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My only issue is battery life on my MBP seems less. I'm running 4GB, so occasional beach balls, but not as many since the latest update.
 
I don't know, I haven't run into ANY significant issues on a mid-2009 white Macbook (old style) with 2gb RAM or an iMac I3 with 4gb. I did an install straight from the Ap Store on both, not a clean install. On balance, I like Lion. Air Drop works flawlessly between the Macbook and iMac (maybe the first of the Macbooks with wifi card that works with Airdrop?), and that is a great feature for me. The biggest thing I don't like is dropping Rosetta as now for a couple of programs I have to use a virtualized Snow Leopard via VirtualBox, which is slow and a bit of a hassle. One thing I haven't tried yet is connecting the Macbook to the TV. I'm a bit apprehensive about that as I have heard some have been having problems and that was also a problem for me in the early days of SL.


I think it depends on how you use your computers. For me, it works well.
 
Ain't That The Truth

I too have no problems with Lion on my iMac. There are no driver issues, its faster than SL was and the "quirky" stuff i got used to in a day. Its no where near the disaster that Vista was, far from it.

Vista was on a par with ME, both nightmares and I still get requests from friends to re-install / update the stuff. I have mentioned this in an older thread, but if MS don't get Windows 8 right, they really are headed down.

Problems of corporate changes etc. Are what keep them alive. My friends (most of whom had PC's) come here for a beer and a "Can I have a go" type of thing.

I still help the ones out who remain in the Windows domain, but the argument is alway's "But you pay so much for your stuff" Gently pointing them in the general direction of the App store, re-sale value etc. and one by one they make the investment.

Clincher? ipad on, 4S on imac on MBA on MBP on ATV streaming everything. "Now I get it" they say.
 
Good post, SixPants. I've always been excited about every new Mac OS, but Lion marks the first time I am not. I haven't installed it due to all the complaints about both sluggishness and bugs that I've read.

It's good you did a clean install. In the past, people who've not done clean installs often have more problems with glitches and sluggishness than people who've done clean installs.

I think there may be a way to reduce (but maybe not eliminate completely) the sluggishness you are experiencing. You said:

My battery life too is in the dumps (2009 MacBook Pro 13", 2GB RAM). Luckily I'm generally plugged-in.

Go to Crucial.com and buy 8 GB of RAM. That would likely help significantly, although maybe not eliminate the sluggishness entirely. Please report back to this thread if you do that, and please share your results.
 
I disagree. Lion has introduced a lot of new features, as Leopard did. Snow Leopard just made Leopard slicker. Doubtless the next OS will streamline Lion further. But Lion is an improvement over Snow Leopard I think. ;)
 
I must be getting old. The idea of needing 8GB to run an OS blows me away. Alas, I guess I'm not one of the "cool kids" anymore!

I can't afford a RAM upgrade right now (2 kids under 2 = no money). And I never read the system requirements so this very well be my own fault. I even came back to delete the rant but saw it was picked up in a nearly-identical thread (guess I don't have original thoughts either).

I think "Vista" is being used as a metaphor. Those of you making apples-to-apples comparisons are possibly missing the metaphorical aspect of referring to a software launch that destabilizes formerly stable software.

I'm so close to reinstalling 10.6 but iCloud seems so great. Then again, Wifi sync takes care of a lot of those issues anyway.
 
I've got used to or worked around most of Lion's new features on my iMac and dumping the Mighty Mouse for the Trackpad helped a lot. I sometimes suffer with the freeze ups due to a lack of RAM but I'm already maxed out at 4GB so I'll have to just live with that.

While I'd never compare it to Vista, I don't think I'll ever accept Apple decision to drop 'Save As'. :mad:
 
I don't use mission control at all, and generally don't use launchpad, outside of those features, I find that Lion has been a stable OS.

I'd like apple to improve both of those items before too long, there's potential in both but in their current incarnation they're not very useful
 
I don't use mission control at all, and generally don't use launchpad, outside of those features, I find that Lion has been a stable OS.

I'd like apple to improve both of those items before too long, there's potential in both but in their current incarnation they're not very useful

I've managed to tweak Mission Control to make it behave better and only ever see launchpad when I make it's multi-touch short cut by mistake. :)
 
Lion has some issues here and there. Kind of like growing pains, but I don't think it's like Vista. Maybe a micro Vista, but not quite like that. The missing Save AS is the main thing I'm a little perplexed with. Yes, I know it is somewhat an improvement for those using Save AS as a backup feature as it's not needed anymore. I still have to adjust myself to this auto-versioning (You never lose your work lest your storage device fails) feature. I now have to remember that Duplicate is the feature needed if I want to take a file and create a version of it in a different format. Otherwise, not too bad for a revamp of the OS. Obviously, not every introduced OP System would be as close to seamless as the upgrade to Snow Leopard. Then again, Snow Leopard also got better with time.

I'd probably have more issues with Lion if I didn't see the nice level of improvement already via their patches. They indeed fixed a good number of stuff from their last release or two. Quite a few of them based on stability issues with utilizing the new full-screen and mission control functions with certain content certain ways. It's a powerful tool, when you use it, but with so many ways the user can exploit their use, I was a little shocked they didn't hammer on it in test more. On the other hand, they were quick to squash the bugs I reported on.
 
