Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Part One There was a time when I’d be excited about the launch of a new version of Apple’s Mac operating system. I’d count the days leading up to the launch with the same fervour as opening the windows on a yuletide advent calendar. Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Installing the big cat The day of arrival was never a disappointment. The …
...hmmm...I installed it on my Mac Book Pro, worked first time, no issues, not one.
Launcher is great, may take some time to organise, but you don't have to organise every damn page, how about using your noggin, and moving your most common apps to the first page only.
Gawd... you sound like a wingetel at work :/
Ok so how many apps can it show on the first page? I have 131 apps install and about 75 of them are my most common apps that I use on a daily/weekly basis. I know this because the Apple menu Recent Applications stops at 50 and it always removes apps that I've used in the last week so 50 isn't enough.
I think this would work for non-power users who only use a few apps a week but hey, they could probably do everything they need to on an iPad too.
The biggest problem I've found with Lion so far is with the scroll preferences - I have a Macbook Pro, and I use a Magic mouse with it. I was using the mouse when I installed Lion, and the scroll inverted. I went in to preferences, and disabled natural scroll, restoring the way I expect a mouse to work. Then I discovered that all the gestures on the trackpad were now inverted.
It appears that natural scrolling is a system wide option, rather than being device specific. Mice and Trackpads are not the same Apple. People use them differently and now that particular scrolling option locks them together.
I'd like to see this become device specific, and I'd also like to see the scroll reversal configurable on a per axis basis too.
I guess I'd better get used to either fucked up scrolls on one device or having sys prefs open all the time :(
Apple has changed some AFP and Time Machine stuff, would have been great if they told other vendors about this, and not their own internal divisions. IIRC, Microsoft used to be slapped pretty hard on the hand for such practices.
My NAS vendor (QNAP) had to push out a firmware update for the AFP issue (now fixed), They are still working on the Time Machine bit (expected soon).
Thanks, Apple.
But all vendors with mac dev's on staff would have access to the Lion beta, in fact I would have expected warning emails from them if they had contact details for you.
There should have been no reason for the firmwares not to be already available.
Rather than thanking them for the "quick" turnaround you should be slating them for not being better prepared.
What a pointless review. If you've hacked around with the operating system, buggered up the fonts etc how is this representative to a standard user? You should have installed 10.6 with a weeks worth of normal use then upgraded to 10.7
Hacking around in terminal? Special font utilities? give me a break..
FWIW I would class myself as a more advanced than standard user, but not a terminal window level of nerd. My install was fine. All multi touch gestures work on my magic mouse and all my fonts are fine. So.. upgrade to a new OS on top of a hacked around OS and some of it doesn't work? What do you expect. Pointless printing such a poor "review"..
I gave Snow Leopard a couple of weeks and still lived to rue the install. Should have waited for the first fix pack and it looks Lion will have to wait even longer. I know I cannot do much with my printer or scanner on Lion because the software needs Rosetta, why this useful piece of software couldn't have stayed optional is beyond me. Yes, I would prefer Canon and OKI to release x86 software but I'm prepared to wait rather than buy new hardware. Curious as to what's happened with the APIs and the POSIX stuff. 10.6 contained Apple's infamously borked Python fork.
As I have a standby machine in case my Macbook dies on me (the fan on the old one did twice), I need to know whether I can still restore to another machine without a system disk!
And I need a tip - how can I get rid of the NASNavigator from my system? I installed it to be able to browse my brother's network but I can seem to get rid of it as it keeps telling syslog!
Finally! Someone actually thinks that you should wait before installing, at least til the initial moans and groans have been fixed. And need we mention Rosetta?! I completely and utterly agree!
If you install it, and everything's fine, I'm happy for you! But I am sick of pro-Mac-ers going on and on and on and on about how cool it all is and then wonder why some apps don't work!!! Didn't you check this BEFOREHAND? God!
I use Snow Leopard and won't be installing it til it's rock solid.
I've had none of the issues you list at all. Even ran Word by accident (I'm not really sure why I have it installed to be honest) and not fonts changed anywhere.
