Apple today announced that, in just one day, over one million users bought and downloaded Mac OS X Lion, the eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system. Available through the Mac App Store for US$29.99, users are buying Lion faster than any other OS release in Apple’s history.
“Lion is off to a great start, user reviews and industry reaction have been fantastic,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, in the press release. “Lion is a huge step forward, it’s not only packed with innovative features but it’s incredibly easy for users to update their Macs to the best OS we’ve ever made.”
Lion introduces more than 250 new features to the Mac, including Multi-Touch gestures; system-wide support for full screen apps; Mission Control, an innovative view of everything running on your Mac; the Mac App Store, the best place to find and explore great software; Launchpad, a new home for all your apps; and a completely redesigned Mail app.
Available in 123 countries, the Mac App Store brings the revolutionary App Store experience to the Mac so you can find great new apps, buy them using your iTunes account, download and install them in just one step. The Mac App Store offers apps in Education, Games, Graphics & Design, Lifestyle, Productivity, Utilities and other categories. Users can browse new and noteworthy apps, find out what’s hot, see staff favorites, search categories and look up top charts for paid and free apps, as well as user ratings and reviews. The Mac App Store is built right into Lion and available for Snow Leopard® users through Software Update as part of Mac OS X version 10.6.8.
More info about and download link for OS X Lion via Apple’s Mac App Store here.
Source: Apple Inc.
Related articles:
WSJ’s Mossberg reviews Mac OS X Lion: ‘The best computer operating system’ – July 21, 2011
NY Times’ Pogue reviews Mac OS X Lion: Offers the promise of a fast, powerful, virus-free, thoroughly modern OS – July 21, 2011
Researchers: Apple’s Mac OS X Lion is the king of security – July 21, 2011
Gartenberg: Mac OS X Lion will only contribute to Apple’s expanding mind-share – July 20, 2011
MSNBC reviews Mac OS X Lion: ‘Worth the upgrade’ – July 20, 2011
USA Today’s Baig reviews Mac OS X Lion: ‘Truly worth lionizing’ – July 20, 2011
Ars Technica reviews Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: ‘Better technology’ – July 20, 2011
Count me as one of the million.
Only one small issue I don’t like about it, the rest is welcome.
And I bet there are at least another million to get lion in the next few days. Those that would rather get it on Friday night/weekend so they can be ready on Monday for work.
And probably around 500k fence sitters that will get lion dater the first wave of bugs are fixed.
On the discussions I saw I assume is a bug with TextEdit. Open a HTML file to edit it… It auto saves as a txt file… Cant save the changes as HTML unless you duplicate the file. I messed with it earlier at lunch, it’s true.. Which is odd.
Beyond that, lion roars!
Not me yet. Probably next week. Wanna do some hard drive cleaning. Major OS updates and hard drive clean-up go hand and hand – like peanut butter and jelly or “Heartbreaker” and “Livin’ Lovin’ Maid”.
I agree.
I did all that two weeks ago 😉
Be prepared!
That was a fast 30 million dollars. Pocket change to this company!
Has anyone else had problems downloading Lion?
I downloaded expecting to install after cleaning out applications that won’t work with Lion and had multiple failures of applications. After which I can’t restart.
Then at the Apple Store Genius Bar it was impossible to download Lion after re-imaging my computer.
Anybody else see this?
Did you pick your user name from Gary the Rat?
Count me as one of the million as well. No problems at all with Lion so far, loving it!
Oh and doing the math on this, Apple raked in more than $30 million in one day with this release. Which should help pay for the ~3.75 million gigabytes (= 3,750 terabytes!) of data they had to serve up from the Mac App Store in that same 24 hour timespan (which seems to have gone amazingly smoothly).
If this is a sign of Apple’s cloud-readiness, then color me impressed!
Loaded Lion yesterday. Then when I tried to run Xcode for iPhone app dev, it said I needed Xcode 4.1. Being a good soldier, I downloaded and installed Xcode 4.1. But something bad, very bad happened. The route to application development files previously found in root/library/Application Support/ etc., etc. have completely disappeared. I’ve found nothing on developer forums or Apple support identifying this problem or what might have happened. Any ideas out there?
Not sure, just wanted to jump in and say…
I paid $5 for Xcode……. And they just dropped the price to FREE to everyone….
I just saw Xcode was the top free app on the store.. I had to double check that.
Oh, in lion the library folder is hidden. Maybe it’s still there but you can’t get to it?
Id head to the apple discussions and check. And instructions on how to unhide that folder is out there, I can’t remember the terminal command.
Found the command.
Open terminal and type in:
chflags nohidden ~/Library
That should unhide the library folder, 99% sure that’s what I typed in…
Or avoid the terminal and download free app Tinker Tool to view the hidden files
Library folder is now hidden by default.
Installed yesterday. A few weird issues with some java on a few work related web sites. Other than that I love it. Love the new Mail.
