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OS X Lion is here! And it arrived on my birthday (a great birthday present I think). Normally my OS upgrade strategy is to wait a week or two before installing to watch and see if there are any horror stories that might come my way. But being my birthday, I splured and took the plung at around 6:00pm Pacific Time this evening.

Here is a brief run down of my experience.

• Download took about two and a half hours. My download speed is about 7Mb/second.
• Installation took about 30 minutes.
• That was it. Very painless.

What I liked most is that I could pause the download if I needed to change locations. It's never fun to have a laptop forced to stay somewhere, so if I needed I could've stopped mid-download and restarted again when it was convenient. That is something Apple really got right with the AppStore.

Here are a few of my favorite things after playing with OS X Lion for few hours:

• Lot's of little changes but all of them move towards the minimalistic which means a better use of screen space for content.
• Lot's of speed improvements. My Mac seems faster in about everything. Safari screams. Launch Pad is fast. Did I say everything seems faster? Apple really did some good work here.
• I'm trying to get used to the new Mail. Since this is probably the app I use most during the course of a day's work, it's important this works right for me. So far it's just different, and probably will be better once I get the hang of it.
• Mission Control is great. Plus the ability to assign different backgrounds to different spaces is fantastic.
• New desktop pics are nice… I always like when the do that
• Finally resizing windows can be done from any side of a window. No more having to go to the lower right corner (Apple was about 10years behind on that one).

I guess the only thing I'm having trouble with is scrolling. The default is to be like the iPad/iPhone. The new way makes sense to me, but my brain is used to doing it the old way. After a day or so I'll see if I can retrain my mind or whether it'll be a trip to the System Preferences.

Overall I'd give Apple a 9.5 out of 10 on this OS upgrade. There are several more features I have yet to explore, but the speed alone is making my (now old) MacBook Air really zing! 

2 Comments

1. Steve ~ July 23, 2011 15:13
   I'm going to download it tonight!
2. Andrew ~ July 24, 2011 04:40
   I loved the new OS. Especially the new 4-finger swipe to switch between full screen apps. But I've got to say Lion runs much slower and hotter on my 09 white unibody MacBook. I did a "dirty" installation, I.e. I did an update instead of a clean installation. And my fan is spinning at the 4096 rpm instead of the usual 2000rpm. I managed to fix the fan problem by typing a few lines of code into terminal from apple.com. But I'm still boggled at the decreased speed. It's got 4GB of ram and a 7200 hard drive... I'll probably be doing a clean installation this week to see if it makes a difference.

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