Let's Stop Avoiding The Hard Truth About Lion

[Jwn]

Reinstalled by igenius and still does not work

My MacBook pro has been to the genius bar 6 times since I put in lion. They replaces the hard drive and we reinstalled off time machine and it would not even bring outlook up. Sid a clean install last night at the geniusbar now it loads but times out. My MacBook pro gas been to the genius bar 25 times in a year and a half for software issues since I bought it and two new hard drives and cords. My tech guy says it is a bad motherboard but apple insists it's fine. I would just like it to work with adobe creative suite and outlook that's all I use. Any suggestions, I am tired of going to the apple store and leaving the computer for a couple of days then getting it back reloading it and still not having it work! I had similar problems with snow lepoard!

 

[Simplicated]

The view that you get when you hover over a group and swipe becomes relatively useless once an application has a lot of windows open and you're trying to return to one of them that hasn't recently been accessed. But are you aware that you can click on the app icon in Mission Control and then swipe down with four fingers to fan out all of the app's windows into a nice grid (aka 'Application Exposé') ? Of course, unfortunately, once you've clicked on the icon, you have to wait for the animation to finish before swiping down. Otherwise, Application Exposé will be activated for whatever app was active before. That's a bit annoying and I've complained about this before, since it needlessly slows you down in your workflow.

Mission Control has clear advantages too though. For example, it is much easier now to pick out apps with only few windows open among a huge number of other application windows.

I know there's App Exposé, but don't you realize how useful the all-window Exposé is for quickly switching between applications? I have a lot of windows and applications open in my typical workflow, and many of the applications (mainly, Photoshop, Pages and Google Chrome) have over 4 windows open. This is where Mission Control falls short.

 

[tkermit]

I know there's App Exposé, but don't you realize how useful the all-window Exposé is for quickly switching between applications?

I do. Honestly, I'm all for a setting to disable grouping of windows, or a Shortcut that can be used to temporarily ungroup windows (Hold down CMD – since they've used ALT already ?). I'm neither perfectly satisfied with Mission Control at this point nor do I think it's 'absolutely useless' or anything like that. The thing is, I wasn't a huge fan of Snow Leopard's Exposé, specifically the fact that it set each window to the same size (which Mission Control thankfully doesn't do). On the other hand, the original one from Panther seemed perfect to me.

 

[GermanyChris]

Had to go back to SL. Couldn't stand the +50% loss in battery life. Easily got 7 hours under SL on my 2010 MBA but under Lion, 3 hours seemed overwhelming.

This post made me look at battery life..It did seem that I was getting worse battery life but I never compared..I put a lion Drive right into the 11 when I bought it..Full charge Lion SSD 5:21 same on Snow Leopard 9:40. So it's back to Snow Leopard for the time being. I do miss natural scrolling though now that I'm used to it.

 

[Simplicated]

Yes, I do. Honestly, I'm all for a setting to disable grouping of windows, or a Shortcut that can be used to temporarily ungroup windows (Hold down CMD – since they've used ALT already ?). I'm neither perfectly satisfied with Mission Control at this point nor do I think it's 'absolutely useless' or anything like that. The thing is, I wasn't a huge fan of Snow Leopard's Exposé, specifically the fact that it set each window to the same size (which Mission Control doesn't do). On the other hand, the original one from Panther seemed perfect to me.

It does seem we have the same opinion about Mission Control (and Exposé!) I loved the original Exposé so much that I replaced the Dock with the one that behaved like the original.

 

[Gemütlichkeit]

Spend hours on a forum complaining about an OS while millions enjoy it around you.

 

[Clint007]

Lion vs Car

When a car maker put a new serie car on sale, the only upgrade is the next year model. You like it or not.

But for Lion (the new model) have some problem and it is almost normal on new model.
But, Mac have time in one year to fix them so many times.

Anxious buyers never learn, they complaint to others about the problems.

I'm not in Lion yet, only make the normal waiting until bugs are settle.

I'm patient and why hurry?