The big problem I have, which made me happy as hell that I'd cloned my boot disk onto an external FW-800 bootable disk, is that my mixing desk no longer works!!! Seeing as my Mac is used 90% for music recording and production, it's a bit of a big problem.
Mine's a FW-400 Tascam FW-1884. Yes, I know it's old, but it's a great desk and I don't want to get rid of it. I've emailed Tascam but had no reply from them at all.
Now I have a choice - use new OS and do no music, use old OS and do music, or sacrifice my desk and buy something else. Suddenly £20 does not seem so cheap ...
Isn't that often true of old kit when you have an OS upgrade?
I have loads of legacy kit that can't be used with W7 because there's no driver support (even using one of the legacy modes doesn't work).
Ultimately you end up with four choices:
1) Make a dual boot system
2) Run a VM for your legacy kit
3) Stop using the legacy kit and buy something up to date.
4) Go without the upgrade.
I have Yoggie Gatekeeper and now that Yoggie have gone bust I fully expect to be going back to a software solution next time I upgrade. In fact it's a good job I archived the drivers I do have as you can't even download those any more.
I did of course clone my drive before upgrading so have a fully working older system the unit still works on. Doesn't change my frustration that if I want to record using the new OS I'll need new hardware.
I've asked Tascam if I can have the code and produce an open source driver for it so we'll see what they say.
However, I would never describe it as someone's 'own stupid fault', that's an absurd statement and says "If you upgrade a system you should expect old hardware not to work anymore", that's a cop out for the manufacturer.
Microsoft managed to create a system where you could run things in another mode so they would still work, and had Apple had a Rosetta compatible mode for example then the hardware would still work.
It's frankly boggling that when we upgrade we are meant to expect things not to work, and even more baffling that people accept it and call the end users 'stupid', when the stupid thing is our acceptance of it.
I'm one of those cautious Mac owners who waits an inordinate time before upgrading to a new version of OS X - I prefer to let the early-adopter types take care of the bug-hunting first :-) (For us, our Mac is a working tool, so we need it... well, working. If I want to have fun tinkering with bleeding-edge OS updates, I have an Eee netbook with Arch Linux for that.)
But I digress: I noted the bit in this review about Time Machine suddenly not working with a NAS box.
I really think Apple should have made it clearer, that they've changed TM-NAS interactions in Lion. The first I heard about it was when Synology announced the beta of their DSM OS for their NAS enclosures, earlier this week. They were proud (they said) to be the first NAS company to introduce "full" support for LAN-based Time Machine backups in Lion - however, much as I liked the look of the other features in the DSM beta, if I had to install it at the same time as Lion, just to get Mac network backups to work, I think I'll hold off.
In fact, as I said above, I think I'll wait anyway. That DSM beta looks very appealing, though...
I got burned in the upgrade to Snow Leopard with applications and hardware devices suddenly becoming unusable and I ended up having to replace a whole host of nearly new kit, including a 3 month old HP scanner. With the prospect of DW 8, Office 2004 etc no longer functioning I will be the chap who decides to stay with Snow Leopard.
I upgraded to Snow Leopard very late (about a month or two ago - ironically, so I could then go for Lion at the appropriate time), and couldn't work out why we couldn't print to our HP LaserJet 4100TN (a veteran network printer) any more.
A quick Google around revealed that we needed to fetch the HP printer suite from Software Update on the Mac... all 1.2Gb of it (good job we're not still on dialup, really). I still wonder what the flip they put in that bundle - a flight sim? An artificial intelligence? SkyNet?
Think I'll hold out for a while here, people...
Thing is Apple don't look at Time Machine backup to a NAS box as officially supported. It may be possible primarily thanks to the NAS box vendors who include the feature that will create a TM compatible network Share for backup. Apple permit it since TM will allow you to select a network destination for backup but Apple only consider backup to a locally connected USB or FW HDD (or an Apple time capsule) as officially supported by TM.
At least that's what the second level AppleCare support droid told me when I had a TM problem* backing up to a ReadyNAS.
So yes they should have made it clearer, but since they don't officially recognise this way of backing up they probably don't care especially since it means you're not using an Apple Time capsule!
*(In case you're wondering, no the AppleCare droid couldn't fix the problem - Google and much searching was my friend).
