“Haven’t upgraded to Lion or iCloud because you still haven’t forked out money for Snow Leopard yet? No worries, Apple has your back,” Joshua Schnell reports for Macgasm. “Apple is now giving away Snow Leopard to potential iCloud customers.”
“In an article sent to MobileMe customers, Apple has recommended that potential customers get in touch with Apple to receive a free DVD of Snow Leopard so that users can upgrade to Lion, and move to iCloud,” Schnell reports. “ll you have to do is follow this link, log in to MobileMe with your Mobile Me account, and fill out your mailing information. Apple will then send you a Snow Leopard DVD for free.”
Read more in the full article here.
The fact is that Lion is NOT good. In an effort to simplify and make it more like IOS Apple has gone in a direction that for many people makes little sense. Many of the features of Lion are ridiculous and little more than eye-candy. A desktop UI is NOT a Tablet UI but merge them they did. Couple that with the loss of SAVE AS and the amazing instability of Preview and TextEdit (remember Word and all PowerPC compatible apps if you still use them..they’re effectively dead under Lion). It’s HARD to bring legacy users forward…and while I applaud Apple’s effort to drag all of us into the future…THIS time.. they’ve done it in a primarily cosmetic and unstable and remarkably buggy way. They can keep their $29…Snow Leopard itself is fine..but the fact that they are using this to lure people into an upgrade is testament to the resistance many have toward Lion. It’s going to be awhile until they fix the glaring errors that are at the heart of Lion.
+1
I have a preinstalled Lion on my iMac and SL on my MBP. I much prefer SL. Lion takes away functionality while giving me messy GUI’s such as Address Book, Mission Control and LaunchPad. Unfortunate to see Apple reverting to the IOS feel/look – something that belongs exclusively on IOS devices.
No doubt! Not only did they make iCal and address book uglier they made it less functional. It’s bizarre. It’s almost as if a team of people from Apple went back to 1986, looked at an Amiga app and decided that was what they wanted to emulate. It’s so jarringly different and oddly hard to use…I think it was built in Redmond. Mission control literally made me laugh out loud it’s so badly conceived…I mean on the level of Microsoft BOB (if you remember that fiasco). Launch pad is equally silly. If it works for you that’s fine…I have no quarrel but to make it the default makes little sense. On install it would make more sense..if from an upgrade they would ASK and SHOW what options there are. The real problem is that people work with these machines…and in a mixed software environment…where some have SAVE AS.
Going back through VERSIONS is just insane..I mean seriously….for every file..you want to fire up that interface, wait for it to load..then scroll back, looking for that one difference you made? These software engineers very obviously don’t work in a production environment.
I agree. Lion will have to change significantly before I could ever use it. Lion is another FCPX debacle that is fundamentally flawed, and due to Apple’s recent tendency to ignore customer needs, I seriously doubt it will. Ugly is acceptable, but non-reliable and feature-reduced is not.
Versions is a major pita for me when editing photos in pixelmator. It’s the reason why I still have SL on my work Mac. ML isn’t better..so far.
+1
Agree – Preview slow and clunky, TextEdit crashy, Versions bizarre.
As for Pixelmator, it randomly ‘disappears’ images leaving a blank. Whether that’s the app or Lion, I dunno.
Whatever, I keep the old Leopard MBP rolling as backup and ‘just in case’.
TextEdit crashes? Since when?
Are you WRITING UP BUGS at bugreport.apple.com if it’s crashing for you?
Word has been Intel for years.. what the heck are you talking about?
Is iCloud in trouble? Why are they doing this?
Give us a free copy of Lion – most of us have Snow Leopard. In my case, I have no interest in iCloud as a storage place for files. iDisk did just fine. I am losing Gallery and the flexibility that iDisk provided. Maybe i am a Luddite or a lunatic or both, but this whole dumping of MobileMe as we know it, is insane.
+∞
Now I feel better about giving my copy of Snow Leopard to my mom so she could update her old iMac. And she has no intention of moving to Lion.
——RM
what good does that do for someone with an older Mac that can’t install Lion?
Erm… you get a free copy of Snow Leopard?
I got my copy earlier today.
Already upgraded to iCloud but they let me put in for it anyway.
Bet the reason they give away SL instead of lion is the app store.
I don’t have any issue with lion myself. Save as is gone… Oh no, it’s renamed duplicate.
