After advice.
Client of mine wants a MacBook Air. I know Lion is coming, but how much better than Snow Leopard is it? I never upgrade anything always prefer a clean install on Wintel, but how good are OSX upgrades? Will Lion be buggy as its new?
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Can't help with the OS, but lots of rumours on Mac forums about a new MacBook Air - apparently a big American retailer has stopped shipping most models.
Lion is now due over here next month, so unless the client buys straight away, his new Air, or new new Air, will have Lion already installed.
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Thanks iffy, didn't realise there was new hardware due as well. Apple really are shortening lifecycles on stuff these days - the old one is only 6 months old.
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Mac fans are resting easy about Lion as regards bugs because it's only an update to Snow Leopard.
I understand previous cat name changes have been seamless.
Apart from anything else, Apple are only charging £20 for the Lion upgrade, which at Apple prices can only be an extra couple of lines of code.
Everyone seems to think Lion will be the last of the line, so bugs might be more of a question if the next OS is completely new.
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I upgraded to Snow Leopard - bug free upgrade, seems to be seamless....I'll wait a bit for the latest upgrade to see what happens to real users.
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>> Apart from anything else, Apple are only charging £20 for the Lion upgrade, which at
>> Apple prices can only be an extra couple of lines of code.
Checked in the apple shop at MK, buy now and you get a free upgrade to Lion.
Going to wait for the new hardware with lion preloaded.
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Activating some professional discounts Apple would sell me one of this for 814 quid.
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It looks like the new Macbook Air will feature a new, faster SSD. It will also likely have the Thunderbolt connector.
As for Lion, it has many changes to the interface compared to Leopard and Snow Leopard. The latter had many changes under the hood but visually was the same as Leopard. It introduced more 64-bit code, shrunk the size of the install by quite a bit and improved performance. I upgraded to Snow Leopard as soon as it came out (I got it for the price of postage).
Lion will have a lot more gesture based features like the iPad. So either a laptop (with multi-gesture touchpad), the Magic Touchpad or Magic Mouse will be needed for this. Also there is:
- Mission Control which replaces Spaces and Expose (both very useful)
- Launchpad (iPad like way of launching applications)
- Fullscreen apps
- Resume - resume an application and continue where you left it
- Versions for files (keeps old versions automatically)
- Airdrop (share files with those nearby wirelessly - no wifi needed apparently)
- Improved Mail client
Will I upgrade - almost definitely yes but might way until others have proved there are no major bugs.
It has not been confirmed but some are saying you need to be on Snow Leopard to upgrade, i.e. not Leopard or Tiger.
They have also dropped Rosetta so PowerPC binaries can no longer be run. I wonder if this is more to do with IBM buying Transitive which underpinned Rosetta rather than Apple pulling the cross-processor compatibility solution?
- Lion Server - no longer is there a separate OS for servers... it is now an addon to the workstation product.
- ... and more (www.apple.com/uk/macosx/whats-new/features.html)
Last edited by: rtj70 on Fri 8 Jul 11 at 13:04
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Oops. I edited it and stuck my last bit in the middle of my list and now I cannot edit it to put it right.
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Sod the OS, where is the new HARDWARE!
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It won't be out before Lion. But that's probably out next week so it must be soon. But the current model is showing as being in stock for 24 hour delivery.
I'd suggest upgrading to 4Gb RAM on the Macbook Air too. It is not user swappable so if you go for 2Gb you're stuck with that because it's soldered to the board.
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>>a new, faster SSD. It will also likely have the Thunderbolt connector>>
A client of mine produce high end RAID servers, they have yested SSDs though do not utilise them yet on the basis of reliability.
As I understand it the Intel/Apple Thunderbolt it has no power passing capability in the way that USB does hence USB 3.0, which is very fast, may prevail.
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Thunderbolt does indeed provide power and is a lot faster than USB3.
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>> >>a new, faster SSD. It will also likely have the Thunderbolt connector>>
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>> A client of mine produce high end RAID servers, they have yested SSDs though do
>> not utilise them yet on the basis of reliability.
Your client is some way behind the high end market leaders IBM and EMC in storage arrays then.
I quote from IBM.
" As well as using less power than rotating magnetic media, the SSDs are more reliable, and can service many more I/O requests per second (IOPS). These attributes make them well suited to I/O intensive applications, such as those that make complex queries of databases."
EMC have offered them since 2008. The only thing wrong with them, and the reason they have not taken off in storage arrays is capacity.
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... It has not been confirmed but some are saying you need to be on Snow Leopard to upgrade, i.e. not Leopard or Tiger...
I read somewhere on the official Apple site you do need the latest Snow Leopard to upgrade to Lion.
The site offered me a free Snow Leopard upgrade which I've done.
Another point about Lion, which I don't think has been mentioned in this thread, is it's 4gb and only available as a download.
Lots of complaints on Apple user forums about how long that will take for those of us with less than superfast broadband.
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The fact it's download only from the Mac App Store says it's Snow Leopard you need before you can install Lion. The App Store is only currently available for Snow Leopard.
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Just checked my MacBookPro and I'm good to go for the update when its available.
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I've never played with an Air, but one of the things people seem to like is its speed, which is usually put down to the use of flash memory.
Seems to me the Windows netbook makers are missing a trick, unless Apple do something very clever with their execution of the technology.
Wouldn't a Windows netbook with flash memory be just as quick as an Air?
Last edited by: Iffy on Sat 9 Jul 11 at 13:10
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Windows netbook makers don't sell their netbooks at over 800 quid. Less than half that in fact.
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...Windows netbook makers don't sell their netbooks at over 800 quid. Less than half that in fact...
That's my point, surely it wouldn't cost a lot to make a Windows flash memory netbook, so it could be sold at a sensible price.
I might even buy one myself.
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How much is a typical Windows netbook? I'd say £250-£300. To have fast SSD in that you can push the price closer to £350-400. I doubt people will pay that.
With the new flash memory in the new Macbook Air being both faster and made on a smaller process I'd expect similar in the next iPad.
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New Macbook Air - Iffy