Count me out from the first million. I’m waiting for the .1 release before jumping in. There’s no need for me to be a beta tester. Besides I have no idea how to burn the ISO image to DVD. It’s all an arcane art to me. Do I burn the .dmg file or some other file? Haven’t got that part figured out yet.
I thought Lion installation was supposed to be dead simple. Why can’t Apple offer a damn DVD? I understand you have to extract the .dmg image before installing or the installation process self destructs the image file upon completion.
Apple needs to hold my hand on this. I’m a total neophyte when it comes to all things Mac. This is too nail bitingly complicated. What if my drive is hosed? Will the Lion DVD spin uselessly in the DVD drive?
It’s actually really easy to get the copy.
Disk utility does 95% of the work for you.
I have a bootable lion USB drive now.
Download lion from app store, When the download is done you will see the lion screen asking you to install lion.
Wait.
open finder to the applications folder. Right click>show package contents.
Then you can copy the contents folder to anywhere and burn the disk later.
A few more steps, but the few steps above will get you ready to burn a DVD/USB at any time.
Or spend $70 next month heh.
There’s no way I’m going to fork out $70 for a Lion USB drive. Typical of Apple to charge $70 when the underlying cost of hardware is $5. They do this for RAM upgrades too. Ridiculous.
I’ll give your suggestion a spin. I know how to burn to disk – it’s just a question of clicking on the gears icon in Finder. But thanks for pointing out which part of the ISO image to burn. I just hope I don’t cock it up, never having burned anything on a Mac before. It’s too troublesome to burn anything to DVD when external hard drives are a MB a penny.
Remind me to knock Apple on its head for ripping off customers with that ridiculous price for a Lion USB stick.
Dear Nut,
You like it simple. So do I. Here it is: Download the installation file. The download is an app that sits in your Applications folder. It is named “Install Mac OS X Lion.app.” It will autostart, but you can quit, and it will just sit there. You can copy the app to any disk or device you like and keep it for a spare or for use on another computer. When you are ready, double-click the install app, and it will do its thing. Note that when it is done, it will self-destruct, so it is nice to have that back-up somewhere else. But note: If you do not want to, there is nothing to extract, nothing to burn. It is just an app that you can run when you are ready. I had my Lion installed within a couple of hours of it becoming available. I truly like Lion. But there is no hurry. Install it when you are ready.
Hey Thor, once again thanks for the clear and unambiguous directions. Mucho gracias to you and FTB for taking the time to draft a reply. Much appreciated.
I’ll add that lion installation went very smoothly for me. It was like installing a (large) app. I happened to be hopping from wifi to wifi (not very high bandwidth, either) and I feared that might cockup the download, but it kept resuming without any problems.
I stopped by an Apple Store today. Interestingly, the MacBook Air models had a different build of 10.7. It was still called “10.7” in the About This Mac window, but the build designation was different. It must be a “custom” version that was necessary to get them manufactured, boxed, and shipped in time for the simultaneous release with Lion on Mac App Store. I guess they will consolidate to the same build as everyone else, when 10.7.1 is released.
I like the new “about this Mac” pretty slick.
I bet they had to have that build weeks ago. Which I would think would be updated now..
I’m loving Lion too. But keep in mind that one million copies does not equal 30 million bucks. That was “copies,” not sales. I paid $30 and downloaded Lion four separate times for the four computers in my house. Just a guess, but I imagine the average is close to two computers per sale. Still not a bad haul — but not $30 million.
The Apple press release says
“Apple® today announced that in just one day, over one million users bought and downloaded Mac OS® X Lion”
so it is sales, not just “copies” (or downloads).
Actually, I was just going to correct myself after I saw the press release, but you beat me to the punch. I leapt to my conclusion from MDN’s headline. My error!
I like the two finger browsing thing but they need to make the forward and backward arrows on safari a little more distinct. Right now can’t tell if the button is black or grayed out.
guys can you help me what is the procedure to load lion in my macbook pro …. thank you
Update it to the latest version of Snow Leopard (10.6.8), if it current runs something earlier. Run Mac App Store, buy Lion, and let it download. Run downloaded installer and do the standard installation. Or how Apple describes it…
http://www.apple.com/macosx/how-to-buy/
Note: You should probably have a backup of your current system and user data, before doing the above, just in case. For example, a Time Machine backup or a “clone.”
Just a day after announcing mucho profits for the last quarter, Apple adds $30 million more to the kitty. For many, many companies, earning that much in a YEAR would be considered a blowout!
Wow! This is great news to all those Apple Retailers out there who no longer need worry about customers coming into their store to get a copy! No more worries about accessory sales or upgrades either. Couldn’t be better. Now Apple gets it all! Wooo Hooo!
Things change and retailers will have to adapt. If you business is founded on the sole purpose of selling OSX upgrades, you better rethink your strategy.
Don’t know if this is a Lion problem, but……
Cannot seem to copy a file to a USB drive or external HD!!!
So I tried to copy it to an external HD. Same problem…….starts off fine, but when it gets to the end it makes that horrible “boing” (or is it “Prang”) noise and nothing gets dragged to the drive.
