OS X Lion: Run With It or Run Away from It?

Several Low End Mac staffers have been using Macs since the System 6 and System 7 era, and it seems that with every step forward there's also a step back - losing 24-bit support with Mac OS 7.6.1, the new HFS+ filing system introduced with Mac OS 8.1, the big leap from the classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, and Leopard (OS X 10.5) leaving behind Classic Mode are among the changes to the Mac OS that have broken backward compatibility and made it difficult (and sometimes impossible) to move forward without adopting new software and/or hardware.

This week our writers explain why they have made the migration to OS X 10.7 Lion - or why they haven't yet gone there and may not go there.

Jason Schrader (Maximize Your Mac): I'm not upgrading to Lion, because my hardware is PPC based.

Austin Leeds (Apple Everywhere): Personally, I don't have any Intel Macs, so I can't upgrade to Lion. However, I have installed Lion on other Macs, and it is a dream to use.

I know, I'm the iPad guy, so I'm a little biased. Still, I view most of the advances in Lion as very positive things. The loss of some backwards compatibility is understandable, but since I don't have any Intel Macs at home to work with, I've just always found ways to use my PowerPC Macs with Windows PCs (blech!) or Linux machines. I've even experimented with Linux on some of my PowerPC machines, although it's not quite satisfactory yet. If I need to install software on my 68k Macs, I can always find a copy of the disks on the Web and write them to floppies using HFV Explorer on my older PCs. So, overall, I've rarely used an Intel Mac to support an older Mac (and even then it was easier to use the PC to support it, sadly) - -without that string attached, I've been gung ho about upgrading to Lion on Macs that support it.

Adam Rosen (Adam's Apple): The bi-annual "should I upgrade Mac OS X or not" question has presented a real conundrum for me the past few years. As a longtime computer user and a professional Macintosh consultant, my overall philosophy is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Systems that are working and compatible are more productive; lots of problems can accompany a latest and greatest release. In the end, the computer is a tool I use to get work done; I want to keep it operational. However as a Mac consultant, I need to stay up-to-date and familiar with Apple's offerings to be able to serve my clients and their needs. What to do?

I decided to upgrade only one of my two primary systems, my Mac Pro office desktop. I knew that I'd have to upgrade any Rosetta-dependent apps before making the jump, and after an expensive credit card payment to Adobe, I was ready to go. The upgrade went smoothly, and I've experienced few problems; for a "point oh" release, Lion 10.7 has been stable and snappy. I like Mission Control, window resizing from any edge (borrowed from Windows), and the integration of gestures throughout the OS. Reverse scrolling, lack of bundled Flash and Java, and the discontinuation of Rosetta are the biggest overall negatives. Fortunately all but the last are fixable.

I've kept my MacBook Pro on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - this is the system I use on the road, and it has to be stable and trouble free. Every new release of OS X seems to bring glitches and WiFi connectivity problems; I don't need to deal with those while attending to my clients' needs. It's also helpful to have access to older PowerPC software in the field, and the vast majority of Mac users have not upgraded to Lion yet. By pursuing a dual OS strategy on two systems, I'm unlikely to run into any serious roadblocks, and I can check out the new while preserving the old.

Allison Payne (The Budget Mac): I'm content to keep OS X 10.4 Tiger on my PowerBook G4 and Snow Leopard on my Aluminum Unibody MacBook.

However, I'm also considering purchasing the current generation MacBook Air, which is Lion-only (for a native OS; I'm always happy to try other operating systems in virtual environments, but they can be quirky.)

I'm looking forward to the speed and portability of the 11" Air, and it will be a novel experience to own a new machine with the newest OS. I can always default back to one of my other machines if I need FireWire Target Mode or Rosetta.

