"Can anyone tell me what Lion is supposed to do?"

[revelated]

* Someone in the room ventures a response, one that makes an awful lot of sense, something like "It is supposed to improve upon Snow Leopard." *

"So why the fsck doesn't it do that?" retorts Jobs.

"You've tarnished Apple's reputation," Jobs declares. "You should hate each other for having let each other down."




Anyway, I actually did get the subject question asked of me by the IT manager at my work. They bought me a 13" BTO Pro at my request a while back, love the machine, but he was curious if I was going to upgrade, and I told him no.

We have a 2010 Mac Mini server that runs VMs, my 2011 MacBook Pro 13", then I have my Big Apple 17" 2011 Pro, 2010 27" iMac, and a 2010 MacBook Air 11" that I'm in the process of selling. None of these machines have or will see Lion in the near future, for one reason.

I bought the 2011 MacBook Air with Lion, and quite frankly, Lion is the only thing I hate about the machine. I constantly wish I could throw Snow Leopard on there. The general experience is annoying compared to SL, and yes, I know the Jobsians will come out and claim that Lion is still new - basically justifying that Apple is using early adopters as beta testers - but the reality is that Lion just doesn't feel complete enough for general release, at least not to me.

 

[QuarterSwede]

It's not. It's really a near GM beta but that's how Apple has always released major releases. Nothing new honestly. People in the industry generally don't update a major OS X release until 10.x.1 or 10.x.2.

 

[sjinsjca]

Lion has only made my early-2010 MacBook Pro about 20-30% more responsive despite using the new FileVault 2 whole-disk encryption option.

No problems whatsoever here.

As to "What Lion is supposed to do," let me take a stab: It incrementally simplifies and streamlines the usage of the world's most sophisticated personal computer, while implementing a host of world-class technologies that make the platform more stable and secure than ever. John Siracusa's lengthy analysis, here, is a good place to start for the specifics.

 

[TDinstinct]

basically justifying that Apple is using early adopters as beta testers - but the reality is that Lion just doesn't feel complete enough for general release, at least not to me.

so basically they pulled a microsoft?

 

[richard.mac]

It's pretty much Snow Leopard, but with UI enhancements and usability aspects that were learned from iOS.

If you don't like it you could try installing SL on your new MacBook Air, I'm pretty sure it will work as SL supports Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt. Just buy a SL install disc (with the white beast on it) from the Apple Store/online or a local shop.

EDIT: It might not work as the install disc comes with 10.6.3 or something, you need 10.6.8, so would have to try and get a 10.6.8 install restored to your MBA.

 

[revelated]

It's pretty much Snow Leopard, but with UI enhancements and usability aspects that were learned from iOS.

If you don't like it you could try installing SL on your new MacBook Air, I'm pretty sure it will work as SL supports Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt. Just buy a SL install disc (with the white beast on it) from the Apple Store/online or a local shop.

EDIT: It might not work as the install disc comes with 10.6.3 or something, you need 10.6.8, so would have to try and get a 10.6.8 install restored to your MBA.

Can't. Apple did something to the hardware on the 2011 Air to make it reject Snow Leopard. I wager it's the same thing they did to the 2011 Pro where you couldn't carry over the 10.6.6 build from a previous hard drive, even though it was the same build as what came on the newer Pro.

 

[nuckinfutz]

Typically people with gripes will attempt to explain what they don't like and even, if they're clever, suggest ways that the existing product could be improved.

Pro Tip: we're not Kreskin..we can't read your mind and there's nothing here that explains where Lion is deficient as compared to Snow Leopard.

 

[rorschach]

What isn't "complete" about it? You didn't give any reasons or details and basically said, "I don't like Lion because I don't like it."

Also, you've never been able to install an older version of Mac OS X than what came with your Mac. Part of that has to do with the drivers for the new hardware.

 

[AlexBerkman]

Typically people with gripes will attempt to explain what they don't like and even, if they're clever, suggest ways that the existing product could be improved.