 

[WishIWasHere]

Yeah, I'm running Lion on a late 2006 MacBook with 3GB of ram, and it runs just fine almost all of the time. I'm not going to say it doesn't hang up here and there when I'm running multiple apps, but so did Snow Leopard.

 

[schemula]

Lion has just borked my 2011 17" MBP for the second time.

I'm trying to repair it or something so I can boot it enough to deactivate my Adobe Software. It's so embarrassing to have to call Adobe and BEG them to reset my serial number. Of course I just installed Office so I'm probably going to have to call them at some point and BEG as well.

What a huge time waste for what is supposed to be my main work computer. I was ok with the increased beach balling and all that, but having to resinstall the whole OS? Twice? OMG.

It works OK on my Sandy Bridge MacBook Air. Been a disaster for the most part in my 2011 17" MacBook Pro.

Going back to Snow Leopard on my 17" MBP. Of course this sucks because now one maching with be Lion and one will be Snow Leopard, so, that is going to annoy the hell out of me.

Not sure why Lion is such a weird release, but for me, it most certainly has been. Problems seem most related to updates. It was trying to reinstall some update (EFI? Thunderbolt?) and it just hangs or destroys my file structure forcing me to boot with a DVD and do a disk repair.

 

[Michaelgtrusa]

I noticed a big improvement in a test admin acc.

 

[sjinsjca]

Perhaps because Lion has absolutely nothing that makes desktop computer usage any easier; in fact, it degrades the experience.

Fighting words. I take it you haven't discovered the double-tap-with-three-fingers that brings up a dictionary/thesaurus bubble, or FileVault 2's whole-disk encryption, or Mission Control, or Versions, or the Data Detectors in Mail...

All these contribute materially to my productivity daily. And, my machine (an early-2010 MBP, 8GB) runs faster than it did with Snow Leopard due to Lion's superior utilization of RAM.

 

[wikus]

Fighting words. I take it you haven't discovered the double-tap-with-three-fingers that brings up a dictionary/thesaurus bubble, or FileVault 2's whole-disk encryption, or Mission Control, or Versions, or the Data Detectors in Mail...

All these contribute materially to my productivity daily. And, my machine (an early-2010 MBP, 8GB) runs faster than it did with Snow Leopard due to Lion's superior utilization of RAM.

Lion ran slower on my 2011 Macbook Pro. I use iStatMenus to monitor memory usage. In comparison running the exact same set of background applications (rightzoom, fontexplorer x and usb overdrive):

After cold boot:

Lion: 1.07gb of RAM
Snow Leopard: 905mb

After running Firefox and system preferences:

Lion: 1.7gb
Snow Leopard: 1.2gb

Those figures with Lion are awful. Comparing either of the scenarios to my Mac Pro is even worse; after a cold boot my Mac Pro 1,1 from 2006 only uses about 650mb of RAM also using the same running apps in the background on Snow Leopard. These figures with my macbook are even worse considering I disable dashboard completely on every computer, I don't use it.

Note: my comparison is between Lion 10.7.1 vs. Snow Leopard 10.6.8

I was really *really* excited for Snow Leopard when it came out, mainly because of the heavy optimizing Apple did, smaller install footprint, etc. Snow Leopard was and still is awesome. Its stable, quick, doesnt take up much hard drive space, has PROPER expose and most applications are compatible with it. And I still really like Snow Leopard. Lion is going the way of iTunes; bloatware with limited ways in changing or disabling added on features that a lot of us dont like, dont want and don't need.

I run OS X in a very minimal simple way. My boot drive is documents/movies/etc free, I only use it for applications and its an Intel SSD for max. performance. All my working files are on a secondary drive in my optical bay which is running a Western Digital 5,400 RPM HD. I have a third HD which is a direct clone of the secondary HD for backups, and that drive itself has another partition with Snow Leopard installed to use as backup and to test new software BEFORE i actually throw it onto my main boot drive. I'm very anal about a *clean* running operating system, and everything is customized to my liking in Snow Leopard, which, for the most part works great.

