“I suppose this is the sort of uncertain question that many ask in one form or another whenever Apple or Microsoft releases a major OS upgrade,” Gene Steinberg writes for TechNightOwl. “Early so-called ‘version one-point-zero’ bugs appear, one or two quick updates are released, and you have to wonder whether they might have done better to wait rather than rush the product out.”
“With Lion, Apple has changed the mold. Unlike previous versions of OS X, most Mac users are expected to download their copies from the Mac App Store, for $29.99,” Steinberg writes. “But the methodology of delivering Lion isn’t the problem. It’s the persistent bugs reported in the initial 10.7 release that trouble a number of Mac users.”
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Steinberg writes, “First and foremost, I do not regard OS X Lion is necessarily buggier than other OS X upgrades. They all had early-release flaws of one degree or another. It makes sense there will be problems because of all the serious changes in Lion. At the same time, I have little doubt that Apple is going to straighten out the worst ills in the months to come… Despite some of the complaints, I do not see Lion as being necessarily less stable than other versions of OS X. But there’s nothing wrong with waiting out a few maintenance updates before diving on.”
Read much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Aside from some funkiness with artifacts on desktops with dual monitor setups (iMacs), we’ve had smooth sailing with Lion. No issues to report at all with Lion on any of our MacBook Airs or MacBook Pros.
Are you experiencing issues with Lion? If so, please describe them below.
No issues I think Lion’s great 🙂
Lion Rocks / no issues
Safari and flash are a buggy mess.
It’s the specificity of your post that I admire most.
Flash in Lion drives me grazy.
Me too!!! Can’t stand that flash basically no worky in Lion.
Perhaps you shouldn’t have downloaded Flash. It doesn’t come with Lion for good reason.
I think that major problem is a memory leak; for example some 3rd party software like ViewIt can consume 1.7Gb of RAM!!!! Sometimes free RAM space can go below 10 Mb.
I just ordered two 4GB sticks of memory to help this as 4GB is totally insufficient now. I admit I keep a lot of apps and windows open but the memory leakage is horrible and I run few 3rd party apps. 75% of what I do is browser-based – Safari, Chrome, Firefox. I’ll go days without using any 3rd party apps and yet Safari alone will crush my memory usage.
More than usual Safari crashes.
Sometimes Safari will lock up my iMac and force a reboot. Just happened 20 min ago.
My Safari whacks out too, freezes.
Yeah, Safari has been unstable for me too. Aside from the unnatural “natural” scrolling, Lion’s been great.
The #1 killer of Safari stability from my experience is crap Safari Extensions. I have had to do ye olde fashioned extensions testing with Safari to discover what is crap and what is not. At the moment I am running 7 specific Safari Extensions that don’t crash the app. I’ve dumped a slew of bad extensions.
I have had a few video problems with lion on the new mac mini
thianguy shpuldmbe sued for lying. Lion is nearly flawless. And it’s downright amazing. I wouldn’t haven’t wanted to wait another to get my hands on it.
As never before, I’m waiting.
It didn’t help that lack of Rosetta forced me to learn a new web development tool. As it’s critical to my biz, I’m taking a careful approach this time around.
My second monitor cuts out CONSTANTLY! It’s driving me crazy!! please fix this ASAP Apple!!
My second monitor is cutting out more often. Not “constantly” but more often.
On my MacBook it’s running great. On my iMac, it sometimes has problems waking after sleep and I have to hold power button to get it to reboot.
No issues with Lion or Lion Server with me! Smooth sailing 🙂
Two frequent problems:
1. Laptop does not sleep w/ external monitor plugged in when lid is closed. This is new after Lion install. Apple has been totally unresponsive to the 100’s of posts on their support user forum. Fail to sleep also happens without an external monitor sometimes as well, but less predictably.
2. Artifacting on external monitor (DVI) connected via DVI to mini display port adapter… Has greatly increased for me since install.
+1
I thought this was me doing something wrong or a setting I had overlooked?
Overall, I love it.
Though I don’t really find Launchpad to be useful. Some things should be set as system prefs, like the checkbox to reopen apps when logging out.
Persistent and reproduceable black screen crashes. Forced to run in integrated video mode only or machine (MacBook Pro, 2.66 i7) WILL crash.
Over a thousand posts on Apple support forums from others having the exact same issues.
i was having this before Lion. Most reports on this were pre Lion I believe.
I had problems with the multitouch gestures on my trackpad not working!
