Tried out OS X Lion 10.7 this week. Upgraded a 13″ MacBook Pro 2011 model from Snow Leopard. Overall it was a nice upgrade but nothing to write home about. It has its pros and cons but overall I felt most of the new features will not be used on a daily basis.
Pros:
- Installed quickly just like an app would. No need to reformat or anything. It took about 3 minutes to load the install files, rebooted then installed. Just a quick install process that took about 40 minutes on my MacBook Pro.
- Did not take up additional hard drive space. Take a look at this snapshot and notice in the “Used” space after the install. Before upgrading to Lion my hard drive “Used” space was about 177GB but noticed how I actually gained about 2GB. But I am almost certain this is not correct and most likely some of the apps that are not compatible with Lion from Snow Leopard might be the cause of that.
- Mission Control was a nice way to combine Expose and Spaces together. I loved how you can quickly create a different workspace for your running app by just dragging to the top of your screen.
- Login screen looks nicer, (though you can tweak it that and also the Mission Control background, more on that later).
- Preview/Mail/Safari full screen mode works great. This full screen feature was the least I was excited about but after using it I am really impressed. It automatically use Full Screen apps in a separately Space and you can quickly switch back to your other tasks with the three/four finger gestures. I intend to use this feature mostly during coding (once X-Code is working of course).
- The “disappearing” scrolling bar adds a nice professional aesthetic touch.
- Photoshop CS5 seems to still be working.
Cons:
- My main concern was battery life on my Macbook Pro 2011 laptop. Although I haven’t fully tested it under working conditions, it does seem like I lost an hour of battery life. That could just be Mission Control though since Expose/Spaces both use more battery life.
- App Expose seems to not be working. My four finger swipe just pulls up the current window and not all running apps/windows like it use to.
- Parallels is not working anymore. Although I believe a Lion EFI update would fix this. Unless you are a bit curious and modify it yourself.
- X-Code 4 is not working either, although I believe there is a X-Code 4.2 beta for Lion in the works.
- Inverse scrolling on pages is annoying but you can change that back. I don’t see myself using the inverse scrolling after pretty much my whole life being used to the normal scrolling.
Overall, once they update and fix out all the bugs after the initial retail rolls out, Lion seems to be a win if you’re willing to shell out only $29 in the app store. They added alot of features that I can’t seem to see myself ever using such as the additional gestures. Pinching with your thumb and flicking your fingers is a bit too much for me to handle. Also “resize from any corner” feature is nice but would probably be rarely used. The “Versions” feature is nice but once all developers start rolling that feature out in their apps, I would still recommend manually backing up your files and documents. Launchpad will make iOS iPad and iPhone users feel more at home with the app screen and folders but I believe more veteran users would just rather quickly use Spotlight to open an app.
