Last night an old friend from high school sent me this on FaceBook:
“Hello Mr. Mac 
I wish I would have learned more about this before it became cool. You were light years ahead of the rest of us =)can I ask you a Mac question? I didn’t save a document in Pages and the baby managed to shut down my Mac when I stepped away. Is it auto saved anywhere like with Word?? Sorry to bug you… I am missing notes from my AP2 Lab class and am going crazy b/c I forgot to save them.”
To which I replied that yes, I was cool before the rest of the world caught up. Ha! And then I asked if she had upgraded to Lion, yet. Her response: “Lion what?”
Sometimes it’s not immediately obvious to we Mac geeks that the rest of the world is caught up the hype of some new Apple release. If that’s you, I am referring to the new 10.7 version of Mac OS X, continuing the legacy of big cat nicknames, this one is “Lion.”
So unfortunately for Christa, she was still on Snow Leopard 10.6 and thus Pages did not auto-save. I advised her on where to go to get Lion: Apple Menu -> App Store -> Click “Lion” -> Click “Install”. $29 and a 3.5GB download later, she’d be all set.
So we come back to the age old question: to upgrade or not to upgrade. See as easily as I advised Christa to go for it, I told one of my largest clients this week that there was no way that any of their users should upgrade to Lion.
There’s only two reasons you should ever consider spending money (even $29) on a major software upgrade like this:
1.) Because you want the new features and are willing to put up with cost to get them.
2.) Because you must do so for compatibility reasons.
In Christa’s case, the fact that one of her kids closing down her Mac before she saved her work is big motivation to get Lion’s new auto-save and document versioning features. (Frankly, I’m still wrapping my brain around how awesome these are.)
Now before I go on, let me tell you that if you want to know everything new in Lion, you have plenty of reading material. The Cliff’s Notes version of what’s new is on Apple.com. Macworld’s review is probably a good place to start. If you want a deep dive, nobody beats John Siracusa’s Ars Technica reviews. Lord knows I have plenty of reading to do myself.
I learn by doing so I am running Lion on my Air and experiencing all the subtleties that it brings to the table. There’s a lot I like (digital delivery, Mission Control, autosave). There’s a lot I’ve already turned off. (“natural scrolling”, window animations).
So, desire for new features notwithstanding, the only other reason to upgrade to Lion is compatibility. As far as I know, the only forced compatibility at this point is if you ran out and bought one of the new MacBook Airs and Mac Minis released last week. They will only run Lion. This is typical: the lowest MacOS a new Mac can run is the shipping version. The Airs and Minis are awesome hardware for the price point, so I recommend them highly.
In absence of positive motivation for upgrade, Lion also carries one big negative to dissuade someone from upgrading. Apple finally cut ties with the PowerPC platform. This has been coming for sometime now, with each previous version of Mac OS X pushing it further away:
2005 10.4 “Tiger” – 10.4.5 in 2006 was the first to run on Intel hardware. PowerPC apps ran with a compatibility layer called “Rosetta” – this is an important detail, hang on.
2007 10.5 “Leopard” – the first to discontinue “Classic” Mac OS 9 apps from running.
2009 10.6 “Snow Leopard” – the first to require Intel hardware.
2011 10.7 “Lion” – the first to discontinue Rosetta compatibility with PowerPC OS X apps.
This makes sense because there’s a significant development cost in backwards compatibility. And I find that we have better success with technology when all the components are the same age. When you try to pair an old printer with a new computer for example, it could be a problem. When you run an old version of Quicken on a new Mac, it could be a problem.
I use these as examples because these are two scenarios where problems will develop with the Lion upgrade, and thus the loss of Rosetta compatibility. Only the newest Quicken (that isn’t really Quicken) will run. Quicken 2009 and earlier all require Rosetta. So do apps like Adobe CS2. Office 2004. Sometimes it’s not a whole app – but certain functions that needed Rosetta and will no longer work.
For my client, none of their high-end printer/copiers would print under Lion. The print driver software needs Rosetta. Or more accurately, the print driver needs an upgrade.
That’s kind of the point. Apple is saying to vendors that they need to get on board with Mac OS X technologies that have been in place since 2006. It’s a lot easier for Apple to say that now than it was back then.
But that means you need to watch out. There’s a great database at RoaringApps.com that you can search. Or call us and we can check for you.
And as always, it might be better to let trailblazers take the arrows. Rumor has it that version 10.7.2 is already in testing to fix some issues that didn’t show up before Lion’s release.
Bottom line, much like its namesake, Lion is not something to take lightly.
Posted by brian on Jul 28, 2011 in Blog, Dock | Comments Off