I've had pretty much the same experience and within 24hours have solved / disabled most of the problems.
A lot of the iOS inspired UI really sucks on a 27" monitor.
Biggest frustration now, is that both VMWare and Parallels are dead and not coming back any time soon. I can't believe that no-one else has been posting about this.
Looking forward to what you have to say about security, app store and what could be a new paradigm for the personal computer, hint, hint...
Parallels 6 works with Lion after updating (i.e. Update Parallels before installing Lion).
People on Parallels 4 or 5 are screwed and have to upgrade, for a charge of course. However they've graciously decided to offer a whole $10USD if you upgrade to 6. In my e-mail the coupon code is lion-upgrade, in the message you get on starting Parallels 6 the coupon code is lion_upgrade. Make of that what you will.
I'm not sure if this counts as a advertising, I'll leave Moderatrix 2.0 to decide that.
I have not updated to Lion. Too much pain for too little pretty.
So that was, what, four pages to basically whinge that upgrading a significantly-tinkered-with install of Snow Leopard didn't quite work correctly after an in-place upgrade to Lion?
What's that, you say? The problems were in no small part because your original install had a whole load of software that hasn't yet been approved as Lion-compliant? Well, I say "yet" - if you've got a wagonload of software that you need for work purposes, perhaps giving the developers more than 18 hours from the new OS being on general release to check for compatibility issues would have been the non-retarded^Wsmart thing to do, eh?
Yeesh. I'm not a big Apple fan, but it's really not their fault if you haven't bothered to make sure all your software packages are upgrade-ready before going ahead with the install.
Surely Apple should be more active is saying "This upgrade will break the following applications you have installed - Do you want to continue?"
After all, this is just an OS *upgrade*. Why should people expect apps to suddenly stop working? If I upgrade as OS, I would expect perhaps some minor driver issues perhaps, but NOT for applications to stop working completely (although it would depend on how big a jump the upgrade is).
That said, I have had similar problems with Ubuntu upgrades breaking a couple of apps. And that was annoying and I would have hoped for a similar warning.
Oh come on - is this the first time that an OS upgrade has borked applications that worked fine in the previous version? No - and it's not an Apple-specific issue, either. It's an upgrade in the same sense that WinVista > Win7 is an upgrade - it's a substantial OS revision, and not something to be undertaken lightly.
Yes, Apple should admit that there are possible issues with in-place upgrades. They should probably also admit that there are profitable side-effects of not allowing users to replace their laptop batteries, or from making people pay £20+ a go for an adapter that lets them connect their FruitMachine to a non-FruitMachine display. They should probably also admit that occasionally the concepts that they implement with a very nice UI have already been implemented elsewhere beforehand.
Apple have very savvy marketing people. Do you really think they're going to sour their release-date marketing buzz by saying "careful now, some software might not work with the new version", when they can instead rightly point out that it's the user's job to ensure all their stuff will work with the new OS?
It has long been a very very obvious fact that, prior to a major OS change such as an upgrade, you should check that *anything* you depend upon for work or leisure purposes will be completely compatible with the new OS. Apple could do more to spread awareness of this, but it's still the user's own fault if they upgrade without thinking first.
Tl,dr; - No matter what the marketing droid claims, it's not a fucking magic box. Stop expecting it to behave like one.
"After all, this is just an OS *upgrade*. Why should people expect apps to suddenly stop working? If I upgrade as OS, I would expect perhaps some minor driver issues perhaps, but NOT for applications to stop working completely"
Wrong.
Going from Snow Leopard 10.6 to 10.6.1 is an upgrade (in the same way Windows XP SP2 to SP3 is an upgrade)
Going from Snow Leopard to Lion is a new OS (like going from XP to Vista, ok, ok, XP to Windows 7 would be the upgrade, XP to Vista was a downgrade)
@Sabba - Shows how little you know. They're basically the same. Do you really think Windows 7 is a complete re-write? No its just an upgrade with some components re-written or updated. Ignore the 10. That's just a name. The version is 7. This is OS X version 7. And the point releases are like service packs in windows
And anyway its XP -> Vista -> 7. Your comparison is like comparing Leopard to Lion.