Versions dont bother me, it saved my ass when pixilmator crashed.. They need to fix that crashtastic app one of these days.
Best Mac OS ever. I Love Snow Leopard.
Whoa. Does anyone Like Lion?…..
I like it. And it’s running on one of the oldest possible Macs that can run it. 🙂
The people who like Lion are usually silent and happy, just using their Macs to do their stuff. The people who don’t are often loud and whiny… You do the math.
Will not upgrade to Lion. Sad to lose .Mac (and renamed MobileMe) email account I’ve grown to love, but iCloud is not compelling enough to buy-in to a world of pain. Sorry Apple, that one’s rotten and should be discarded, or it may spoil the entire barrel.
I don’t see this offer on the Apple site anywhere. Can you help a brother out?
I’d like to try out Snow Leopard at least.
It’s very, very telling that Apple needs to give stuff away in order to convince users to update.
In fact, it’s proof positive that they are not getting people to adopt the Lions at anywhere near the numbers they need to keep iCloud relevant.
This is very bad. We’re not in the ‘post PC’ world yet, nowhere near. I still need an iMac to do anything beyond the basics and I don’t care what anyone says typing is a pain on a touch screen.
I know that Apple folks read MDN so here goes:
—
Dear Apple. You’re awesome, but you’re blowing it with Lion and even worse with Mountain Lion.
I’m not putting ML on my main machine simply because it gives me absolutely nothing over Snow Leopard that I need. You spent all your time on iOS and OS X has gone absolutely nowhere. The Finder needed a UI update years ago, it’s unintuitive and Jaguar was the last version that showed image thumbnails instantly (yes, I remember). iCal is a kludge, as is Address Book and Preview. iPhoto is quirky and slow and just unpleasant to use, and iTunes still has a tiny monochrome info screen after all this time. Where’s the innovation??
ML’s keynote features are:
Messages. Notification Center. Reminders. Notes. Game Center.
I have an iPhone and an iPad, why have all this stuff on my Mac as well? Why have all these tack-on features from iOS when the OS X apps have stagnated so badly??
I am an optimist but I’m really worried.
You pretty much did as you pleased when Steve was around and it worked because he instinctively knew the right direction and had a strong enough RDF to pull it off. Does Tim have that same instinct? Well, does he?
—
Predictions:
Apple stays the course with its consumer focus.
Power users and pros get ignored.
All new Macs dump optical drives and eventually HDDs.
Everything moves to the ‘cloud’.
After a series of kludgy OS X versions (Lion and ML being the first) Apple makes the shocking decision to completely “iOSify” the Mac. The Finder is removed along with access to the file system.
Pros have no choice but to avoid the ‘upgrades’ or move to Windows. (If you think Apple cares about this then you have not read anything about Final Cut Pro X.)
With its most influential cheerleaders gone (creatives) Apple loses its chic status. Coupled with that, M$ (after a few missteps with its phones and tablets) finally gets its act together. People love W8 and then W9 (pros included) and the circle is complete. As M$ courts both the pro AND the consumer they only have to produce a few winners to hurt the seemingly unassailable iPhone/iPad. If that happens it’s game over.
Boy I hope I’m wrong.
Wow… That is certainly where it appears they are headed. If they did it would be tragic and just crazily misguided. It feels very much like Steve’s influence on certain areas faded in the final two years of his life. He would NEVER tolerate such a clusterfsck as Lion has become. Apple seriously needs to look at options again…. Oh and Duplicate? Yeah… It works but it’s like a workaround and when it crashes… Which is very often using Versions is insanity in a nutshell. Spotlight is also now just so bad it s nearly unusable…
Whatever you do. Do NOT … Ahem “upgrade” to Lion.
I’m running Lion on my MBP and love it. No instability at all, in any app. (Except for once when I accidentally attached a 67 GB file to an email. Wow.) Safari is still slow and unstable if you have more than 5-10 tabs open, but it’s been that way for years.
Preview and TextEdit have not crashed once in the 2-3 months I have had Lion, and my productivity has increased thanks to iCloud syncing my calendars. My only complaint is that scrolling is confusing when I have to switch back to SL on my office iMac. I can’t wait to upgrade it.
My only complaint right now is that Apple released no Java fix for SL.
Did the “upgrade” to my iCloud on April 19th, opened the door for the FedEx package today.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3 disc inside 🙂