Did Apple release Mac OS X Lion too early?

“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.

 

136 Comments

  1. Yawn. I got burned upgrading immediately to Leopard, so with SL I watched the circus while waiting for 10.6.5, and similarly am enjoying the circus comprised of people that are so impatient that they would pay money to be bug-fixers for Apple’s beta Lion OS. Thanks guys. I’ll reap the benefits of your bug fixing tribulations when I upgrade at around 10.7.5. Sure, most people don’t have problems with Lion, but some do, and I run a business, and can’t afford all these hassles.

  2. I absolutely have problems with lion on a 1 year old iMac. It always disconnects from airport when waking up, and it takes about five minutes of spinning beach ball funkiness for it to reset and connect. What a pain!!

    In addition I get serious system hangs for no apparent reason, and my 12 gigs of ram is always full if I leave programs running for a day or more.

    Serious problems all.

  3. Running an iMac 2.8 GHz with a cinema display. Using Vuescan it crashes the computer if I don’t reboot it at the end of the day. Safari still eats all the memory in the universe as well. Wonder if that will ever get fixed? At least it reopens all the windows when I quit and restart it.

  4. I’ve run into a few tiny glitches but nothing that makes it unusable. Safari (in full screen) won’t shot my my recent searches and sometimes when switching from Safari to another desktop will leave behind the tabs bar; in other words, the tabs bar will show up in non-Safari desktops. Come to think of it, though, that’s about all I can think of. There might be one or two other things here and there but nothing big.

  5. FRUSTRATING bug when you open up MBPro if you don’t wait about 10 seconds before hitting a key or the trackpad then it will immediately go back to sleep. If you try and close then open again you are caught in an endless loop. Only way to fix is to restart, which I have done at least 10 times since Lion install on second day of availability.

  6. I second the black screen crashes. Also, inability to read DVD-R disks. Worked fine under 10.6, show up as blank disk under 10.7. Annoying that I have to pop a disk into a 10.6 MacPro to read the contents. Notice others have this as well, but inconsistent. Arghhh

  7. My brand new Macbook Air kinda sucks on occasion with Lion. Like when it wakes up, there’s a long pause with a blank screen until it figures out what to do. And every few weeks, it won’t wake up at all and requires a hard restart with the power key. I’ve also had issues with the Wi-Fi connection having to be reset in order to work. The track pad behavior isn’t always good. Sometimes it gets stuck in a mode where it’s as if the button is pushed and I have to tap it several times to get it to release. (Yes I know about the double tap as click and hold feature. It seems to trigger even if I tap once.) Some of the voices in text to speech (the brit voices, for example) have weird rules in them. For example if you have it say Mr. Smith, it will treat Mr. as the end of a sentence. There are a lot of other minor bugs too.

  8. Couple of issues:

    Sometimes the little preview when using spotlight stays on screen in front of everything else and will only gobaway with a restart.

    Also when I move a file into a folder that an app has an open window into, the moved file doesn’t show up for a while, quite annoying and slows me down.

    Quite happy in general though.

  9. Lion is causing my MacBook Pro to run slow and hang. It doesn’t seem to like Keynote at all. Slide projects I’m working on freeze continually. I am constantly saving. Aperture is incredibly clunky now. I find I have to shut down often. And I don’t know why they removed the Spaces icon from the menu. I never know where I am.

  10. I have problems with iCal freezing every time I try to enter a new event or edit an existing one. It stalls every six characters or so as I try to type, and hangs long enough to make it completely unusable. Also, Safari is very unstable, crashing at times if I have 4 or 5 tabs open. This never happened before. I find Lion to be the buggiest release Apple has made since System 7.5. I agree that it was released too soon, and I’m quite certain the engineers at Apple know this to be true as well. Unacceptable and unnecessary; they should have waited.

  11. Four of the biggest issues with Lion are as follows:

    1. PDF Files in Web page frames download to download folder instead of viewing within page frame. Extremely irritating and a security issue when viewing my paycheck stubs on a shared Mac. There is a nice plugin if you do a search for “pdf browser plugin safari” that Macworld gave 4.5 mice to.

    2. Lion no longer will see many NAS servers because of Apples removal of Samba. It stinks that Apple relies on the Manufacturer to come up with the changes when it used to work just fine in Snow Leopard. Unfortunately, my NAS manufacturer in no where to be found any longer so I’m left with a terabyte of storage I can’t use in Lion. Thanks Apple for that one!

    3. If you work for NASA in Mission Control, you’d probably have access to any and all system critical monitoring components. I want to know who’s bright idea it was to not let me even see my minimized programs any longer in a system component that Apple calls Mission Control. REALLY? So now you are required to open safari (which was minimized and I can’t find anymore) and then do your three finger salute in order to find any other safari windows that are minimized. There is no way to see any and all minimized windows any longer (I like to minimize windows to the application icon). One would have thought that Mission Control would at least made this simple feature a part of its core system monitoring capabilities. NOPE. Apple left the fuel gage out on that one.

    4. Dual screens no longer work in Lion. There is no easy way to display Safari on one screen and Pages on another screen. Thanks for making it more difficult to do term and research papers!

    I do have a few more issues but I’ll just conform to the Apple way of doing things with those. I’m not entirely bitter about Lion. I think that it has many qualities that will one day make it better than Snow Leopard. Unfortunately, today is not that day.

    1. samba issue is not Apple’s fault, per se. They could no longer use it due to licensing. However, while I do expect some issues, the current implementation is worse than i expected it to be.
      Give them time and they will resolve these issues, even for your NAS.

  12. Unmitigated disaster for me and I’m a long time Apple fan and even still have a little code in the OS.

    Full screen apps are a disaster for a multiple monitor system

    None of my old quicktime movies play anymore. Hundreds of home videos. But get this: they’ll play in quick look in the finder, just not in quicktime.

    One by one I find I’m turning the new features off: I prefer the old mail interface, I like to have scroll bars there because I don’t like swipe, swipe, swiping.

    Sliding between safari views gets accidentally activated by a fraction of an inch and my mouse clicks go dead.

    I click in iDisk documents and get the spinning cursor. Never did before, everything used to be cached and updated.

    I much prefer the old Spaces. I could give a damn about mission control. There’s not a single thing added to Lion so far that I care to have and many I can’t stand.

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