OS X Mountain Lion will be a must-upgrade release from the Cupertino, California-based Apple Inc. this year. Why? Because Lion doesn’t cut it. Even Leopard was better. iCloud being practically the only incentive to upgrade to Lion when Apple released it in 2011, many people (including myself) discovered the hard way that OS X version 10.7 was, in fact, not the best upgrade spit out by Apple Inc.
It lacked certain key functions, such as the ability to Save As, and it brought sorrow to those who didn’t want the scroll-bars changed. Every app whose UI displays usable contend right down to the last line of pixels now has that content blocked by the conspicuous scroll bars.
Everything moves and giggles. Every accidental scroll you make with your Magic Mouse moves some thing or another. It’s extremely annoying!
Lion is the first Mac OS to mark the arrival of some serious security troubles for Apple’s longstanding virus-free platform.
It offers nothing revolutionary when compared to its much-more stable predecessor, OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. And the new features aren’t all that great to begin with.
For instance, Launchpad doesn’t make much sense in the desktop environment. Most people use very few apps and seldom make a change in their daily workflow. The Dock is more than enough for that.
Mission Control is confusing, especially for newcomers. Admittedly, with a bit of cleanup, it can be a really nice addition.
Even the newer versions of iCal and Mail are more cumbersome than the previous ones in Snow Leopard. Apple, what happened there?
The many third party applications I relied on to get work done ran great on Mac OS X 10.6. Many of them started to act up in Lion. And I’m not talking about those that relied on Rosetta, but the ones that are labeled as Universal, meaning they’re suitable for Intel processors too.
Unlike Snow Leopard, Lion requires loads of customization efforts to get started - not the
works-out-of-the-box we’ve all grown accustomed to.
Most of all, I hate that Lion eats up too much memory. I have six gigs of RAM on a 21.5-inch iMac (Mid-2009) and it launches apps slower than Snow Leopard did on the same computer when I had just 4 GB of memory. All this after a fresh installation of Lion.
Apple's OS X Lion teaser from 2011 aimed to depict a new direction, but now it seems to resemble a closing door
Image credits: Apple I’ll admit AirDrop is one of the few new features that really makes the experience bearable. In fact, it turned out to be the best way to swap files between two computers since the invention of the computer itself.
But let’s stay on track here. While major OS releases do come with such drawbacks, there have been one too many in OS X Lion. We know this. Apple knows this. And it needs to be fixed. And it will be, in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
The only problem is that Mountain Lion, scheduled to arrive this summer, might retain some of these unnecessary changes (such as Mail.app).
It’s no mystery why Tim Cook & Co. have accelerated the upgrade pace from two years to one. At least as far as
this upgrade goes, the company wants the next Mac OS in the hands of end-customers ASAP.
Which brings us to my point. Let’s take a stab in the dark and assess just how many people will stick with OS X Lion once Mountain Lion comes out. I’m guessing very few. Your guess is as good as mine, though. Do share it in the comments.
Of course, there will be
some people out there who will stick to their current configuration out of commodity. Others will perhaps postpone plucking out $30 (if the current pricing scheme stays in place) for what they imagine could turn out to be another crappy upgrade.
And let’s not rule out any other incentives Apple might put on the table for those customers who are
not dissatisfied with Lion.
All in all, there’s a good chance OS X 10.7 will be forgotten before it even got a chance to get it right.
Disclaimer
This is a Personal Thoughts piece reflecting the author’s “personal” opinion on matters relating to Apple and / or the products associated with the Apple brand. This article should not be taken as the official stance of Softpedia on Apple-related matters.
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