Only trouble I’ve had (still have) is the occasional icon on the desktop hides itself – the filename’s still there, a quick shuffle about brings it back, but it’s annoying. Using an 2008 MBP driving an external monitor.. may be some relationship to the ‘funkiness’ you mention above.. Otherwise very happy. Can even scroll things the new way.
Not too many things. I get the screen artifacts. My issue is more functionality based. Just small things like being able to move around my desktops in MC, rename them etc. Other than that, I love it.
Can’t connect to my NAS via SMB.
We have an iMac, three newer MacBook Pros and an older MacBook Pro. All have functioned well with only one exception. The iMac locked up once when trying to login. It took several reboots to correct it. Nothing since.
Only problem – ever since upgrading to Lion my new MacBook Air takes like 30 seconds to become responsive after waking from sleep. That is very annoying.
Same here. I use the time to perfect my rendition of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
My laptop does that too, but its running 9.2.2, so I guess not much has changed in the past 12 years. Haha.
Lion’s Power Management is completely broken. They reworked it in Lion, particularly the way that IODisplayWrangler handles power states. But because of Apple’s notorious secrecy, I’m pretty sure nobody told the team that writes the NVIDIA driver.
Basically if you have an ATI card, the power management is fine. If you have NVIDIA graphics, don’t plug in an external monitor or let your machine go to sleep or enable a screen saver or install 1Password or use one of the iPad desktop-extender apps or… well you get the idea.
The smart money’s on 10.7.2… 🙂
Lion is working extremely well for me.
And if Apple keeps providing updates then I am a happy user. Thanks Apple keep up the excellent work.
Too many ‘niggles’ to list them again on MDN.
Te one that I find most annoying is how mission control will sometimes arrange all my open programs linearly on top of one another and not allow me to click on anything other than the active app. Happens sporadically and goes away once I change apps via another mechanism.
Most of my initial problems probably related to some hard drive corruption problem that I had after installing lion. Sorted that out and the performance got a little better, but generally I agree that it was rushed to market.
Dual monitors is also buggy as MDN point out. Snow leopard was definitely a great deal more polished in my opinion, and in hind sight I should have waited before upgrading to Lion.
On my unibody macbook, I had a problem using Air Video server because of Some problem Lion was having with Java. Apple put out a fix but I had to search for it, a it wasn’t automatic in the software updates.
Other than than it has been perfect. My wife’s11″ Airbook is even running a second monitor, a 42″ LED Visio without problems.
Apple deprecated SmartCard Services with Lion, relying on the OpenSource SmartCard developer community to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, Lion was released before the OpenSource SmartCard developer community had support ready, so Lion users had to PAY EXTRA for services that were standard in all previous version of Mac OS X.
Apple reasoned that SmartCard Services, though pervasive, are “old technology”, so they were not included in the “next generation” Lion…unfortunately, Apple has offered NO REPLACEMENT TECHNOLOGY. Usually, Apple has dropped “old technology” (floppy disks, etc.) when they have a replacement technology solution. NOT THIS TIME!
Conclusion: Yes, Mac OS X Lion was released too early.
Problem with Safari crashing and also bookmarks not opening, however I was able to fix these issues through Apple Support pretty quickly and no issues since then without doing a reinstall. BTW, for those of us who purchased Lion there is 90 days free support directly through Apple by phone. Tech support guy repeated this a couple of times to reassure me. Happy customer as always.
What was the Safari fix?
Besides for Photoshop acting a little funny here and there I’ve had smooth sailing. I love my new Air, and it’s been an absolute pleasure for my job on the road!
Mail.app can’t send outgoing mail – .me, gmail, and university account – from home. AT&T isp. Worked fine before Lion upgrade; still works fine from iPhone and other Snow Leopard computers at home. No way to tell if it’s AT&T’s problem (no hope lies down that road) or something in Lion, so I’m waiting before upgrading my family’s computers, with my bet on Apple to fix it. Hope they can figure it out, because I know AT&T won’t.
I had this problem too with a couple of my IMAP mail accounts. Apparently authentication/password handling is a bit different in Lion. If you have a password that’s 10 characters or greater change it to something shorter. That’s just a workaround. The actual fix is more complicated and involves your ISP, but there’s no need to go into that…
@darkness – many thanks. My pw happens to be 8 chars. Ugh. Other than this issue, I love Lion, and can’t wait to introduce it to the family (bought a magic trackpad for the living room iMac), so I wish we could get this working.