As widely anticipated, Apple’s new major OSX release is available this morning, download-only, for $29.99 USD in the Mac App Store. There’s a quick copy and paste job of the feature list after the jump. Also as expected, there’s a new, Sandy Bridge-based Macbook Air. Update: A reader pointed out John Siracusa’s Lion review at Ars.
Multi-Touch gestures
^aEURc Fluid and realistic animations make gestures feel natural and direct.
^aEURc Tap or pinch to zoom in on text and images.
^aEURc Swipe left or right to move from one page to another in an app or switch from one full-screen app to another.
^aEURc Swipe up to enter Mission Control.
^aEURc Pinch to access Launchpad.
Full-screen apps
^aEURc A new full-screen button takes an app window full screen.
^aEURc Run multiple full-screen apps at the same time.
^aEURc Switch between full-screen apps and your desktop with a gesture.
^aEURc Apps stay full screen when you switch to another app.
^aEURc OS X Lion includes full-screen Mail, Safari, Preview, iCal, FaceTime, Dashboard, Screen Sharing, and Photo Booth.
Mission Control
^aEURc Brings together Expos~A(c), full-screen apps, Dashboard, and desktop spaces.
^aEURc Gives you a bird’s-eye view of everything running on your Mac, allowing you to navigate anywhere with a click.
^aEURc Expos~A(c) view shows all open windows on your desktop grouped by application.
^aEURc Create and organize desktop spaces in Mission Control.
Launchpad
^aEURc A new home for all the apps on your Mac.
^aEURc Apps downloaded from the Mac App Store automatically appear in Launchpad.
^aEURc Launchpad automatically adds pages to accommodate all your apps.
^aEURc Apps can be organized on multiple pages and grouped in folders.
Mail
^aEURc The widescreen layout displays the message list and selected email side by side in full-height columns.
^aEURc The favorites bar gives you one-click access to your favorite mail folders.
^aEURc Search suggestions dynamically present the best matches for your search.
^aEURc Search tokens help refine search results based on people, subjects, mailboxes, dates, and attachments.
^aEURc Conversations automatically groups related messages, displaying them in chronological order and hiding repetitive quoted text.
Other great Lion features
^aEURc Auto Save automatically saves your changes as you go, so you never have to worry about losing your work.
^aEURc Versions keeps a history of your document as you work and presents it in a timeline you can browse.
^aEURc Resume reopens an app exactly as you left it.
^aEURc AirDrop is the simplest way to send files to anyone around you, wirelessly ^aEUR” no setup or special settings required.
^aEURc Reading List in Safari lets you easily save web pages to read or browse later.
May also want to check out Siracusa’s review
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars/
Typically a fun read for every OSX release.
If you are planning on burning it to a DVD to make future re-installations easier, make sure you burn the DVD after downloading and before installing.
I’ve just downloaded, installed and then went to burn the DVD only to find that the installer auto deletes itself after installing, so now I have to download it all again! Not impressed Apple! – Also, when I attempted to download again via the App store, the app store generates the error, ‘A newer version is installed…..’, to circumvent this, hold down option whilst you click ‘Install’.
I would find that very annoying! Keep in mind that the installer creates a permanent recovery partition, so if you only have one Mac, you may never need the DVD backup. On the other hand, if you have more than one mac, your $30 lets you install it on all your computers, so a DVD would be handy in that case.
I didn’t realise it created a recovery partition, thanks for that. Regardless, I’d still prefer a physical piece of media to cover hard disk failures.
Edited 2011-07-20 18:11 UTC
I just read an Apple press release regarding this:
“Users who do not have broadband access at home, work or school can download Lion at Apple retail stores and later this August, Lion will be made available on a USB thumb drive through the Apple Store for $69.”
The ARS link mentions that there’s a dmg in the recover partition that you can burn (I think).
On their latest models (ones they’ve just released without optical drives) you can replace the hard disk and apparently on the board itself there is the ability to install Mac OS X Lion over the internet using an ‘on the board’ recovery tool (maybe there is a ‘flash’ chip on their holding a recovery tool and stripped down Mac OS X?).
