OS X Lion growth stagnates at 16% Mac market share - Page 3

Do you guys believe you are the first to complain about features in a OS X upgrade?

or is it TBell keep that thread running with controversy. Just like with the other username :-)

I'm on to yah...

I don't think you've been around here long enough to make that accusation.

I use a Mac at work for normal office stuff and have a few older PPC programs that need Rosetta. Not many, but one or two that are essential for the business. I also don't want a "toy" OS on my desktop, although its fine on my iPad. It seems like Apple are making Microsoft's mistake in reverse - MS want the desktop OS on both desktop and tablet; Apple wants the mobile OS on both.

The reliability reports pointing to this that or the other problem, plus the complicated upgrade procedures being reported with several blogs and magazines now offering "How to Upgrade to Lion" tutorials don't make me think Lion is a 'must have' product. No physical media to boot from is not good either - I like to have a disk to hold in my hand when it comes to things as important as an OS.

In fact I see Lion as being so poor for business use that instead of getting the latest, fastest Mac mini out there I've just bought a discounted last-model mid-2010 Mac mini server for over $300 less than I would have had to pay for the i7 model I really wanted to get. I'll now stick a spare copy of Snow Leopard client OS on there and work with that.

Lion joins the long line of Apple innovations that have stopped me buying the latest versions of their equipment, including glossy screens on iMacs with no alternative, a fragile, double-glass iPhone 4/4S and now an OS for teenagers and not businesses.

As for uptake, with Mac sales rising each year, of course Lion uptake in numbers will increase each year because there is a larger and larger user base to apply percentages to.

Let me state the obvious.

Perhaps it's just that the more recent Apple "switchers" have a working computer and don't even think about needing the latest, greatest OS. The machine still works. Why change it? Upgrading to the latest Windows is generally a multi-year affair only slightly less painful than being disemboweled with a wooden fork.

Most people don't even buy apps after the first few months, and they certainly aren't itching for an OS upgrade or whining about Rosetta. Only if you're an Apple geek does that stuff bother you in the least.

Lion will mostly grow in percentage terms as new machines are sold.

Interestingly, unchecking "Natural Scrolling" in mouse settings disables natural scrolling system-wide.

"OS X Lion growth stagnates at 16% Mac market share"

"Web stats indicate Mac OS X Lion still growing very fast"

C'mon, AI.
Which is it?

Rightfully so. I don't want to transform my MBP into a dumbed-down, oversized iPad. I'll probably just skip Lion entirely and wait for Apple to sort its s#1t out come 10.8.

1) You think Lion makes your Amex into a dumbed down iPad?

2) You think over the next three years of iOS domination that Apple will not be adding more features of iOS to their next version of Mac.

Good luck with all that.

Good observation.

I disagree with his assessment in both respects. Apple only added iOS-like features to Mac OS for the sale of familiarity and only when they made sense. We haven't seen an iMac with a touchscreen nor will we. It just doesn't make sense.

What MS is doing with Metro is creating a new, web code-based UI that that is similar WP7ms UI, not Win7 desktop.

Each are very distinct development platforms but it's obvious there will be some cross over, in both directions, as these OSes evolves. To MS credit, even though I dislike the Windows Everyone meme, they are making great strides compared to their previous efforts.

Lies, damned lies and statistics.

My reasons for not updating to Lion, and even thinking of skipping Lion totally:

- I want to have control of when I save documents, and sometimes decide NOT to save a document. I want a SAVE AS feature which I use a lot.

- I have a few Rosette apps

- Reports are that Lion is still buggy

- Snow Leopard is ultra stable

- Nothing in Lion attracts me to upgrade

- the online installation sucks. I want to have a clear-cut system that enables me to restore if all goes wrong. What if the reinstallation partition fails?

- the upgrade price is very reasonable, and it never occurred to me to avoid upgrading because of price.

- For me, Snow Leopard is the pinnacle of OSX, and Lion is the beginning of the dumbing down of the OSX to make it more like iOS. e.g. removing SAVE AS, and forced auto saves etc.

There are quite a few of you posting to this thread who are complaining about "feature creep" in Lion. After using the OS full-time, I disagree with the way you are framing the new features of Lion. These new elements (Mission Control, LaunchPad, and Gestures) are not gratuitously added features; they are Apple's first steps in evolving the OS away from the file-system driven desktop metaphor that has dominated computing since the '80s.

This change is not seamless, and the new pieces of the OS need to mature before I can say they are 100% successful. I did experience a learning curve, but, once I acclimated, I found the new features to be useful.

- Mission Control: This brings focus to the various Expose views in previous release. It needs better multiscreen support, and I think naming the screens "Desktop 1", etc is odd since they are often not in that order.

- LaunchPad: Spotlight was Apple's first move to give users fast, non-file system access to files. LP makes opening apps much faster. However, the default implementation is incomplete. I installed the freely-available LaunchPad-Control (Panel) to allow me to control which apps appear--this changed the experience for me. Apple must give user's a way to control which apps appear in LP.

-Gestures: If you do not have a gesture capable input device (Magic Mouse or Trackpad), then I don't think Lion will work as well for you. I absolutely depend on quick swipes of my fingers to access the new features. Some of this can be replicated by assigning actions to mouse buttons, but this is not helpful to the many users that do not have the newer style of trackpad on their laptops.