Pro Tip: we're not Kreskin..we can't read your mind and there's nothing here that explains where Lion is deficient as compared to Snow Leopard.

Simple, it ****s up, and it smells like windows the way it do not fit the reality of pro work. You simply havent got the time figure out how to make things work.
We, who needs it for work wait in patience for you, the guinea pigs, have sorted it out and had all the grief. And i cant see the big lift with lion, it might be sumtin for amateurs to brag a about, but work wise I have no use for it yet.

 

[baryon]

Snow Leopard was nowhere near as buggy on release as Lion is.

 

[iGrouch]

If you don't like it you could try installing SL on your new MacBook Air, I'm pretty sure it will work as SL supports Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt. Just buy a SL install disc (with the white beast on it) from the Apple Store/online or a local shop.

EDIT: It might not work as the install disc comes with 10.6.3 or something, you need 10.6.8, so would have to try and get a 10.6.8 install restored to your MBA.

Technically one can only install an OS the same or newer than the version on new hardware using installer discs and from what I hear the Thunderbolt MacBook Air OS is slightly different from the Lion the rest of us have.

But....

If one had time and were daring, one could experiment as follows. It may or may not work. It all depends if there is the compatibility of hardware driers and if the MacBook Air will play ball.

Clone an install from an older Mac with 10.6.8 onto an external HD (preferably for most Macs a Firewire drive, though for MacBook Air you will need to use USB). To test, first connect the cloned HD to MacBook Air and boot holding down option. See if the cloned drive appears as bootable. If it does, give it whirl. If it boots and works fine over a period of time without doing anything whacky such as kernel panics, Wipe the MacBook air internal storage and clone the cloned HD's install onto the MacBook Air.

My hunch is that more than likely it will not work, but I have used crazy workaround solutions like this in the past, where discs are not available, or where one really needs an OS to work on hardware that Apple lists as not supported.

 

[iGrouch]

Snow Leopard was nowhere near as buggy on release as Lion is.

Have to say that I have just moved my main drive to Lion and so far so good. If there is the odd bug experienced, it will be expected in a 10.7.0 version.

No, for me, the problem has been the changes to the GUI in Lion, but I spent two weeks, prior to installing, researching workaround solutions, to adjust my workflow to the new features.

As I have said elsewhere on Mac Rumors, this resulted in abandoning the way I have used the OS windows management features in the past (Expose and latterly Spaces) for something completely different, namely HyperDock. For me it is miles better than anything Apple has offered in the GUI, past and present. This has meant that ultimately the move to Lion has been OK, where I can just ignore the bits that I am really not interested in any more.

With Apple, one has to think laterally in terms of how OS updates change how one works. I am sure there is a certain amount of this with MS Windows updates as well.

 

[sweetbrat]

One of the major things Lion does is greatly improve security. Read up on File Vault. It really is a HUGE step forward in security.

 

[Gemütlichkeit]

What did you expect Lion to do?


I watched all the footage at the conferences, paid close attention to the demo's they showed and Lion is doing everything I expected it to do.

 

[PhoneI]

I really like Lion and have no desire to go back to SL. Maybe I am in the minority.

 

[old-wiz]

It's not. It's really a near GM beta but that's how Apple has always released major releases. Nothing new honestly. People in the industry generally don't update a major OS X release until 10.x.1 or 10.x.2.

I updated my "spare" MBP 13" to Lion to try it out. I've left my 3 other Macs at Snow Leopard 10.6.8. Normally I wouldn't update till 10.x.2 or 10.x.3, but I now have a spare MBP, so nothing's lost if it screws up as I have a 10.6.8 Super Duper Clone.

 

[JKK photography]

Ive yet to experience any of these problems with Lion that the OP hasn't yet described, but most assuredly will. Its not mind-reading; its simply talking points repeated over and over by the ones who claim to hate Lion.

