Mac OS X Lion
 

Means nothing to me, as I don't have a Mac, but I thought I may as well start a thread about the other WWDC news...


Lion is coming in July, via the Mac App Store only, for $29.99

http://www.apple.com/macosx/


Features: http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

Interesting ... The low price suggests what I've suspected for some time now - that there actually isn't very much new in Lion other than the iPad-like app launcher and the front-and-centre placement of the Mac App Store.

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

The world's most advanced desktop OS? Seems a bit far-fetched to me...

$30 isn't a bad price, but wtf do I need to upgrade from 10.5 to show Leopard (at a cost of £26) to upgrade to Lion. Thieving gits. :mad:

---------- Post added at 23:16 ---------- Previous post was at 23:14 ----------

It says it's got '250 new features', which indeed sounds like not much change at all...

Most likely just some new eye candy to keep the fanboys happy.

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

Looks nice. I wasn't sure if I was going to bother, but the UK price is only £20.99 so I think I'll go for it when it's available.

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

They are only selling Lion through the Mac App Store, and you can only get the Mac App Store app in later versions of Snow Leopard.

You can get Snow Leopard upgrade discs cheap on eBay.

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

Like I said: thieving gits. Is there any reason why the Mac App store can't be made available to 10.5 or earlier users?

Hardly. £25 appears to be the going 'buy it now' rate. Not that I'm particularly keen on getting started with fleabay anyway. :erm:

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

Even so, 46 quid isn't a bad price to upgrade 2 versions, considering that a single version upgrade used to be 130 quid.

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

Apple do have a rather generous definition of "Feature". They are apparently counting disappearing scroll bars and the same physics based scrolling used on iOS devices as features.

My own view? A few nice things. I find it funny that they are suddenly hyping full screen apps as the next big thing as the Amiga had them in mid 80s..

My main concern is that if we go for this at work, I am going to have to find a way of distributing it that doesn't involve up to 100 computers each downloading 4 gig of data from Apple. I have a nice method at the moment, but it involves setting up one computer with OSX and some configuration options, then taking a disk image of it. This might still be possible, but they mentioned authorised computers downloading it. Not sure how Lion will handle authorising multiple computers using one disk image.

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

It may be a relatively good deal historically, but I still object to being made to pay for every minor upgrade (which they are really). It's still thieving, though perhaps not on the grand scale Apple has form for.

I think I'll pass...

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

TBH I would very much recommend upgrading at least as far as Snow Leopard. There were a lot of performance tweaks in that version that should make your Mac leaner and faster - I had about 10GB more space on my hard drive once I'd done it.

There are also an increasing number of applications out there that have Snow Leopard as the base version of the OS in order to work - it seems to have been some sort of watershed release in the same way that Panther (10.3) was.

You need Snow Leopard for Firefox v4, and also for the Ikea Kitchen Planner plugin, which I was having much fun with last night. :D

For me though, the primary motivation for getting Lion is that I use MobileMe - actually, have used DotMac since launch, long before Apple decided to start charging for it. MobileMe is getting canned this time next year and the only way to keep my email addresses and other services is to move them to iCloud. And the only way to use iCloud on a Mac will be to have it running Lion.

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

They've been saying that since 10.0

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

I don't think that entirely accurate. There are a number of new features, the most interesting ones not being the app launcher or mission control etc. I think the two interesting additions are Resume, which starts your computer in the exact state it was prior to a restart, and Versions/Auto save which saves your work automatically and detects revisions allowing you the cycle back though the state of a document. These features are exposed to developers so every app can support Versions quite easily.

There a bunch of smaller updates as well. FileVault has been improved with greater encryption, application sandboxing etc. Developers can use Push Notifications (you can be alerted about small bits of data without the app running. I.e Calendar appointments, e-mails, someone tweeted you, Arsenal have just scored. Whatever the developer wants) and cloud (keep all your app data in sync, again for whichever app and purpose).

It's more substantial that Snow Leopard was.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html

Developer Features:

http://developer.apple.com/technolog...whats-new.html

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

Not quite - they've been saying "the world's most advanced OS". It has subtly shifted to become "desktop OS" only recently, presumably because they want it to share the "most advanced" claim with iOS.

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

Hm. Possibly. I must say that I've been seeing the pizza a lot lately. I'd also like to upgrade to a new version of Bootcamp. It must have improved over what I'm running...

I'm typing this in FF 4.01, on OS 10.5.8 :)

Re: Mac OS X Lion
 

Ah, must have been Leopard rather than Snow Leopard ... all these big cats get so confusing :spin: :D