Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

The latest version of OS X (10.7 aka Lion) is out today. Link to the Mac App Store is here — you have to be running OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) to have the App Store installed. Price is $30.

The best and most complete overview of the new operating system is, as usual, John Siracusa’s writeup at this Ars Technica article.

* Quicken users: if you are running an older version of Quicken — prior to Quicken Essentials — read this article before you upgrade to Lion. You’ll need to export your financial data before upgrading because Lion does not support the older versions.

I think I’ll wait for a couple of weeks before upgrading. This is a major release and I prefer to watch the blogs for a while to see if there are any other incompatibilities or performance issues to be aware of. I don’t like surprises.

Related info

All of TUAW’s Lion tips in one place. Handy resource.

Lion Mail — Improved speed, some UI updates, full screen option, conversation threads.

Mission Control — The evolution of OS X’s Spaces, Dashboard and Exposé.

Make an OS X Lion boot disk — This is the first time an OS X update has been delivered exclusively as a download (from the Mac App Store), so there’s no physical installation media. When Lion installs it creates a 650 MB boot/recovery partition, but some of us still like to have an installation disk.

List of new features in Lion including OS Recovery.

Lion: 10 (or so) things that bug me — Erica Sadun’s thoughts on some of the new features.

A few nasty gotchas, including issues with Mail.app (receiving from POP account) and Network Attached Storage (NAS). Comments on this post also mention problems with VNC and Remote Desktop.

The Mac mini no longer ships with an optical drive. CDs and DVDs are going the way of floppy disks.

Posted: July 20th, 2011
Filed under: Apple, Software Tags: app store, mac, os x, os x lion | No Comments »

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