 

[revelated]

Pro Tip: we're not Kreskin..we can't read your mind and there's nothing here that explains where Lion is deficient as compared to Snow Leopard.

What isn't "complete" about it? You didn't give any reasons or details and basically said, "I don't like Lion because I don't like it."

The reason I gave no specific gripes is because Jobsians will try to provide compensation-based answers to each instead of acknowledging. Stuff like "wellllllll....I don't really use that feature anyway, so it's not needed "

Or my favorite, "Do you really NEED that backlight? Can't you type in the dark? " Totally missing the point about REMOVING OR JACKING FEATURES FOR THE HELL OF IT.

Lion has issues, period. A lot of issues make the OS act worse than Snow Leopard rather than an improvement to said. I know I for one would prefer to work in Windows 7 than Windows XP because 7 is actually an improvement to XP in every way except file copying. Hell, even Vista had superior hardware driver support than XP. To me, and this is coming from decades of computer experience, that's what I an expect an OS to do: Be superior to that which came before it. BUT I also expect an experience where I have the flexibility to move within supported operating systems. There are now hundreds of thousands of people that are running Snow Leopard on their computers. Yet I cannot load Snow Leopard. Does that mean it's a supported OS, or it isn't? Or perhaps Apple's walled garden says that you must walk the Lion path if you choose to move forward, and then they will just expect you to buy a new Lion machine?

The simplicity of Windows is that XP, Vista, and 7 are ALL supported. Vista is not sold in box anymore, BUT you can install it, you can get a license key from the Microsoft Store if you really want, you can still buy XP, you can install it, or you can buy 7 and install it, 32 or 64 bit of the latter. So if 7 is just too "pretty" you can roll back to XP and work with that until they stop supporting it. No PC in existence now or for the next 5 years will just refuse to load XP, it's silly. Even after that when hardware has evolved to a point, XP will still "work" with generic drivers.

Lion is not an improvement over what I have over Snow Leopard. It has no significant advantages at all. The only thing I can see from Lion is a ploy to sell people more stuff via the App Store and possibly entice iOS users. That's fine. Sell Lion. But for those that don't care for that experience let them roll back, EVEN IF the thing came with Lion. Snow Leopard appears to still be supported, so let me use the damn thing. I don't want to hear about drivers, the only different hardware in the Air is the Bluetooth adapter which (A) should not be a deal breaker and (B) should have a driver for it.

 

[*LTD*]

The reason I gave no specific gripes is because Jobsians will try to provide compensation-based answers to each instead of acknowledging. Stuff like "wellllllll....I don't really use that feature anyway, so it's not needed "

Or my favorite, "Do you really NEED that backlight? Can't you type in the dark? " Totally missing the point about REMOVING OR JACKING FEATURES FOR THE HELL OF IT.

Lion has issues, period. A lot of issues make the OS act worse than Snow Leopard rather than an improvement to said. I know I for one would prefer to work in Windows 7 than Windows XP because 7 is actually an improvement to XP in every way except file copying. Hell, even Vista had superior hardware driver support than XP. To me, and this is coming from decades of computer experience, that's what I an expect an OS to do: Be superior to that which came before it. BUT I also expect an experience where I have the flexibility to move within supported operating systems. There are now hundreds of thousands of people that are running Snow Leopard on their computers. Yet I cannot load Snow Leopard. Does that mean it's a supported OS, or it isn't? Or perhaps Apple's walled garden says that you must walk the Lion path if you choose to move forward, and then they will just expect you to buy a new Lion machine?

The simplicity of Windows is that XP, Vista, and 7 are ALL supported. Vista is not sold in box anymore, BUT you can install it, you can get a license key from the Microsoft Store if you really want, you can still buy XP, you can install it, or you can buy 7 and install it, 32 or 64 bit of the latter. So if 7 is just too "pretty" you can roll back to XP and work with that until they stop supporting it. No PC in existence now or for the next 5 years will just refuse to load XP, it's silly. Even after that when hardware has evolved to a point, XP will still "work" with generic drivers.