Dan Bashur (Apple, Tech, and Gaming): My stance opposing Lion has been made clear in my own articles and responses to others. To reiterate and further explain my personal situation: I never plan on upgrading to 10.7 for three primary reasons:

1. First and most obviously, I simply can't upgrade to Lion since I am running all PowerPC equipment.
2. The second most obvious: No Rosetta. It would not be cost effective for me at all to upgrade to Lion due to the fact that all of my applications are PowerPC. I would have to start off with a clean slate if I were to purchase a brand new Lion 10.7 or later Mac - not good for a guy like me that has 10 years worth of PowerPC applications laying around or installed. I'm not going to purchase new hardware and be forced to turn around and buy/download all new applications as well. This means that my cut-off (for the time being) is early 2011 models that can run Snow Leopard, and hence Rosetta giving me access to my application. I'm also with Dan Knight on not giving up AppleWorks 6. It's an excellent and powerful production tool that is easy to use.
3. As a writer and longtime Mac user, I have gotten by just fine on Mac OS X` 10.4.11 Tiger and 10.5.8 Leopard for all of my fairly modern applications using my 1.42 GHz eMac and 12" 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4. I also have my 600 MHz Summer 2001 iMac G3 and Pismo PowerBook for Mac OS 9 native applications. In short, I have all the tools and components to make everything I have continue to work (and work together over a network). I'm not going to reinvent the way I do things until the changes made to the workflow (with an OS update) are justified in enough increased efficiency, while still being feature-rich. Right now, I don't feel Lion has accomplished either.

In summary, not only does the look and feel of Lion seem inconsistent to what I have learned to love for so long, but much functionality has been taken away with the elimination of Rosetta and the dumbing down of the OS in general. Although many of the iOS themed features in Lion can be turned off (once you upgrade), what's the point in upgrading in the first place once you do so? I'm passing on this one, Apple!

Charles Moore (several columns): Upgrading to Lion? I'm torn, but not a whole lot. I'm more casually curious about than enchanted with the changes in Lion, and some I know I'm going to hate. I'm certainly in no rush at all to upgrade. The crunch will come, of course, when applications I want to use start requiring Lion as minimum system requirement. You can swim against the tide for only so long before you have to make the choice between going with the flow or getting out of the water.

Having been an iPad 2 user now for a couple of months, I can think of absolutely nothing the iOS does that suits me better than the way things work in Snow Leopard, and there's much that I like a lot less. Consequently, making the Lion UI more like the iOS, with a lot of dumbing-down and more of the OS making control decisions for you (e.g.: autosave, autocorrect) does not appeal from the get-go. To say nothing of the loss of Rosetta, which is huge.

Aspects of Lion that I recoil from include:

• Hidden Scrollbars - This is partly reversible, but even if you modify the default setting so scrollbars are visible at all times, they're pathetically anorexic compared with traditional ones. I also would revert to traditional scrolling behavior from the so-called "natural scrolling, which is okay on the iPad but not on a laptop or desktop.
• Multi-Touch swipes and gestures in general - After a couple of months on the iPad, I'm more convinced than ever that that I'm just not a touchscreen/multitouch kind of guy, and I probably never will be. I find that memorizing gestures, especially ones not used frequently, is a facility that eludes me. I've had a MacBook with a multitouch trackpad for nearly three years now, and I've almost never used any of the trackpad gestures it supports, and I keep a mouse or rollerbar plugged in wherever practical. I can live with a trackpad in its traditional role for pointing and clicking, but gestures? Not so much.

On the iPad, my biggest irritation is text selection, copying, pasting, and so forth. I find the hit or miss imprecision of touchscreen input maddening to the point of fury.

Sometimes you tap or gesture and get the results you want first try. More often than not you don't. Wasted motion and wasted time. I profoundly miss the predictable precision of using a mouse or other device for pointing and clicking. Find a snippet of text in an article online that you'd like to save? First you have to get it selected, typically a major tussle. Then try to paste it into a Mail message to send it to yourself. But the selection you copied is truncated by Mail. Arrrrgh! For some reason, I find email composition and sending works more reliably in the Notepad app, which sends through Mail (but doesn't randomly truncate pastes), than Mail itself. That's typical of what maddens me about trying to do stuff in the IOS. Most everything feels half baked and inefficient compared with the (traditional) Mac OS way. Adding insult to injury, different apps behave inconsistently. Superimposing this sort of efficiency-strangling behavior on the Mac OS seems woefully regressive to me.

After 19 years of using the Mac OS as the main tool of my trade, I've developed a complex ecosystem consisting of a suite of production applications I use and a workflow I've developed around them. I managed to compensate for losing Classic Mode when I transitioned to 10.5 Leopard, although not without sustaining a bit of a productivity hit, but Lion at this point appears to be a burned bridge too far.

