Quote:
Originally Posted by
mstone 
People are by nature resistant to change. You might love it once you get used t it. You are not required to upgrade so wait and see, you may be pleasantly surprised.
You say I may be pleasantly surprised, by what might I ask? I've seen the same screen captures you have. What is it that I may find so pleasing? You're talking to someone that was elated when 10.0 came out and I got to experience aqua after 9.2. My first 600 MHz iBook (my first laptop ever) ran both OS's and I used them both. I loved the look of OS X. I loved seeing my friends who were Windows lovers (and some still are today) looking at how fantastic it looked on that rather low resolution screen.
Just move forward to Lion and I'm sitting here with an 8-core Mac Pro and a 30" Cinema Display with more than a HD resolution, and I'm watching the OS bleach out until it's nothing more than a bunch of gray buttons and disappearing sliders. And you suggest that I might be pleasantly surprised? What exactly would you have me be pleasantly surprised by? I'd really like to know. What is it that you find so awe inspiring with an OS that has all the appearance of the gravel in my driveway? I know there are people who are easily distracted, and I'm sorry for them, but I'm not one of those people who gets distracted. I see the OS I've supported from the very beginning becoming something that's not even interesting to look at. When an OS is no longer interesting to interact with, what is there really? What's the point? Gestures? Is that all I have to look forward to? I can't even manage to teach my parents how to use the gestures included in Snow Leopard. What's the point of even trying to get them to use the gestures with Lion?
Let's be blunt here and accept the fact that there are two kinds of users in the Mac Community. There are those people who want nothing. They want bare bones. These people exist in Terminal, and they think that even iTunes has far too much color for their world. They get distracted by everything around them, and they don't want anything between them and what they are doing. Then, at the opposite side of the spectrum, you have people like me. I don't use the Terminal, I enjoyed Aqua, I enjoyed the Dock not being that reflective thing, and I enjoyed the OS being so fantastically different visually from everything else out there that people were literally drawn to look at my screen and ask about all the things they were seeing.
I've converted over 40 colleagues alone to the Mac OS. Every single person in my immediate family has switched over to the Mac because of my insistence. I'm the one they all call when they can't figure out how to do something. What does it tell you as a fellow Mac user when you see someone who's been with the OS since it first turned to color, all of a sudden having very serious doubts about my love for Lion? I've seen the same screen shots you have. It's appallingly bland and doesn't appeal to the eye in even the slightest way, in my opinion. It seems that the people who want to see nothing, and experience the least possible from the OS have won. What I've seen of Lion is about as visually impressive as the inside of a hospital. It's apparently what you want in an OS. I may end up using it, but they'll never get me to say that I find it visually pleasing. I never thought I see the day when I'd lose faith in the Mac OS, but Lion has truly let down those of us looking for something more, not less, from our interaction with the OS from what I've seen so far. It's just depressing.