Apple OSX Lion - Available for download today

Right - I now have a bootable USB with Lion on it. Follow the instructions on the how to, it's pretty straight forward and quicker than trying to burn a DVD.

Now to do the rest of the house!

 

Well, it's true! Your number of buying options is greater than ever, offering you even more choice! You can now choose to buy an optical drive for only £70! Apple: we care about providing you the greatest versatility.

 

Was able to redeem from my work purchasing an iMac for me. I was upset at first about not getting physical media, but after the Ars piece, I think I am going with the Repair Partition method.

 

Apparently Apple will be providing a 'retail' copy on a USB stick for $69 in August. No idea on UK price though.

 

Managed to ans possibly bricked myy macbooks hdd :-( cant reformat the hdd at all. Damn lion time to hunt down the snow leopard disk and/or buy a new hdd

 

By the way, there is a way to disable this - run this command in console and then reboot :

Code:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Source : http://gdgt.com/question/in-os-x-li...press-and-hold-accented-character-picker-f1k/

 

I've been using it for the past hour or so. A few thoughts.

"Natural" (I.e. opposite) scrolling on the trackpad makes a lot of sense. After half an hour it seems normal to me. However it seems completely wrong on my scroll mouse (And there's seemingly no way of having one setting for trackpad and a different one for the mouse).

Safari's animation to skip back/forward in history is fantastic, and almost enough to make me want to use that rather than Chrome. Almost.

The old one-button mice or the iPhone's home button were minimalist to the point of being counterproductive. The iPhone could use another physical button. The absolute antithesis of this is the myriad of trackpad commands. Swiping around desktops seems quite confusing - one/two/three/four finger swipes/taps/pinches. It's actually incredibly versatile (which is great) but it takes a while to remember what does what. I love OS shortcuts / productivity tools and it's not that hard to learn. But it's not intuitive and it's probably confusing enough that most users simply won't bother.

The new iCal is the ugliest program ever made, on any OS, let alone on a Mac. Judging by the sheer volume of similar opinions, the person in charge of that is undoubtedly going to be shot tomorrow.

They've got rid of "Macintosh HD" in finder by default. I had to use google to work out how to bring up a finder window for ~library.

I understand the new Macbook Airs have a launchpad shortcut button. This makes perfect sense - very similar to the iPad/iPhone. So why the hell can't I set up a similar button on my 2 month-old Macbook Pro?

Overall it's a bit of a funny one for me. A lot of the new features are superb and the OS certainly looks nicer than ever. However there are a few features that seem overly complicated. Actually, I think the word I'm looking for is inelegant. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but I do wonder how much Steve has personally got involved with this OS. By all accounts he has some pretty strong views on aesthetics and design and some of the quirks of Lion seem like they wouldn't have slipped through Jobs' net if he wasn't on sick leave. Which is a funny thing to say, because overall I feel like it was definitely worth the upgrade price and I don't miss Snow Leopard at all.

 

How did it happen?
That's precisely why I'd hate to have some OS installation routine taking the initiative of messing with my partition table without my direct input..

 

reading anandtech's review. it seems to be moving a lot of iOS features to the bigger desktop.

one i really like is 4-finger to get back to springboard, and 3 finger left/right swipes. it feels very natural on the ipad to do these things, hopefully it will make more people use this feature on the ipad.

(hack a file in iOS 4, or use it in iOS 5)

 

Pretty much its stuck with 2 partitions, my boot camp one and my mac one. Tried to remove the bootcamp one now I can do nothing with the disk at all :S

Looks like im buying an ssd

 

Very strange gilljoy, Lion installed with no problems on my Mac Pro and that has partitions coming out its ears.

 

Installed it yesterday & after a bit of tweaking it appears OK.

However these forums now don't work properly in firefox. I've got a white background & wrong colour text

 

and it double posted :-(

 

It was happening before with snow leopard so i'm not too sure whats going on with my HDD

 

Ok I'm eyeing up Lion but unlike the previous stuff, I don't know if this will actually be worth my time without asking first!

I've got a 2006 MacBook, is the multi touch likely to work for me? It has the standard 2 finger scrolling etc, so I'm guessing it's multi touch but I can't be sure. I'm all for the simplicity of Mac's "it just works" methods, but their requirements need to be more specific, or at least provide a table where you put in your serial number or just what model, and it tells you what features will/won't work for you.

I found this out on the App Store too when I downloaded a game. It doesn't run properly at all, but there is no warning that I can't run it, and the only requirement is that you have the latest OS version. Hardware isn't even mentioned.

 

Fiyero, it depends which 2006 Macbook. Lion requires "x86-64 CPU (Macs with an Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core i3, Intel Core i5, Intel Core i7, or Xeon processor.)" - and T2400/T2500 in early 2006 models didn't have x86-64 support, while the late 2006 model with T5600/T7200 had x86-64 support.

You can see it here as well, in "Maximum Operating System" row :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook#Model_specifications

 

Fiyero, I'd hazard a guess that it may not be worth it for you. Lion has proven to be a bit of a pig on early Intel systems - mainly due to the anaemic GPUs they shipped with back then, which Lion is making an increasing use of. That said, it very much depends on what model of MacBook you have, how much RAM etc.

If you've got a Core Duo, it isn't officially supported, although there's some .kext hacks to fix that. Whether you'd want to do such a thing is an entirely different question.

As for multi-touch...maybe. Some of the early models, again, only really supported two finger scrolling. Lion is using up to four in multiple directions, pinches etc.

 

Thank you both, it's very much appreciated.
I don't think I'll bother upgrading then as it doesn't sound like it'll do me any favours.

It's a Core 2 Duo but being so old, I did have my worries that it'd be the lower end of useful.
It's a handy netbook at best nowdays it seems.

Very glad I asked now, certainly saved me wasting £20 or so upgrading.

Thanks again guys, +rep to you both.

 

Just a heads up for all of you using Dropbox, who were greeted with a lovely incompatibility message when you started Lion for the first time - http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=41644 - daily build direct from DB which works

 

Dropbox worked first time for me.

Strange