Lion is not an improvement over what I have over Snow Leopard. It has no significant advantages at all. The only thing I can see from Lion is a ploy to sell people more stuff via the App Store and possibly entice iOS users. That's fine. Sell Lion. But for those that don't care for that experience let them roll back, EVEN IF the thing came with Lion. Snow Leopard appears to still be supported, so let me use the damn thing. I don't want to hear about drivers, the only different hardware in the Air is the Bluetooth adapter which (A) should not be a deal breaker and (B) should have a driver for it.

You want the Apple ecosystem but with MS' way of doing things. You can't have it both ways.

 

[CyBeRino]

Snow Leopard was nowhere near as buggy on release as Lion is.

Snow Leopard and Lion can't really be compared directly like you're doing here.

The reason is that Snow Leopard was basically meant to make Leopard better. The changes in SL were for the most part not user-visible; they were improvements in APIs and such.

Lion adds a whole wealth of user-visible changes again. So if one would want to compare it, it should be compared with Leopard.

And it so happens, that Leopard saw a similar progress. The initial release still had some bugs that were ironed out in the next two point-releases (.1 and .2). The same will happen with Lion. I expect that .1 somewhere in the next week or so.

 

[QuarterSwede]

I agree with you mostly except for this bit:

Lion is not an improvement over what I have over Snow Leopard. It has no significant advantages at all. The only thing I can see from Lion is a ploy to sell people more stuff via the App Store and possibly entice iOS users. That's fine. Sell Lion.

Read up on what under the hood changes there were. It's quite extensive. The fact that I can login and use my Mac right away is an improvement. I no longer have to wait for the menubar, airport, etc. to load before using it because they're all loaded while booting. And that's not to mention that everything is much more responsive even on my old C2D MacBook. Speed increases across the board are in the 30% range and that usually takes a processor upgrade or SSD installation to provide.

But for those that don't care for that experience let them roll back, EVEN IF the thing came with Lion. Snow Leopard appears to still be supported, so let me use the damn thing. I don't want to hear about drivers, the only different hardware in the Air is the Bluetooth adapter which (A) should not be a deal breaker and (B) should have a driver for it.

Why should Apple provide support for hardware on an older OS that it was never designed for? Legitimate question.

 

[revelated]

You want the Apple ecosystem but with MS' way of doing things. You can't have it both ways.

No, I want OS support regardless of what Apple thinks. Leopard? Yeah, it's done. Snow Leopard hasn't even been out...what..3 years? And again, they're still supporting people who have it installed, so support people installing it. Why is that not logical?

If I bought a 2011 Pro today, it would come with Lion BUT I could roll back to Snow Leopard. I can't do the same with the Air. There is NO LOGICAL reason why that is the case, I'm sorry. Drivers don't explain it. If it's the partition it's choking on I should be able to blow the partition out, clear the drive and install Snow Leopard with no problems.


It's not about a Microsoft way of doing things. EVERY OTHER OS does the same thing. Even Unix, which oh by the way Mac OS is, supports running an older version.

I agree with you mostly except for this bit:

Read up on what under the hood changes there were. It's quite extensive. The fact that I can login and use my Mac right away is an improvement. I no longer have to wait for the menubar, airport, etc. to load before using it because they're all loaded while booting. And that's not to mention that everything is much more responsive even on my old C2D MacBook. Speed increases across the board are in the 30% range and that usually takes a processor upgrade or SSD installation to provide.

Your experience is tainted by the fact that had you loaded a SSD in there, you would have seen a performance gain in Snow Leopard that blows away what you're seeing with Lion AND you wouldn't be forced to deal with the collateral damage, i.e. UI changes for the hell of it. Now maybe you don't care, but my point is the whole "improved performance" is negated by the fact that hardware upgrades can do the same thing.

