I don't know about you guys but I subscribe to the MacRumors RSS feed at work and have been keeping uup to date with the OS X Lion news.

I have to say, I am really looking forward to this release! I will be in the market to buy a new something or other when it comes out and my MBP is current gettnig slower and slower all the time.

Along with that, all of the updates I've seen so far (including the sneak peak at the last KeyNote) have been really promising!

Snow Leopard was OK but nothing really worth shouting about.

Lion looks like the move from Tiger to Leopard (if that makes sense).

I have to say that I'm not actually filled with abundant enthusiasm about Lion.
If Leopard was the iTunes OS, then this is the iOS OS, if that makes sense.

Perfect sense to me, because it mirrors my own opinion.

Mark

I'm uncertain that I will like Lion.

It seems Lion is the upgrade where Apple kills Rosetta. That means several of my regular programs* will be off to Silicon Heaven.

Of course, I could stick with Snow Leopard for as long as I can, but then I may well miss out on all the fun and games.






*No, I can't upgrade them. Canon have seen fit not to provide Intel-native drivers for my scanner, and Adobe ate FreeHand and ceased any development on it in 2004. I use Frustrator under sufferance.

I will upgrade three of my machines, as they are Intel's. Though I will wait till the Mac Box Set and get them then with the latest iLife and iWorks. Especially as it is a good deal for a number of machines.

I think it's official. According to the latest developer release, there is no system framework supporting PPC in Lion. It's x86 and x64 only.

Looks like I won't be stepping to Lion if I want to continue using my preferred but increasingly flaky vector design application.

So far on my test machine it feels fairly nice.

Need to give it a bit more of a prod though

I'm in two minds about Lion. On the one hand I love Apple's products and how Apple progresses it's products, I'm looking forward to auto-saving, versions, etc....On the other, I'm not fussed about iOS elements, Mission Control, Full screen apps, or launchpad...

Snow Leopard was an excellent release. It gained some really important development mechanisms, and gave users a much better experience in terms of speed.

I think it is, unfortunately, inevitable that Apple would want to get rid of previous architectures completely. I think the only reason that Rosetta was an option with Snow Leopard was that they felt three years wasn't long enough to drop support for PPC completely. Five years on and developers should have moved on, though it is a pain when an application has been dropped and no one has come up with a viable alternative.

I've got my fingers crossed for 32-bit support. Apple users were telling me that seven years of support is about usual for a Mac, it's been about five years since the first MacBook was launched, so I hope to be supported for one last OS over the next two years before upgrading.

Snow Leopard is slower than a snail on a go-slow!

I don't know whether it is the applications, like Safari, iTunes, iPhoto and Firefox have become so bloated or Snow Leopard has just killed the performance, but my iMac crawls since it got Snow Leopard. I keep thinking about going back to Leopard. That said, I spend most of my time on my Windows laptop now, because it is much faster.

My laptop doesn't break a sweat when running Outlook, Excel, Word, Tweetdeck, Zune, Firefox, Skype and Trillian, yet the iMac starts puffing if I load Safari and iTunes at the same time, opening Office grinds the whole thing to a halt. Even 2 new re-installs haven't really helped.

With Lion, I'm looking forward to getting versions back into the OS. That is something that I have missed for the last 15 years or so. It was a great feature in VMS and saved me many times, where I made changes to a document or source code and had to go back a couple of steps. CVS, SourceSafe and SubVersion have somewhat mitigated the problem, Timemachine and Acronis Non-Stop Backup as well, but they aren't a replacement for the operating system doing it automatically.

I agree, Mission Control and full screen apps aren't really a pull, I have a 24" screen, why would I want to full-screen a web page or a document? Some applications can make good use of it (Appeture, Final Cut etc.), but for the applications I use, I generally have 3 or 4 visible, so that I can use a couple as reference documents, whilst typing into a third, E.g. at work I have a browser open with our ticketing system, Excel open with a list of tickets open for more than 3 days and call up the tickets and check the status, then fire off e-mails to those responsible for the tickets, to get status updates. Full Screen mode would be a huge step backwards for most of my workflows, so it isn't something I would use often.

So far, they have only released 64-bit developer versions, it doesn't mean that it would be impossible, but I wouldn't hold my breath. I always wondered at Apple's decision to go with 32-bit chips for their laptops and minis, when the Pros went from 64-bit PPC to 64-bit Intel, the 6 months with 32-bit Core Duo mobile chips seemed like a crazy move. Waiting a further 3 months for the 64-bit Core 2 Duo wouldn't have been much of a problem and they wouldn't have the silly situation they are in at the moment.

Microsoft didn't have the chance to make a clean break, they've grown up through a 16 bit an 32 bit Intel world and they are still struggling to get some users to switch to 64-bit, even if they have 64-bit processors - mainly due to the complete balls-up they made with XP 64, Vista and 7 are much better, but Windows is tainted with the bad rep of XP 64. Apple doesn't have that problem - they don't give their users a choice - but they have this one 32-bit chip sitting in the middle of their range, holding them back.

I have to agree with Dave. My i7 iMacs can slow to a crawl. It is constantly indexing files, and when Safari, Mail and iTunes are running it slows down. Unfortantely as I use these a lot. There are no real major reasons for me to upgrade apart from the fact that so much of my software will very rapidly be Lion only soon enough. I will get the upgrade along with iLife and IWork bundle in the box set.

i had minor problems, slow down etc, with SL after doing an upgrade install from L
Simon from the MacUser site was doing a clean install of SL after suffering similar problems

after the clean install of SL on his system he reported a massive improvement
so i backed up and then wiped all my systems ready for a clean install of SL

since then i have had no problems of any kind on any of the systems ...

PS. am unsure at this time if a Lion install will be done on any of these systems
will await reports in regard to the Lion update ...

After being caught out trying to upgrade Windows and Linux (last time I tried linux was about six years ago, Windows a bit before), I always do clean installations. Leopard was a resource hog, it prompted me to max out my MacBook to 2GB of RAM. When I got my Mac Pro I installed Leopard for a week or so as a couple of apps weren't working yet (can't for the life of me recall what they were), I really noticed the difference in responsiveness and overall speed in Snow Leopard, on both of my machines.

Given that Snow Leopard was as "under the hood" release, and that it was being "finely tuned", it does seem odd that people would find it otherwise, especially in my experience of using the OS on two platforms.

Snow Leopard was fine here. Installed over several iterations of Leopard, too. Never done a clean install on this MacBook Pro.

In fact, I was grateful for the extra 30GB of free space I found after the final reboot.

I did an Sl install over leopard and I've never noticed any slowdown per se. I'd suggest it's definitely true that a lot of apps have become more bloated in the last few years though, firefox being one. Plus any app which you can then install 3rd party plugins in to... well, if you can figure out where that pile of code spaghetti is having an issue, good luck to you. Also, a lot of apps are taking advantage of GCD to run stuff in background threads on SL, so I have a feeling they may be sacrificing overall system responsiveness to make their apps look less laggy.

Anyway, in terms of Lion, I was thinking last night I may use it as an excuse to do a fresh reinstall anyway. My OS has acquired so much cruft over the years that a clear out is probably a good thing overall.

Jon

After the upgrade (in place over Leopard, which was upgraded on top of Tiger), it was very fast. It was in the middle of last summer that it really ground to a halt and I did the clean install and applied updates. I also didn't install any of the menu bar extensions etc. the machine is still pretty much clean apart from the delivered Apple applications, iLife, Office and Firefox...