The biggest problem with Lion is that it introduces a ton of crap that I don't need and theres no way (yet) for me to change any of that. Launchpad is part of the dock, if there was any way I'd completely disable like I do with dashboard. Expose is limited and I can't turn off the grouping of windows for proper multitasking, the new save function can't be tweaked, theres no way to not allow full screen ability (I don't need it, I have a 24" external display which is large enough for me), Mission Control can't be tweaked to turn off spaces so it doesnt show the other thumbnails or the grey border, etc. etc. etc.

About the only thing I found useful was the fact that I could resize windows by clicking on any side. Apart from that, there isnt anything significant in Lion that makes me want to go back to it. In fact, I'm better off without it as you can see my memory usage is better in Snow Leopard, and I suspect my temperatures would be as well since a lot of people are having problems in that area too. On top of that, a few of my apps still work in SL, while in Lion they do not (Vox 0.2.8 & Screenflow and a couple others).

 

[wywern209]

I am new to the mac scene so my opinion may not be worth much.

I have a new macbook pro 2011 13 inch. It runs pretty dang smoothly on 10.7.1.

It is lightning fast after putting in 8 gb of ram and a samsung 470 ssd.

No spinning beachballs ...

Maybe you have an older machine that runs better with an older version of the operating system?

My guess is new version of 10.7.2 will have some speed improvements and probably a ton of bug fixes.

i have the same issues that he does and unless a sandy bridge 2.2 w/ a 6750m is old, lion sucks for me right now. it hangs up every 7 seconds.it's a pain in the butt to take notes in class so much that i am considering going back to paper notes.

 

[ronboutwell]

Since this is your first and only post in this forum, I suspect your intentions and I don't take your post very seriously. While Lion isn't flawless (no OS is), your post sounds quite biased and not based on a realistic evaluation of the pros and cons and based only on one individual installation, which may have other factors affecting your performance beyond the OS itself. Is Lion perfect? Absolutely not? Is it as bad as you claim? Absolutely not.

You got me dude. You outed me. I'm a G14 classified Microsoft secret agent out to topple Apple. (LOL). You're to sharp for me.

 

[Steve's Barber]

It does seem we have the same opinion about Mission Control (and Exposé!) I loved the original Exposé so much that I replaced the Dock with the one that behaved like the original.

You found a replacement for Lion's Mission Control? What is it?

(I suspect you're talking about the dock in SL though)

 

[erawsd]

I've had it running on my hackintosh for nearly a month now, haven't run into any crashes or freezing issues.

I have run into some compatibility weirdness with certain programs, but that is the type of thing I always expect from a new OS. Also, it bothers me that all the stuff borrowed from iOS are largely useless. I have not used launch pad, facetime, full screen apps at all. I also prefer regular old web gmail to the mail app.

 

[App Downloader]

Well, on a Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13GHz, 4GB RAM Macbook Air 13" 2010, it works perfectly, so yeah...

 

[Tom in London]

too

"too", not "to".

 

[waltervt]

Very happy with the new King of Desktop

Hi everybody, I just updated my MacBook Pro 5,5 (13", C2D 2.53GHz, RAM 4GB, HD 250GB) yesterday you Lion 10.7 and immediately ran Software Update to get 10.7.1 and other update. Everything runs great and I love the new OS. The only two issues I found was that Guitar Pro 6 didn't run, but that was solved upgrading from 6.0.7 to 6.0.9 and that Diablo II was no longer supported, but let's face it it's a 2000/1 PPC game.

 

[ronboutwell]

No, because his first post is asking for people to jump on the "we hate Lion" bandwagon,

No, it wasn't. I was pointing out a shortcoming in the software. It had nothing to do with "hating Lion". That is an extremely paranoid view of my post. It does nobody (Apple included) any good for everyone to avoid issues. From a Quality Control standpoint that would be foolish. Apparently some of us (like me) love our Macs. Others are downright "cultish" about them.