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I had an iMac and I upgraded it to Lion. I hated it. It didn't make sense in my head. Launchpad seemed useless, fullscreen apps were stupid on a 21" screen, resume was okay but annoying at times, autosave/versions and the lack of save as made me want to cry and the gestures were useless to me since I didn't have a Magic Trackpad or Mouse. To boot, Mission Control seemed buggy and too restricted as far as Spaces are concerned.

However... I have since ditched my iMac and moved onto a MacBook Air. And I hate to say it... but I have re-evaluated my opinion on Lion. Post after post I've bashed Lion on these (and other) forums. For the first time, Lion has made sense. Launchpad and Fullscreen apps are perfect on such a small screen. Resume I still find annoying but bearable and autosave I still don't like but can live with. With a magic trackpad, Lion is a hell of a lot more understandable. Without the gestures on my iMac, Lion's features seemed inconsistent and half baked. But with gestures, it all fits into place. Mission Control appears to be less buggy since the 10.7.2 update, but I'd still like to be able to rearrange spaces and fullscreen apps in it by clicking and dragging.

Lion has grown on me. It is clear to see that it was designed with the MBA in mind. There are still a lot of bugs I want to see fixed though. Such as WiFi drop outs and poor battery life.
 
Lion has some issues here and there. Kind of like growing pains, but I don't think it's like Vista. Maybe a micro Vista,
One of the big issues with Vista was that MS took years to finally roll it out. They promised everyone, developers, consumers the sky. The basically pre-announced all the features and raised everyone's expectations even before a full beta was released.

When Longhorn - renamed to vista rolled out, it had basically no new features except for an annoying security feature that kept prompting you when ever you did an action, like enter the control panel. Plus, for no real new features it was bloated, buggy.

With regard to Lion, apple has added a lot of features to Lion, some people don't like all the features, but that's normal. There are some bugs and even issues with how apple implemented the features, i.e., mission control.

My point is apple may have mis-fired in some respects but Lion is a solid OS that is very popular and in no way resembling vista
 
For me Lion is somewhat like Vista in that I was an XP user when all the Vista stuff happen. Because of Microsoft's and Vista's issues I converted over to Macs.

Now I'm running Lion on three Mac's. Because of Apple's and Lion's issues I've set up Windows 7/Office 2010 installations on two of them. I'm back to about 50% Windows usage now. A Mac Pro with Lion and W7 offers lots of flexibility.
 
After installing Lion (I have been using Snow Leopard for 3 months and 5 months using Leopard) I don't feel like Lion is Windows Vista.
 
For me, and I stress this is MY opinion and MY experience, having spent extended time getting to know the ins and outs of Lion a bit more, Snow Leopard is a far superior user experience on my Mac than Lion.

My initial reaction was WAY off, massively so in fact.

I find when Lion is first booted, it runs brilliantly. Within the hour, it begins acting up. Animations going to/from full screen mode can stutter, as do the animations opening/closing folders on Launchpad.

The system can feel, in general, sluggish (especially scrolling on Safari) after waking from sleep, and the RAM management is quite frankly shocking. Yes, I know the old argument that inactive is the same as free continues, but in my experience RAM must be used and allocated then freed up by quitting the application using it, to become inactive. Lion, again, within the hour allocates any free RAM to inactive and that for me is what bogs my system down.

I used iFreeMem as a trial, and when optimising RAM and returning inactive to free, there was a marked improvement in performance, but Lion should not be turning free memory into inactive memory when nothing has used the RAM and been quit in the first place.

I'm going to relegate Lion to the external partition and bring Snow Leopard "home" over the weekend and put it back on the internal. Even running Snow Leopard from the external WD drive, it's just a slicker, quicker user experience on my Mac (note MY Mac, everything above is MY experience, not me speaking in terms regarding ALL users).

I just can't shake the feeling that the lack of Bertrand Serlet on this project didn't help. OS X up until Snow Leopard never felt bogged down or thrown together, but at times sadly Lion does.

Sure, I'll miss iCloud support since 10.6.9 got scrapped by all accounts, and autocorrect is a nice feature when typing (at times), but sitting here on Snow Leopard right now, my Mac feels like the Mac I loved to use, not the one I sat down and tried to force myself to use when on Lion.
 
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I cannot tell how many times I smile when ppl have posted: Leopard is Apple’s vista, Snow Leopard is Apple’s vista.

It would be just natural for the continuation to happen with Lion…

Apple has never produced an equivalent to Vista, especially the very essence of refinement in 10.6.5 thru 10.6.8.

That said Lion is indeed an eye candy upgrade for those who are iToyz lovers.
 
To the ones that said clean installs fix problems like slowness and such. i have cleaned installed mine after upgrading my sl to lion to see if it would get any quicker. well for me it was just the opposite. it became slower and buggier on my mac mini and it is running 8gb of ram. So for me a clean install made things worse
 
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