noticed that option was placed NEXT TO THE TEXT SMOOTHING OPTIONS!!! Who the F$%# put it there?!?!

Hey glad you found it !

 

[robeddie]

Thread is about SL on 2011 MBA. Not 2010.

Since everyone around here wants to talk around the question rather than answer it directly, the answer is YES, SL can be installed on a 2011 MBA:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1352079/

 

[polee]

Wirelessly posted

I used Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard & Lion. Lion is the only OS which I heavily dislike. Feels slow and sluggish and ruined some things about SL which I liked. I especially hate how it handles Spaces & Expose.

I'm just glad that I decided to buy a 2010 Refurb MBA instead of a 2011 MBA and therefore I have the choice to use SL.

Don't know much about Lion but I did not exercise my option to upgrade when I bought my MBA which came with Snow Leopard in October 2011. Now I am thinking that I have done the right thing?