I too created a physical DVD plus I backed up the .app that was downloaded from the AppStore (7z’ed it) – did a clean install and everything is working beautifully so far.
there’s no need to do such a thing. If you have your Snow Leopard disc and have legally purchased a copy of Lion, all you need to do is log onto your App Store account and download again. Its a lot simpler than some of you make it. Remember, you can’t install it clean, it relies on Snow Leopard.
Mine is a legal copy of both. Downloading a second time is crazy at 4gb and how do you do a clean install without media, and yes with the boot disk you can do a clean install.
Edited 2011-07-21 02:48 UTC
Some of us live in countries that have metered internet – in the case of me I have a 90GB ‘allowance’ per month so I sure as heck don’t want to be wasting it re-downloading something if I can avoid it.
I expected that much. Thank you anyway.
Could the ads be marked or put into quotes?
Hey, I warned you it was a cut-and-paste job from Apple’s web site.
Besides, I just read over them, and they are great!
Edited 2011-07-20 16:58 UTC
OK ok
Great is fairly modest for Apple. Usually everything is just magical.
“The Lion-compatible and 64-bit Cocoa version of iTunes 10.4 is now in Software Update”
HURRAH!
Edit: no… wait… it is some kind of bizarre hybrid apparently.
Edited 2011-07-20 19:41 UTC
Mac OS X still can’t “dist-upgrade”. Instead, the “installer” shrinks your existing partition, puts itself into a new partition, reboots your Mac from the new partition and installs Lion.
Sounds fine, until you realise that resizing partitions only has a 99% success rate. Statistically speaking, one in every hundred Lion upgraders is going to lose all their data.
A good way of selling Time Machine units?
I dunno – it never caused me any great problems when I used it a while back. However, there’s danger in any partition resize and everyone should have good backups anyway, especially for mobile devices!!
Time Capsule. I got a 2TB a short while ago after looking for a replacement wireless router/NAS (pure NAS, not one with extra “apps”) and coming to the conclusion that what Apple was selling was fairly close in price to the competition. Simple install all in one box won.
Actually, the installer blesses a new boot bundle on the same partition, reboots from that and then starts creating the Recovery partition as part of the install process from what I’ve read.
Other than that, there’s nothing whatsoever important about “dist-upgrade”. It’s just a buzzword. The end result is the same. Though, Ubuntu still won’t let users install the latest and great versions of their favorite apps without upgrading their entire OS. So, I can see why some would place importance on something like dist-upgrade.
Resizing partitions has been a no-brainer on Macs for quite a few years (since at least 2006 with the advent of BootCamp). I’ve not heard of any memorable catastrophes but I’m sure they’ve happened on very rare occasions. I’m sure dist-upgrades fail more often than partition resizing on Macs. However, everyone should have a current back-up before trying anything remotely major such as this, right?
Well I upgraded to Lion today… beside my account on my system going away and having to recreate it all went good. For those wanting media use this http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20080989-263/how-to-create-an-… it works just fine to create the boot dvd.
Edited 2011-07-21 00:53 UTC
I didn’t follow all the rumors on Lion, but it looks interesting from a user point of view (will we be able to get rid of the dock at last?). The only thing I’m dubious about is that Full screen thing, all that I wanted was a maximize button that actually does just that instead of the current “+” that never works as you would expect.
Asking for the menu bar to go away from the top of the screen and going where it belongs to – its application – is asking too much, I guess.
Anyway, I’ll wait some weeks before installing on my MB.
And a 11″ Air plugged to two 27″ displays… uh, I have to stop eating for some time to buy those…
Sounds like you’re a little attached to the Windows / Linux layout of things. I much prefer the menu bar at the top of the screen – only the relevant menu is displayed, and all windows look tidier as a result. The + button is a funny one – it’s to “optimise” the size of the application to what it feels is best for the window contents. A minor thing, but I don’t mind it. What I’d like is the new Amiga-type way of doing it: Hold down shift and click + and it would go to full-screen instead of its current behaviour. Then you get the best of both worlds, and still not clutter your window with extra buttons.