For the immediate present, it's a moot point. I haven't enough room left on the MacBook's 160 GB hard drive to use my second partition volume for a fair-trial Lion install, and I'm not nearly ready to say good-bye to Snow Leopard. I'll probably buy one more Mac sometime before mid-2012, most likely a Certified Refurbished Core "i" 13" MacBook Pro that can run Lion comfortably and still boot from Snow Leopard. After that, it will remain to be seen.

Adam Rosen: (Adam's Apple I agree with you about trackpad vs. mouse for cursor precison. Night and day. I'm using both simultaneously on my Mac Pro.

Simon Royal (Mac Spectrum): Charles, that is so true.

While Apple really seemed to have turned up the heat with Lion and take up is not simply a deal of new OS, but a massive change in your current hardware and software. This has slowed down a lot people who would normally be early adopters.

I'm all for holding on to older hardware. The iBook G4 I am writing this on is the fastest Mac I have had in years, but it is still swimming against the tide, and every day I face times when I start to drown. At some point I am going to have to go down the Intel route and possibly the Lion route.

I thought going to Leopard-only was a big step. It meant I had to drop Classic support, and with my iBook I also had to drop native OS 9 booting. 30% of my software is now not usable, so I understand the steps needed when facing an OS that doesn't support your software and the frustration when you have no other choice.

You can hang on and push PPC support as hard as you like - but at some point, as you say, you will have to move to Lion or get out of the Mac world. People needing to buy a new Mac will have no choice to have Lion and lose a lot of the software they own.

Charles Moore: Of course what one must try to avoid, despite dismay and apprehension at what's happening to the Mac OS, is storming into a closet and slamming the door. Sticking with PowerPC and one of the older versions of OS X will work for some of us in the short-to-mid term, and I intend on doing just that with my old Pismos and OS X 10.4 Tiger, but I expect that compatibility issues will eventually render that impractical for production efficiency.

The conundrum is where would one jump if deciding to jump ship. Going to either Linux or Windows would involve a steep orientation curve and most likely worse compromises and inefficiencies than eventually gritting my teeth and learning to live with Lion. Windows 7, in some respects, would be more tolerable than Lion, but Windows 8, based on early reports, is afflicted with the same tabletization and touchscreen-style input unfortunateness as Lion is, while desktop Linux is spinning its wheels and losing traction in the marketplace, sinking farther and farther below a one percent market share, which doesn't inspire confidence in its long term viability as a competitive alternate platform.

Dan Knight (Mac Musings): I won't say never to Lion, but I don't expect the move to Lion - whenever it comes - will be an easy one. It took years before I made the switch from Mac OS 9 to OS X 10.2 Jaguar, and to this day I continue to use Classic Mode on a PowerPC Mac running OS X 10.4 Tiger. I have a second Power Mac G4 running Leopard, and I only went to Leopard because one program I depend on (NetNewsWire) stopped supporting syncing with Tiger.

I do have an Intel Mac, a competent little 2007 Mac mini with a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and Intel GMA 950 graphics. I am running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on it and could run Lion on it if I wanted to. At present, the Mini has its original 1 GB of system memory, and I just upgraded it with a 320 GB 7200 rpm WD Scorpio Black, because for the past two days my external drive has been making frightening noises. Rather than risk losing everything on the external drive, I spent $75 at the local Best Buy, used iFixit's guide, and swapped the hard drive - not a task you want to attempt without a guide!

Why do I not plan on moving to Lion in the near future? Because, like most of our staff, I have a comfortable workflow developed over 20-some years using Macs and 14 years publishing Low End Mac. Someday there may be a killer app for my work that is Lion only, and that's when I'll contemplate making it part of my production environment. Until then, my trio of Macs works very nicely (the Mini does need more RAM), and I can continue to be productive working on the Web without using the newest version of OS X.

I'm sure that I'll get a copy to play with sometime in the next year or so, but as someone who is completely comfortable with the pre-iOS way of doing things on Macs, there's no compelling reason to abandon what works well for something that will require a fair bit of relearning.