Why should Apple provide support for hardware on an older OS that it was never designed for? Legitimate question.

Let me tell you a secret. The whole "designed for" is a farce. The newer Air was not designed for Lion. They held it back so they could put Lion on it, but it was designed long before Lion was ready. Again, hardware wise there is nothing in the new Air that precludes the ability to run Snow Leopard, speaking strictly on specs. The ONLY different hardware from the 13" Pro that might result in a foreign driver is the Bluetooth adapter. But if that one piece doesn't have a driver it should not brick the machine the way a Snow Leopard attempt does. That screams of an intentional block, and say what you will about "Apple doesn't like you going backwards", across nearly 10 Macs from 2009 to now, I have never had that happen.

When Apple went to Intel they basically did away with the whole "designed for" myth. A Core i5 is a Core i5. RAM is RAM. SSD is SSD. It's all supported. Even in the PPC days you could run System 6, 7, 8, it didn't matter.

 

[rorschach]

All that text and yet still not one single example, apparently because you're afraid that people will actually refute or disagree with what you have to say.

And if you search my posts you will see I myself have gripes with Lion. So let's hear it.

The reason I gave no specific gripes is because Jobsians will try to provide compensation-based answers to each instead of acknowledging. Stuff like "wellllllll....I don't really use that feature anyway, so it's not needed "

Or my favorite, "Do you really NEED that backlight? Can't you type in the dark? " Totally missing the point about REMOVING OR JACKING FEATURES FOR THE HELL OF IT.

Lion has issues, period. A lot of issues make the OS act worse than Snow Leopard rather than an improvement to said. I know I for one would prefer to work in Windows 7 than Windows XP because 7 is actually an improvement to XP in every way except file copying. Hell, even Vista had superior hardware driver support than XP. To me, and this is coming from decades of computer experience, that's what I an expect an OS to do: Be superior to that which came before it. BUT I also expect an experience where I have the flexibility to move within supported operating systems. There are now hundreds of thousands of people that are running Snow Leopard on their computers. Yet I cannot load Snow Leopard. Does that mean it's a supported OS, or it isn't? Or perhaps Apple's walled garden says that you must walk the Lion path if you choose to move forward, and then they will just expect you to buy a new Lion machine?

The simplicity of Windows is that XP, Vista, and 7 are ALL supported. Vista is not sold in box anymore, BUT you can install it, you can get a license key from the Microsoft Store if you really want, you can still buy XP, you can install it, or you can buy 7 and install it, 32 or 64 bit of the latter. So if 7 is just too "pretty" you can roll back to XP and work with that until they stop supporting it. No PC in existence now or for the next 5 years will just refuse to load XP, it's silly. Even after that when hardware has evolved to a point, XP will still "work" with generic drivers.

Lion is not an improvement over what I have over Snow Leopard. It has no significant advantages at all. The only thing I can see from Lion is a ploy to sell people more stuff via the App Store and possibly entice iOS users. That's fine. Sell Lion. But for those that don't care for that experience let them roll back, EVEN IF the thing came with Lion. Snow Leopard appears to still be supported, so let me use the damn thing. I don't want to hear about drivers, the only different hardware in the Air is the Bluetooth adapter which (A) should not be a deal breaker and (B) should have a driver for it.

 

[deadlystriker]

I have the 2011 air as well and it's a great machine except the fact that only lion can run on it. Lion is the worst "feature" of the current MBAs and I am seriously considering on getting an ultimate 2010 11" justfor SL. It's that much of a difference to me that's I'm willing to sacrifice on the new hardware improvements. Agree with the OP that it's ridiculous SL is not supported on these new incredible machines.

 

[xlii]

I love using Lion, it's better than SL. Here are some benchmarks that prove that Lion is just a little faster than SL.

http://www.redmondpie.com/os-x-lion-vs-os-x-snow-leopard-head-to-head-performance-showdown/