I like it on my MBP 13″. However the whole notion falls down when you have more than one screen or a really massive screen. Also if you want to access the menu of a window that is not in focus you first need to click on the window and then go to the menu bar.
Yeah, I get the multiple large screens thing I suppose, but I can’t say I’ve ever needed a menu in an application which wasn’t in focus. Perhaps it’s an automatic thing for me though to reach for F9 or F10, or sometimes Command-Tab or Command-~ to have the application/window I’m looking for in focus.
I personally like the menubar-on-top thing, it’s neat, and I sure can’t remember a single instance where I would’ve had to access the menu of an application that I don’t already have in focus. Hell, I don’t even remember the last time I needed a menu at all
Then again, that’s more-or-less the only thing I like about OSX..
I believe the menu bar on the top of the screen is nothing but a relic of the past, when the first Macs had minuscule displays and were practically monotasking. Later it was kept as a purely distinctive sign.
And don’t even talk about the Dock, it’s the thing I hate the most on the Mac.
As I see it, menus are part of the application, thus they should remain in the application’s limits. Probably the best thing Micosoft introduced with Windows 95 is the Taskbar: a system-level element dedicated to system-level tasks (launch apps, list running apps, showing system status). Clean and simple, even though I would like to have it a bit richer.
BeOS, with the added plus of virtual screens, was probably closer to perfection. That’s why I liked it so much.
But I don’t want to start a discussion on user interface design here.
The Windows taskbar is a HORRIBLE piece of garbage. How you can like it better than the Dock?
The Dock consistently has the same thing in the same place Every Single Time you use your computer. The piece of bleep Taskbar the order is going to be different every single time unless you open things up exactly the same way every time, and that is for only as long as explorer.exe doesn’t hang or crash.
If Anything needs to be fixed, it is definitely the Taskbar.
PS: I’ve been using Microsoft OSs since 1983. I’ve been using Macs since 1998. So I’ve been using Windows a lot longer than Macs and I’ve always thought the taskbar was a piece of ****.
Edited 2011-07-21 16:31 UTC
This is true only if you “Keep in Dock” every program you ever run. Otherwise, (a.) the programs that aren’t “kept” in the Dock will show up in a different order “unless you open things up exactly the same way every time” and (b.) the programs that are “kept” in the Dock will physically move away from their “same place” when other, non-“kept” programs are launched.
Point (b.) violates the interface-design principle that things should stay in the same place (as you want them to) to encourage “muscle memory” when using the mouse for oft-repeated tasks.
A simple fix would be to locate the Dock in a corner rather than centering it. NeXTStep had the Dock in a corner, although I think that non-“kept” programs were placed in another corner altogether. I’m not sure. In any event, if the OS X Dock were located in a corner, the non-“kept” programs would simply be added to the end of the Dock, the “kept” programs not moving at all. Alas, as far as I know, there is no way to anchor the Dock to a corner in OS X.
For starters, the taskbar (at least in Win7) visually-distinguishes between icons that are shortcuts to launch a program & icons of programs that are running. Hell, even the old Win95-style taskbar + QuickLaunch bar handled that better than OS X.
That is, until you add or remove an icon (or launch a program that isn’t already in the dock). Since the dock expands from the center, any of those actions will move EVERYTHING on the dock and (in the process) cause Apple fanboys to conveniently forget that whole “Fitt’s Law” thing they’re always rambling about.
Bzzzzzzt, WRONG. Windows 7 allows taskbar icons to be pinned (so they’re always in the same location) AND allows the icons to be rearranged by drag and drop.
Maybe if you’d ever used the current version of Windows (you know, the one that’s been out for nearly 2 years now), you might actually know what you’re talking about.
…um, have you actually used any version of Windows released after the year 2,000?
That’s funny, considering that your criticisms of the taskbar are completely baseless (or at least 2 years outdated). And you know what’s even funnier? The fact that the Windows 7 taskbar improves on the OS X in just about every possible way, it’s essentially the Dock done properly.