"Going from Snow Leopard 10.6 to 10.6.1 is an upgrade (in the same way Windows XP SP2 to SP3 is an upgrade)"
No, X.Y.Z to X.Y.Z1 is a generally considered to be a *patch* in the un*x world where this kind of versioning comes from was followed by programs like Firefox until recently. This usually means bugfixes and security patches.
X.Y to X.Y1 is a *point* upgrade and usually means new features but no break in the API.
X to X1 is a *version* upgrade and usually means new features and changes to the API.
Apple is, of course, free to do as it pleases but it would be helpful if it provided more information in advance. MS has, as far as I know, learned from past mistakes and brought out a program that checked for Vista and 7 suitability. I've gained some kind of migration assistant but nothing that has informed me that 10.7 could have problems.
As previously noted, retaining Rosetta as an optional install would make a lot of the pain go away. The changes to networking are likely to cause lots more problems.
Yes, the Unix world differentiates between point releases and major releases.
In the last decade, we've had, what, 7 OS X releases? All of which have had the same point release numbering system, and several of which have featured *exactly the same kind of problems as detailed in this article*.
What do we learn from this? That Apple's approach to version tracking is not quite the same as the Unix world's. Therefore, other assumptions from the Unix world (such as the impact of installing a point release) shouldn't be taken for granted when dealing with Apple products.
At some point, FruitMachine enthusiasts are going to have to accept that, marketing guff notwithstanding, installing a new release on launch date carries a non-trivial risk of something not working correctly. Just as would be the case with any other OS vendor.
Christ, I really don't see what's so hard about this. You'd swear it was some previously-unheard-of phenomenon rather than the same damn story we hear every feckin' time a new OS comes out on the market.
Not quite 7 new versions in 10 years but it seems you didn't read my post carefully - Apple can call the versions whatever they want. Maybe they're saving 11 for dolphins and whales because they're so pretty.
AFAIK the following were major: Leopard - dropped the classic environment; Snow Leopard - dropped native Power PC support and largely dropped carbon; Lion dropped x86-64 only (less of a problem) lots of networking changes. But YMMV especially if you were doing anything with low-level POSIX stuff. Snow Leopard and Lion have AFAIL broken compatibility without breaking much new ground which is why they were both relatively cheap. Lion is, of course, the entry to the "owned by Apple" world and this is where all the new features are.
I have a Mac and I haven't upgraded yet but I do sympathise with those who feel confused. I have worked with computers for over 20 years and there are still lots of things I don't really understand so I do sympathise with those who do not understand the difference between Power PC and x86 ("endianness", FFS!) let alone the x86 and x86_64 stuff.
It is the easiest thing in the world to offer users a compatibility test for Lion once they have installed the "migration assistant" that we got with 10.6.8. A little notice informing the user that the following programs/add-ons/drivers will not work with Lion and you can check this anytime from "About this Mac" or wherever would save so many problems. Parallels has this built in - it has told me I must upgrade to able to use Lion, why can't Mac OS do the same?
This still does not explain why Rosetta is not available. I also have Windows 7 which has a sandbox for 16-bit apps but it still let's them run. +1 to Microsoft to finally learning from IBM. What was it Winston Churchill said? "You can rely on the Americans to always do the right thing. After they have exhausted all other possibilites."
I agree that Apple should offer a compatibility test for Apple-made products. It would be very nice for Apple to offer a full compatibility test that identifies potentially-problematic 3rd party products that may cause a problem in the event of moving to Lion.
But (and it's a big but, the kind that Sir Mix-A-Lot might commemorate in song) *nobody's making you upgrade*.
There's no gun to anyone's head. There's no imminent loss of operability or functionality for anyone who stays on Snow Leopard. There is a significant marketing effort dedicated to convincing you that your life will be full of unicorn rides and blowjobs if you upgrade to Lion, but that's it.
So if you *are* one of those users who's not sure how to check whether the software they depend on for work will remain operational when using Lion, the easiest thing in the world to do is *not upgrade yet*. I know remarkably few IT pros who'd actually encourage end users to use *any* new, version 00 operating system, because the odds are far too high that said release will have bugs or compatibility problems of some sort.
