Switch to Lion or stay with Snow Leopard?

[Alvesang]

2010 MacBook Pro 13" 2.6 GHz C2D 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD user here and I think about going back to Snow Leopard daily. Boot and shutdown times have increased considerably, Safari and iTunes have become beachball presentations, the App Store has become really slow and the entire experience seems rather sluggish. I do enjoy Lion's features, though. So I'll wait until 10.7.2 is released and if that doesn't even fix half of my issues I will go back.

What strikes me as odd is that Lion performs really well on my 2010 11" MacBook Air equipped with the 1.4 GHz processor and 2 GB RAM. Except for slower shutdowns and a slower App Store it seems to perform just as well as it did under SL, even though the machines specs would suggest an even worse experience. Very weird.

 

[Morod]

2007 24" Al iMac, 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM here. I want to stay with SL. I haven't even tried Lion yet as SL does what I need it to do, and I have no problems with it. Now that it looks like I'll be able to access iCloud with the 10.6.9 update, I really have no reason to move to Lion.
I was down at the Apple Store last week checking out Lion. New eye-candy but nothing I'd use much, so SL for me. While there, I picked up a Magic Trackpad. Very nice, especially when surfing the web. I wish I could turn down the sensitivity a bit on it, though.

 

[frito1224]

Hi!

I am considering a change to Lion, but after some hours of research here on this forum I'm not so sure anymore. That's why I am seeking your advice.

Currently I'm running Snow Leopard 10.6.8 on an Mid 2007 24" iMac (the first generation with the aluminum body) with a 2.4GHz Core2Duo, 4GB RAM (which already is the maximum!) and the ATI Radeon HD 2600 with 256MB RAM.

So far everything is fine and I don't really have any performance issues what so ever - my machine is actually still quite snappy.
Apart from "standard" use (internet, e-mail) I regulary use MS Office 2008, iPhoto, iMovie, Aperture 3, watch HD Videos (720p and 1080i/p with QuickTime Player 7 and VLC, use Skype for videocalls, play Civ5 (with Steam) and do some video encoding.
Occasionaly I run Win XP in a virtural machine, I also have a Win XP in a Boot Camp installation.

I have a Time Machine backup disk.

- Would a switch to Lion bring performance issues? (big issue)
- How's the current situation with Lion compatible versions of common software? When I switched from Leopard to Snow Leopard that was quite a problem.
- What would happen to my Boot Camp Win XP? (minor issue)

Thanks

Lion is a great os i have a late 2007 imac 2.0ghz the computer runs great with lion the startup time is longer and the temperature of the computer is about 10-15 degree's cooler my only real issue is that boot camp won't run vista

 

[tahoeroscoe]

Havent read all responses but i will give you mine.

I have a MBP with C2D @ 2.66ghz, 8gb ram and an SSD and it runs great, i did the ram and SSD upgrade the same time i upgraded to lion so i can't compare to SL but lion is smooth, and i love some of the new features.

Also, regarding the ram upgrade, i probably didn't need to as Lion seems to be pretty good about managing memory usage and i rarely use more than 4gb with normal usage.

 

[WeegieMac]

Well, today I went back to Snow Leopard. I simply could not take the RAM usage and graphical issues any longer. By graphical issues I mean the frame rate stuttering when going to/from full screen and opening/closing Launchpad, especially when all my free RAM mysteriously turned into inactive RAM, despite running nothing but Safari and iTunes for the duration of the day.

Hopefully 10.7.2 or .3 sorts out the RAM usage, because it's hellish.

 

[mzd]

Please let me know how your upgrade went and how you iMac is handling Lion.
Good luck - hope you don't need it!

well, this post is from Lion. so far so good I guess, but I really haven't had much time to play with it yet. i was very disappointed to learn that my new OWC Mercury drive will not boot from Firewire on my iMac though! it boots only with USB2. so my data transfer and such took a long time. other than that, the install onto the external hard drive went well enough.
I haven't really noticed any system lags or glitches, but again, this is really only my second time booting into Lion since the install. I haven't really run anything taxing, just checking apps and such. so far CS3 is working very well for me. I haven't tried printing from Illustrator, which may or may not cause a problem.
the only incompatible app so far for me was an old version of Maya (8.5) I guess it had some PPC code in there somewhere as that is the error I get. but that version is very old and I really don't use that app anymore so it isn't a deal breaker for me.
I'm a little concerned that I won't be able to accurately tell performance over USB2, but so far so good. apps launch smoothly and I'm not noticing anything particularly slow. I only have 3GB of RAM btw. I should be able to do some good temp testing since I have SL still on my main drive, but again, so far I haven't noticed anything out of the ordinary.
full specs:
2007 iMac 2.8GHz C2D, 3GB DDR2 667 RAM, ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro

I'll be sure to post back after more time with Lion.

[edit] I will add that I am able to run Front Row (copied important files over from SL) fine and still access my iTunes music even though I have upgraded iTunes to 10.4. This is apparently a bit of an anomaly as 10.4 was supposed to break iTunes music in Front Row in Lion. 10.3.1 worked fine, but once people upgraded to 10.4 they could no longer play their iTunes music in Lion. I was on 10.4 in SL before I transferred all my data over to Lion so maybe that makes a difference? That is the only thing unique to my experience because by the time I got around to installing Lion, I had already updated my iTunes Library in SL.

 

[YMark]

Also, regarding the ram upgrade, i probably didn't need to as Lion seems to be pretty good about managing memory usage and i rarely use more than 4gb with normal usage.

I disagree 100%. Lion is TERRIBLE at managing memory. In fact, Lion is terrible at a lot of things, but memory management is definitely a weak point.

 

[harcosparky]

Thanks for your input, what kind of Macs (and which generation) do you have?

I have two ....

Macbook Pro - 2011 - Three Month Old

24" iMac - 2007 - Apple Care Expired December, 2010 ( if that helps age the unit )


Here is the iMac info ......

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac7,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz




FWIW - I reinstalled Snow Leopard on the MBP so both and now on Snow Leopard.

I may still go with Lion on the MBP - but I have a ton of time intensive work to do on it and at this point LION was getting in the way. I had to go back to Snow Leopard on the MBP so the work I was doing would be compatible with it and the iMac.

 

[wrx]

What I'm keying on your above comment is that you don't have any performance issues and how everything works. In my line of work I'm a firm believer of the "don't fix what's not broke" philosophy. Unless Lion has something you absolutely need to make something work, there's no real reason to change unless you simply want to.

That pretty much sums it up

Thank You for your helpful posting !

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Lion is a great os i have a late 2007 imac 2.0ghz the computer runs great with lion the startup time is longer and the temperature of the computer is about 10-15 degree's cooler my only real issue is that boot camp won't run vista

Thanks! But why on earth do you want to run vista ???

 

[wrx]

I'll be sure to post back after more time with Lion.

Please do !
And thanks for the update

 

[mzd]

well, I've been using Lion a fair amount more and so far no real issues. I did upgrade my RAM to the full 4GB my iMac supports. over the weekend I tested out VPN and connecting to some drives at work from home and working on some SQL all with no issues. I guess I still haven't tried printing from Illustrator CS3 yet - I'll need to confirm that works fine before fully switching... but aside from that, so far so good. overall I've spent the most time working in Lightroom, which has been no different from SL.

[edit]
I went ahead and made the switch. So far so good. I did lose the Front Row iTunes integration I mentioned in my first post. I was worried that might happen since every other Lion Front Row user has had the issue. I guess, since my earlier Lion install was on an external, the Front Row files still referenced the SL files on my internal drive.