“If the Lion upgrade is about any one thing, it’s about the iPad,” David Pogue writes for The New York Times. “What made the iPad a mega-hit? Two factors, really”
“Factor 1: Simplicity. No overlapping windows; every app runs full screen. No Save command; everything’s autosaved. No files or folders. No menus. All your apps are in one place, the Home screen,” Pogue writes. “Factor 2: The multitouch screen. You cycle through screens by swiping the glass, zoom out by pinching and rotate something by twisting two fingers.”
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“Spending the day with your arm outstretched, manipulating tiny controls on a vertical surface is awkward and exhausting. The ache you feel later is not-so-affectionately known as Gorilla Arm,” Pogue writes. “Apple has built what it considers a better solution, a horizontal multitouch surface. That’s the trackpad of its laptops, and the top surface of its current mouse.”
MacDailyNews Take: If you use OS X Lion on your desktop Mac, we recommend you take a serious look at Apple’s $69 Magic Trackpad
. We use them with our Mac desktops and OS X Lion just isn’t the same without them.
Pogue writes, “The good news is that once you learn all of this stuff, it does work… If you prefer the status quo, you don’t ever have to put an app into full-screen mode, or use a touch gesture, or open apps from the Launchpad. You can even turn off that reversed-scrolling-direction thing… It may never be the king of the jungle. But once the world’s software companies have fully Lionized their wares, and once Apple exterminates the bugs, Mac OS X 10.7 might be something even more exotic: a fast, powerful, good-looking, virus-free, thoroughly modern operating system.”
Read more in the full review here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward Weber” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
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
if you think smacintosh is going the way of the dodo you don’t get the play being dribbled past the competition. It’s called full spectrum dominance and the mac is every bit as important as everything else. One addictive universe of possibility.
Notice to Microslut and it’s users: Keep your flippin viruses. The Lion is King of the Jungle.
Now that we have Lion the king of the jungle I wonder what’s the next cat going to be? Pussycat? Or is this the end of cat line…
i wonder if redmonds copiers have been running hot lately. Ballmer recently ordered a bunch of extra powerful ones to keep up with the workload. I just hope he hasn’t burned them out already.
Those mega-copiers have been lent to Google and working at full capacity since the original iPhone was released
There’s a reason that MS releases one major OS update following two or three from Apple — it takes that long to imitate the innovator.
Still, Apple needs to work on a few things:
1) industry — Until CAD/CAM and other high-power industries have been swayed to the Apple platform, Microsoft will reign supreme in corporate offices worldwide. That is sad for the corporate lemmings, but it is a truth that Apple needs to confront this now. Squabbles with Adobe don’t help much — Apple needs to forge development partnerships with Dassault, MSC, and other technical professional software companies that are today served solely on the Windows platform.
2) aging users — While Apple has made great strides in attracting switchers, the baby boomer generation has largely stood pat with their antiquated Windows PCs. Believe it or not, they don’t see a reason to migrate to Apple. If they have cell phones, they are intimidated by those expensive “smart phone things”. They love the iPad in concept but won’t buy it because they assume it carries the maintenance baggage that a PC does. It would be highly lucrative for Apple to crack this market more effectively.
3) The upgradeable desktop tower. Apple has made the Mini an attractive machine, the iMac is a huge mid-level value, and the Mac Pro is truly top cat. But there remains a huge hole in the lineup: a mid-level upgradeable tower, sans display, slotted between the Mini and the Pro. It must include all the “features” that the median tower PC offers, and it must be priced competitively. Such a machine would lure many current PC users to Apple hardware, as they would likely retain all their existing peripherals and retain their dual-boot needs for those one or two software titles that are simply not Mac-native.
#2 – You are full of it, you ageist dog.
#3 – Why? I never saw a card changed, a memory or installed peripheral upgrade on any windows desktop system. It’s too expensive. By the time I retired the company had gone to three year leases for all desktop computers, new machines every three years. Every other approach was too much money and too time consuming. Sadly, your #1 is on target, so the leases were never for iMacs.
He gets something right that others have missed (or not made clear). If you don’t use the new features, Lion pretty much feels like Snow Leopard.