There's only so many times people can be advised to not do something stupid before the response to a subsequent problem report becomes a Nelson-Muntz styled "Haha!". I can't feel sorry for someone who'll complain that marketing lied to them, because what the fuck else has marketing ever done?
Indeed, reviewer should know better. A knowledgable Mac user would understand that we are supposed to buy brand new hardware with each minor OS upgrade. That we should understand how it all works is a positively outrageous suggestion.
I will now return to throwing birds at pigs on my 27 inch iPad, as Nature intended.
I went from XP to Vista to Windows 7 with a lot of development tools and obscure hardware support applications installed.
The upgrade advisor said what would work, what wouldn't work and what they couldn't be sure off.
It even does the same when you install software on it if there are known compatibility issues (and what the solutions are to the problem - if known of course).
And so far it has got everything right... And the Windows Ecosystem is way larger than the Mac ecosystem...
But then I forgot MS sucks, and when they break compatibility it is a crime against the world, and telling people what apps are broken before you start is a terrible idea; when Apple does it people should just accept that installing a new OS may break stuff with no warnings given...
Here's a clue:
If your 3rd party software provider *hasn't* yet published their list of Lion-ready applications, *you don't proceed upgrade*. I'm not aware of any pressing requirements to have Lion running on systems that shipped with Snow Leopard, other than the usual raging-boner-for-the-latest-shiny that seems to afflict so many computer users (and not just Apple fans, I should add, before someone misinterprets that comment).
The policy of assuming no problems will arise when undertaking any project (whether one as minor as a major OS revision on a single computer, or one as major as rolling out a new OS to an entire corporate ecosystem) is one that will bring you nothing but misery and pain. But hey, don't pay any attention to me and my suggestion that putting a bit of thought into the maintenance and upkeep of a complex piece of machinery with a 3-4 figure price tag.
@Stacy - from what I've seen of the MS in-place upgrade process, you sound rather lucky. I've done several in-place upgrades (from 2K>XP, XP>Vista and Vista>7) and for the most part the system performance has degraded significantly after a few months so I've generally held to running clean installs rather than in-place upgrades.
I was going to post a comment in exactly the vein!
When I read that about LaunchPad - having to group everything with icons and then hunt them down sounded exactly like good old Program Manager!
Fond memories which may or may not be rose-tinted, and the fact that my old 486 with 170MB HDD could only physically store a couple of dozen applications at most.
Software going cyclical - ironic since MS from 95 to 7 has tried to ape Apple, now Apple has found the old Windows 3.1 way of doing things to be the best for it's brave new world of touchy feely interfaces!
This is the fault of Adobe for installing their apps in such an archaic and pointless way. there's no difference to searching for the Creative Suite group in Launchpad and then having to find the app underneath that, than there is in going to your Applications folder, searching for the Adobe folder and then having the search again for InDesign underneath that, which has been a pain in the neck since long before Lion or Leopard for that matter.
You know, Apple haven't gotten rid of the Applications folder on the Dock. Nor have they stopped you from putting often used apps on the Dock for easy access. Or, as you say, you can use Spotlight.
The LaunchPad is just another way of accessing your apps. It's not the only way.
"For the best all-round upgrade experience, I installed Mac OS X Lion on two Intel Core i7-based computers"
Surely to do even a halfway complete review, you would need to also install it on a lower end machine, to see how the experience differs. It's no use if it absolutley flies and works perfectly on the latest i7's but ends up taking 20 mins to even open a window on an older machine.
Best of luck with that then! I have a Buffalo Technology encypted external drive that stopped working on my mac when snow leopard was released, I am also waiting for Buffalo Technology's firmware upgrade and have been for nearly 2 years, you may have to wait some considerable time.
http://forums.buffalotech.com/t5/Storage/Mac-OS-X-10-6-incompatible-with-HDS-PH160U2-US/td-p/21087
But since backing up using Time Machine to a NAS is an unsupported configuration** that requires an amount of hacking about to get going in the first place, I'm surprised that the author expected it to work in the first place.
As a general rule of thumb when using unsupported configs, you should make sure you have plans in place in case a patch breaks it and remember to only kick yourself when it stops working unexpectedly.
