![]() With Lion, Multi-Touch gestures are now front and center, and it’ll be interesting to see how users react.įor some users, gestures are already second nature I can’t imagine using my MacBook without two-finger scrolling. In 2008 MacBooks got a Multi-Touch glass trackpad, and in 2010 Apple brought the same gestures to the desktop with the Magic Trackpad. After the arrival of the iPhone in 2007, things really picked up steam. Scrolling and gesturingĪpple has been adding Multi-Touch gestures to OS X since the introduction of two-finger scrolling in the PowerBook in 2005. After you download it, move a copy somewhere else before installing, or you’ll have to re-download the installer from the App Store before using it on another Mac. If you’re planning on updating multiple Macs to Lion, though, be warned: the Lion installation app self-destructs after use. Not only is that convenient, but it’s legal: The Lion download license covers all of the Macs in your household, making that $30 an even greater deal. The good news is that, once you’ve got a Lion installer, you can copy it freely to all the Macs in your house (so long as they’re running the latest version of Snow Leopard) and upgrade them to Lion. Wiping your hard drive entirely and re-installing Lion will be a different (and potentially more complicated) process than it is today with Snow Leopard, but for most users, installing (and restoring) system software under Lion will be a simpler process. And despite all the talk about Lion being available only via the Mac App Store, the company plans to release a $69 version of Lion on a USB stick in August.Īpple doesn’t provide an easy way to burn a DVD or format a USB drive as a back-up installer, though even Apple execs admitted that technically adept users will be able to figure out how to create a bootable installer from the contents of the Lion installation package. Company executives told me that users without access to a high-speed connection will be able to bring their Macs to an Apple Store for help in buying and installing Lion. What if you aren’t running Snow Leopard, which is required for the Mac App Store? What happens if your drive crashes and you have to reinstall Lion onto a new, blank hard drive?Īpple has answers to many of these questions, but the rules of the game have definitely changed. What if you have a really slow Internet connection or low bandwidth cap? Downloading 4GB of data could be painful. While the experience is clean and simple for the most common installation scenarios, things can get weird if yours isn’t one of them. However, relying on downloading alone for an OS release has its drawbacks. And the $30 price is remarkable-in the past Apple would’ve charged $129 for an upgrade of this scale. ![]() With the release of Lion, Mac users can get near-instant gratification. ![]() Double-click that, and the installation begins.īack in the day, getting an OS X upgrade involved going to a store or ordering online and getting an optical disc. After a 3.5GB download, there’s a new Install Lion app in your Dock and Applications folder. That’s because Apple has decided to release the upgrade primarily as a $30 download from the Mac App Store. For more on the fate of older software, see Chris Breen’s series on Lion-incompatible software.) A new kind of upgradeĮven before you boot into Lion for the first time, you’ll feel just how different it is from previous versions of Mac OS X. And if you rely on PowerPC-based apps that run on Intel Macs using the Rosetta code-translation technology, they won’t run in Lion. (Before you read any further, you need to know that Lion isn’t right for one particular group of users: If you’re using an early Intel Mac powered by a Core Solo or Core Duo processor, you can’t run it. Combine the influx of new Mac users with the popularity of the iPhone and iPad, and you get Lion.Ĭan Apple make OS X friendly for people buying their first Macs and familiar to those coming to the Mac from the iPhone, while keeping Mac veterans happy? That would be a neat trick-and Apple has tried very hard to pull it off. In that time, while Mac sales have continued to grow, Apple has also built an entirely new business around mobile devices that run iOS. But the last four years have seen some dramatic changes at Apple.
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