Well there’s your problem, maybe you should try upgrading from Windows 98.
Edited 2011-07-22 22:03 UTC
Well, I’m sorry to say, bo these aro no real innovative features … just the cosmetic ones.
No real technology which makes the WORK easier, only some minor fixes and doubtful “enhancements” like fullscreen apps [wow, now that’s so up-to-date! I’ve never heard of ’em].
Mission control can be easily created with normal icons … darn it, everything on the list is obvious and pretty common in every developed OS.
I suppose only hardcore fans and people who have never knew sich features would be happy about them.
And those who don’t look for features in Apple’s PR material.
Have a look here:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7.ars#toc-…
Do tell me of another OS that has integrated document versioning…
It also has to be noted that Windows upgrades cost a lot more for the features they provide…
Edited 2011-07-21 14:57 UTC
it is a mature OS… what did you expect for 30 dollars?
This is an absolute shambles for small businesses, or any business with only a small subset of Macs.
We have 5 Macs running Snow Leopard here. What are we supposed to do if we want 5 licenses? Buy 20 licenses and discard 15 of them?
* The credit card company won’t accept 5 people with individual Apple IDs attached to one credit card for fraud reasons. The Mac App Store license doesn’t cover 1 purchase being used by 5 people concurrently on 5 different machines.
* I could order using my personal credit card and claim the money back. Then, who owns the license – me or my employer? What about the other software we may want in future? Employees buying their own work software is nonsense, so let’s discard that option.
The situation is a mess, and how predictable the new Apple should ignore a vast swathe of its traditional customers. It’s a particular insult to the small creative businesses that should be the lifeblood of Apple. The ones running Adobe products that Apple hates; the ones who invested in X-Serves that Apple canned; or the ones running FCP that Apple crippled. It’s just another piece of evidence of Apple’s blinkered consumer vision.
My bet is that Apple have received so many phone calls today (not to mention its forgotten-about resellers) that they’ll back-track and lower the volume licensing to 5 or 10 copies.
If not… then they really don’t give a crap.
Chris
Edited 2011-07-21 12:07 UTC
huh?
and why would you need to do that?
What exactly do you object to?
Upgrading Macs to new system software?
Not giving all your employees personal credit cards so they go on the App Store?
Having between 2 and 19 Macs in an office but no more?
Not wanting to throw away 15 copies of Lion?
Trying to make sure all your software is legal?
Criticising Apple?
Or maybe the lack of detail is because you’re just trolling for this reply.
You can install on up to five Macs with a single AppleID. We have three Macs and two accounts. One of us bought Lion, signed in on all the machines and downloaded and installed it. This is the case with any app purchased through the App Store.
So if you have an AppleID for your business, tied to a business card, then you only need to sign in with that ID on all your machines and you can upgrade them all.
Guys, I’m tired of being accused of NOT reading official materials. I’ve seen it, I’ve been there and I know what I’m saying. To *me* there are no real features, really. It’s no argument when people repeat the same sentence about not reading stuff
Sorry, but you’re not correctly licensed to use Lion. According to Apple’s EULA, you’re effectively pirating it.
The pertinent bit:
If you’re likely to be audited for your software licenses, it would be a good idea to fix this before they come.
Edited 2011-07-24 12:17 UTC
Have to agree with marcp, I find that release quite underwhelming… I love my Snow Leopard (recent convert here), don’t get me wrong. But even after reading Ars review I really don’t get it as a major upgrade – despite Ars enthusiastic conclusion.
I played with it already.. and wow really, the launchpad… you want to convince me a grid of icons is a major move forward !!?? I obviously did not drink enough KoolAid yet…
PS: I really don’t like the idea of doing a partition resize to install …
Edited 2011-07-21 13:42 UTC
The things that I think are the biggest benefits to people are:
1) Auto-saving. Users no longer will be forgetting to save their files.
2) Auto-saving. Users no longer will be forgetting to save their files.