When I used this in my own environment I made sure the NAS could also be connected up using a USB cable, meaning I could still access my backups in the event of a problem.
**Except for Apple's own Time Capsules, naturally.
A completely artificial restriction that was hackable with one terminal command. Obviously someone at Cupertino has been fired for their crime and the 'bug' has been fixed (i.e. the artificial restriction has been hard coded). The goal is that once something enters the Apple ecosystem it doesn't leave, not even light.
that you are not using OSX like a regular user - more of a power user - so it's no surprise that things don't go as smoothly as they can or should.
The only difficulty I had was with my partitioned drive, which I had manually adjusted after Boot Camp had initially created it. I told Boot Camp to sort it out, and after that it installed with no problems at all.
I'd rather a review fixated on the issue that is more of a problem for everyday users - that their scrolling appears to have reversed :)
I find it amazing how Apples Lion fails (such as implementation of SMB) are getting so little press. You folks in the press really are taking one up the rear from Job's at every opportunity you get (even at el Reg) and are loving it....
Trying the access SMB NAS devices or Windows machines does not work, the SHARED area in finder finds devices and then you cant cannot - even after supplying credentials. Now theres a workaround by using the 'connect to server and specifying smb://etc' which will be beyond the limits of most regular users.
Launchpad is just a dumbass interface, cowering to the iPad crowd
I'm not convinced....
Firstly you complain about Launch pad and Adobe. You can also launch it from the command line, but I don't see you complaining about how fiddly that is. Are you aware that the ways you were previously using to launch it have not changed..? i.e. the Dock or Spotlight..? Nothing to complain about here. Launch Pad is clearly aimed at basic users who have perhaps just bought their first computer but are used to the iPhone interface.
Installer self-destructs after install? Still here on my Lion machine. (And incidentally I downloaded the installer from a machine at work (using my personal iTunes account), copied it to a flash pen and brought it home, copied to the local drive and installed from that.
App Store wont let you reinstall if you are already running Lion? I watched a guy at work do that yesterday. He was able to re-download Lion and install it without issue.
The AFP issue - I was hit by this myself using Linux based afpd but it turns out that netatalk packages have been updated for some time to include the more modern crypto. It would be nice if we could manually tell Lion we would like to support legacy crypto (like DES support in Windows 7 / Server 2008R2 for example which is deprecated by default but can be enabled with GPO tweaks).
... my gf's mac.
I sold my macbook a few months back after realising I didn't like it much, after decades of Linux & Windows usage, it was a pain in the arse to use.
Anyway, the gf installed Lion today and I was faced with what I considered to be rhetorical questions - silly me!
"Why is it doing this?" "Where's my xyz gone?"
Erm, dunno.
Anyhoo - it installed without a hitch after eating our broadband for 3 hours - and ... da da duuuum, £25 spent on, I'm not sure what really?
Ah yes, she can no longer run mac the ripper, adobe acrobat reader doesn't work, and a few other apps she rarely uses have a 'stop' style line across the icon.
This is the Apple way - they don't do backwards compatibility well, as they want you to buy new hardware every few years.
That sucks, but that's just my opinion - I tried Mac, didn't get along with it - any OS upgrade which breaks software just a few years old, is ... wrong.
Microsoft, love them or hate them, have legacy support that goes back a decade. That's how it should be.
Linux, bless it's little tux, goes one better - it'll run on damn near anything made in the last 20 years.
And that's the reality - Mac OS really isn't all that - it's a marketing success above anything else. Easy to use, but inevitably... it's just another OS, running on pretty hardware that costs a whole lot more than most people have to spend.
Bah.
>>> If I want to run Adobe InDesign CS5.5, I do not want to call up LaunchPad, flit back and forth between screens until I find a group called ‘Adobe Creative Suite’, click it to open it up and then hunt through the 20 or so programs in there to find InDesign, especially when I also have to distinguish between InDesign CS5, CS4 and CS3 (not to mention CS6 in beta) on the same computer.
Well don't bloody use it then. Did you have Steve Jobs holding a gun to your head forcing you to use it? And if you can't be bothered to rearrange your icons into usable groups then you only have yourself to blame.
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