----------

I love my Mac as much as everyone here - really. I'll never own anything else. But let's stop ignoring the Gorilla standing in the corner of the room because we are afraid to let Apple know that we are horribly disappointed in Lion. sure, it has a few cool bells and whistles that set it apart from Snow Leopard but compared to Snow Leopard in is slow as heck and dare I say the word, often unstable. I could not wait to upgrade to Lion and I was never more disappointed afterward. After about 30 days of using it and suffering from almost constant "spinning umbrellas" and an almost brand new MacBook Pro that hangs up during reboots making it necessary to hit the physical power button to complete the operation - I pulled up an old Time Machine backup and gave my Mac what it wanted - a Snow Leopard reinstall. The machine was immediately faster again and I am overjoyed.

Let's see a show of hands - who else finally decided to call Lion a loss of $29 and went back to Snow Leopard? Let's tell Apple what they need to fix to keep "We The Customers" happy.

Well, as luck would have it. My older (about 2 years old) MacBook Pro with 4GB of RAM and a Core Duo processor did not like Lion so much as I stated above. Multitasking was a bit of a problem. Also, Kasperski AntiVirus which ran beautifully under SL was one of the problems I had not yet identified. As soon as I switched it off - the machine sped up immediately. Go figure.

New chapter, I just recieved a brand new MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM and an
i7 processor. Lion seems to love it. It runs fine under the new system. My wife was a die hard PC user for years who spent a while looking over my shoulder while I used my Mac. She now has taken possession of my old MacBook Pro. She saw my issues with Lion on that machine and is running SL. I'm using Lion on my new machine because it works well on the new one. Of course adding a 256 GB Samsung SSD drive made life with Lion a lot easier still. I susect the real problem was the age of the machine. Several people with newer processors seem to have no problems with Lion even with the same amount of RAM and a mechanical HD like my older machine.

 

[Jannuss]

roll back and get rid of LION? possible?

Let's see a show of hands - who else finally decided to call Lion a loss of $29 and went back to Snow Leopard? Let's tell Apple what they need to fix to keep "We The Customers" happy.[/QUOTE]

WELL my hand is raised. I have relied on my Valet Plus for my home network mainly b/c the interface is so easy and I can block my teens multiple Itouch, iPhone, computers etc during certain hours of the day. And Cisco still has no fix for the LION OS - is there a way to roll back to snow leopard? There is nothing I'm using in Lion currently that encourages me to find other work around on my network etc.

If I can roll back on my MBP 2010 build and my 27" iMac - please enlighten me.
Many thanks

 

[wpotere]

WELL my hand is raised. I have relied on my Valet Plus for my home network mainly b/c the interface is so easy and I can block my teens multiple Itouch, iPhone, computers etc during certain hours of the day. And Cisco still has no fix for the LION OS - is there a way to roll back to snow leopard? There is nothing I'm using in Lion currently that encourages me to find other work around on my network etc.

If I can roll back on my MBP 2010 build and my 27" iMac - please enlighten me.
Many thanks

Rollback no, but you can just pop your SL install disk in and reinstall it. That is what I did.

 

[CamoBear]

Let's see a show of hands - who else finally decided to call Lion a loss of $29 and went back to Snow Leopard? Let's tell Apple what they need to fix to keep "We The Customers" happy.

I just reverted back to SL and man I love it. Expose > mission control in every way. Plus it runs at least 10C lower than with Lion.. It´s also undeniably cleaner and faster.

 

[wikus]

Let's see a show of hands - who else finally decided to call Lion a loss of $29 and went back to Snow Leopard? Let's tell Apple what they need to fix to keep "We The Customers" happy.

I would be pretty peeved if I had paid $30 to 'upgrade' to Lion only to find out how buggy, botched, restricted it is. 30 dollars to ditch SL, get higher temps, higher memory usage, 50% battery drop, crappy execution of Expose, etc would suck. Especially if you found out and had to revert back to SL, what a pain.

 

[dba415]

I just reverted back to SL and man I love it. Expose > mission control in every way. Plus it runs at least 10C lower than with Lion.. It´s also undeniably cleaner and faster.

same here, and I took the best parts of Lion (which was the gestures for switching between spaces) and just used bettertouchtool to program that into my SL, now I can switch between spaces as easily as I can in Lion.