3) Auto-saving. Users no longer will be forgetting to save their files.
4) Auto-saving. Users no longer will be forgetting to save their files.
5) Auto-saving. Users no longer will be forgetting to save their files.
I purposely am repeating the same thing. I’m a computer systems analyst for the organization I work for that has over 10,000 employees. Of the things that are the “users” fault this is one of the big things.
6) Versions – This will be great for when they write over the top of a document (instead of using a tradition restore) they can get back to the previous version.
7) Resume. This is a big time saving feature. Where else are you going to start working in a program other than where you left off? Most of the time, maybe 99% of the time, it will be where you left off.
Not only does this work for individual programs but also for when you shutdown or restart your computer. It will bring you right back to where you were working. Brilliant.
8) App-store – This actually started with Snow Leopard but for any new person coming from Windows to Mac OS X the App store is something they will love, just like they do on idevices.
9) Resizing windows anywhere on the Window – Twenty-Seven years in the making. This was a stupidly set in stone thing on Macs that was done right on most OSs (quite a few before Windows). Finally Mac OS X allows you to resize from any side and any corner.
10) Merging folders with drag and drop. Another FINALLY thing. Instead of stupidly replacing a folder if you drag another identically name folder on top of it, it will now merge the two folders together. Whoever thought the old way was smart, wasn’t.
11) Address space layout randomization (ASLR). Another thing that many other OSs have and Mac OS X is finally getting a lot better with. Windows has it but it certainly hasn’t kept malware from causing lots of headaches for Windows users but better security is always better as long as it doesn’t take the user’s rights away from them.
Summation – Everything else is “nice to have” but is BS when it comes to be the major features of Lion. I’m not caught up in the PR machine. I see things from the users’ perspective and always have since I started programming in 1979. What users see and experience is what matters. If programmers looked at things from the user perspective, if they are even able to, lots of problems would never been created.
Edited 2011-07-21 16:55 UTC
Doesn’t auto save have to be enabled in the application? I don’t think MS word won’t suddenly start working with it. It might be something pretty cool 3-5 years from now when most things support it.
As with most new apis, it is strictly Opt In. iWork 09 got updates to support it though…
Yeah, now some of the apps you use you wont have to press the save button, and others you will. Does that really decrease the odds of data loss, or increase it? I guess there really isn’t any other way to transition to an always autosave world. Ah well.
Also, Iwork is not for me. I’m not sure who it is for, but with google docs, MS office, or libre/open office I don’t really understand its purpose/place. I mean I paid money for it, and I’d rather use a free one.
Edited 2011-07-22 04:16 UTC
If you use NSDocument then you automatically get it – the problem is that Apple didn’t use NSDocument for iWork’s applications.
What impressed me most, though, is the huge difference in performance. With SL my MacBook Pro (early 2011) used to run hot, noisy (fan), slow. With Lion it is simply a pleasure to use: cool, quiet, fast…
Even if if you play a game in Parallels the CPU doesn’t go mad.
Doc versioning *may* be useful to some, but not for all users. Some prefer to have carte blanche on start.
Resume – returning to previously saved state [halt-reboot sequnce] is something they already call “session management” in other OSs – notably Linux. XFCE has it, other DEs probobly has it.
If I were to create a boot DVD (using the .dmg inside the installer) and install using that, could I choose not to have a recovery partition created? Space is a little tighter than it used to be: the SSD in there now is not as big as the two failed hard drives it replaced.
The partition will be created, but you can delete it and resize your other partitions to reclaim space afterwards.
The new release is insanely great.
Just to let you know if you have a “messed with” boot setup… say running more than 2 OS’s, or using rEFIt to handle boot, or you have used any other partitioner than the BootCamp assistant then the auto install will probably fail.
I ended up removing rEFIt, not enough, removing my BootCamp partition, not enough, resizing the boot partition to full disk size… enough then and the installer would run.
I removed my linux partition and reFit( I thought it prudent). And it installed fine. My windows partition is not showing up in bootcamp though…