Looked at USB drive and HD info don’t seem to be locked in any way…..i seem have read and write permissions.
Then I tried with a different file type…..one created by Pages….that seems to copy over to both the USB drive and the HD. The files that did not copy over were .jpeg and .tiff files. Files are about 4MB. There is plenty of space on the drives.
So I am left wondering if this is something to do with Lion…..but hard to imagine it would be. Any ideas anyone?
Oops, let me say that again.
Don’t know if this is a Lion problem, but……
Cannot seem to copy a file to a USB drive!!!
So I tried to copy it to an external HD. Same problem…….starts off fine, but when it gets to the end it makes that horrible “boing” (or is it “Prang”) noise and nothing gets dragged to the drive.
Looked at USB drive and HD info……both don’t seem to be locked in any way…..i seem have full read and write permissions.
Then I tried with a different file type…..one created by Pages….that seems to copy over to both the USB drive and the HD just fine. The files that did not copy over were .jpeg and .tiff files. Files are about 4MB. There is plenty of space on the drives.
So I am left wondering if this is something to do with Lion…..but hard to imagine it would be. Any ideas anyone?
Go post that question in the apple discussions.
Not saying people here won’t help you.. But they have a much bigger user base to answer your issues.
And technical questions here tend to get overlooked with the amount of articles MDN posts. And we tend to “forget” to come back and see new posts till we get a notification.
Might even find the answer just reading some of the threads.
Maybe it has something to do with formatting type, used on the USB flash drive and USB hard drive (although it’s odd that some files copy over and others do not). If they are currently formatted for the Windows world (using something like “FAT32”), and they don’t need to be formatted to allow Windows access, you can try reformatting (erasing) them using Disk Utility with “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” as the format. If they need to be accessed by Windows, use Disk Utility and select “MS-DOS (FAT)” as the format.
Yeah Sorry, I probably should post on apple discussions.
BTW, THANKS ken1w for replying. Yes, I did format from its original FAT32 to an Apple format using Disk Utility. Did not make it work. So I reformatted BACK to its original FAT32, again using Disk Utility. Still does not work.
Yep over to the Apple discussion board I go……er any idea where that is….is it on Apples site?
It’s on the “Support” tab from the main Apple website, and then “Communities.” Or here for the direct link
https://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa
While the 3.49 GB Lion will fit within FAT32’s file size limit of 4GB’s –
YOU CAN’T BOOT AN APPLE COMPUTER FROM A FAT32 FORMATTED DRIVE.
So you might have to reformat a thumb drive back/to HFS Plus (Mac OS Extended)
Please correct me if I am wrong on this point.
Happy to learn.
skylark
That is true… But the download is just an installer application (not a “system”), so copying it to a drive (no matter what format) will not make it bootable.
You may be able to use the unofficial procedure (available online) to create a bootable Lion Installation DVD, but use a USB flash drive instead. To make a drive bootable, it should have Partition Map Scheme of “GUID Partition Table” and Format of “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” which can both be set using Disk Utility on the “Partition” tab (click Options button for Partition Map Scheme).
I once tried to create a “maintenance and emergency” startup disk using a 16GB USB flash drive. I put a minimal Mac OS X system on it, and installed TechTook Pro and some other utilities. Unfortunately, it did not work reliably. It would sometimes boot, but it was very slow and basically unusable. So depending in the specific type of USB flash drive you have, it may or may not work properly.
I would use the downloadable Mac OS X Lion Installer the way Apple specifies.
Downloaded but have not installed yet. Maybe when the kids go to bed. *crosses fingers*
Download went great, apps all work but had a problem with mail. My sent folder was locked into a never ending spin. Turns out I had duplicate outgoing smtp addresses.
While talking to the Apple rep he asked me to click on user in Finder to look for the user Library. I had to tell him it was hidden in Lion. He rooted around and said, you are right.
I downloaded the moment it come up on the OZ site at midnight. Only thing I was not happy with is the HORRIBLE incongruous “leather” look to the iCal and Address Book. Got straight onto Google and found some replacement images for the iCal app, so it is now a matching gray to all the other apps. Made my own version of the tile for Address Book, one simple change and it is now a much more refined and pleasant light brown colour – really looks quite smart.
Apple has gradually lightened the look of all the standard apps so they are all washed out, and now they put in these more iPad or iPhone type versions and they just look way out of place.
Another one of the first million Lion buyers here. And I downloaded it twice yesterday, for installs on my stock hard drive and on my “alternative” sold-state drive that lives in the PCI card slot on my early 2008 MacBook Pro.
Now I’m lusting after one of the new MB Airs.
I am waiting for Adobe and Luxology to release patches so that I don’t stumble in to production issues. Last thing I need is having to back track my steps and being forced to go back to SL.
This Dennis Miller quote just took on new meaning: “Sure, the lion is king of the jungle but airdrop him into Antarctica, & he’s just a penguin’s bitch.” 😛