My takeaway from this is that Apple wants to do two things: 1) deprecate the Finder as the main way of accessing files, and move the primary mechanism for app/file access to the OS or associated programs; 2) use gestures to add "dimensions" and short cuts to the OS.

Open Apple+S is now Save As.

I'll repeat that.

Open Apple+S is now Save As.


It's not. No more than Snow Leopard or Leopard ever was.


It's… not online. You download it and you install it here.


Then it downloads Lion again. For free. And installs it.


Oh, no! Apple has made a paradigm shift from something that NEVER SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED but lasted for two and a half decades to something that should have happened from the start! It's the beginning of the end! We're being dumbed down!

The above fallacy is what I read every time I hear someone complain about Versions/Saving. It works exactly the same as it always has. Apple just removed a step that has always been unnecessary.

Don't you mean Command + S?



I've not found any major bugs either, though Safari does seem to much through RAM like there's no tomorrow. Updates have made it slightly more conservative, but still, its crazy. With just this page open, Safari's using 235mb, and WebProcess 332mb. That's twice the RAM the iPad 1 has in total, and Safari can have multiple tabs open and still be fine.



I think what 4miller's trying to say is if your HDD dies and you replace it, or the partition table becomes corrupt for some reason, you've got no access to an OS at all. You'd have to go to an Apple Store to get the OS reinstalled. You can't just re-download it without an OS to download it with; the EFI doesn't have enough intelligence built in to download Lion and format the drive itself.


That'd be all well and good if everything supported it, but at the moment it's only Apple's own apps. Few developers seem interested in adding the feature to their own apps. If autosave worked in everything, I wouldn't have to keep up the habit of hitting Command + S every now and then.

And don't - it's a real pain. My printer driver is all screwed up not to mention the ridiculous obtrusive swiping that keeps throwing widgets . And the worse part is every friggin document, etc reappearss whenever you re-open any application. A nuiscance The worseMac OS ever- and I've used them since OS8. Not user friendly- AT ALL.
Apple is trying to put a round peg in a square hole here- bridge a gap between our Desktop OS and mobile devices not understanding that desktops need a separate and powerful OS of their own- independent of any toy peripheral.

I do. Shows you what computer I grew up on, dunnit?


Safari has been doing that since Leopard. It's not a Lion bug, it's a "Hey, Apple. You've created a browser with a MULTIPLE GIGABYTE MEMORY LEAK. Might want to fix that." bug.


Unless you've burnt your own spindle of 25 copies of it or created a simple NAND flash drive with it on there.

Hard drive corruption should be a non-issue and should have even been a non-issue before the advent of Time Machine. ALWAYS have a physical backup. Burn your own discs or use Time Machine to have a direct parity copy.


You'll get over it. I don't say that demeaningly; I say it as a consolation. I was worse than anyone I knew about hitting Save at increasingly short intervals, but my time on the Developer Previews broke me of that.

The only interesting thing will be to see if Creative Suite 6 decides to support it. I mean, it goes against absolutely everything that Adobe has demanded its users do since the beginning of time, but Versions/AutoSave is a better way of doing things

Though I bet if they do implement it, it'll be feature #2 in a list of 10 that costs us $4,000 to upgrade to.

Smart
And totally true- all of the above.

I'm on Snow Leopard and have no plans to upgrade even though I bought a copy of Lion. I don't need a phone like OS on my workstations and Macbook Pros. I'm really only waiting to see what release after Lion looks like. If Apple keeps moving in the iOS/iPhone direction for OS X, then it's good bye Apple for me. I don't need a computer/OS from a phone company.

I had Lion installed for about 2 weeks before downgrading back to Snow Leopard. I simply did not like all of the iOS-like "features" in Lion. I know that one day I'll be forced to upgrade, so I just hope Apple makes Lion suck less, but I'm not holding my breath.

No doubt the more cautious majority of Mac users caught wind of the many problems that impetuous, poorly-prepared early adopters ran into with the initial Lion release. Also, Lion is a really mixed bagmore different from the previous OS X release than any other I can think of. Some of the differences are actually beneficial, and some are decidedly not. Most Mac users will eventually upgrade to Lion because they must; but Lion has definitely thrown the Mac community a curve. Personally, I've been test-driving Lion on an external hard drive since the day it was released, but I still haven't installed it on my main machine and don't plan to anytime soon.

I went through the same thing. I just did it for kicks, but I didn't realize that installing MySql from the command line would actually turn the OS into the server version as far as Apple was concerned, which made updating almost impossible. I eventually ended up completely reformatting the drive and a fresh install of Lion to straighten it all out.

Anyway I think I read that it doesn't come by default because there may be some licensing issue now that it is owned by Oracle. The default DB on Lion is Postgres. Running websites locally has never been something that I do, since I find it much better to have a development server. That way the client can log in and review the progress since it is on the web.

Still you must do it first before you start editing otherwise you will save over your previous version. By habit I often do a little editing before I save as or if I don't like the way it is working out I will just close without saving. That is a habit I would have to break in the future. Fortunately I don't use any apps that implement the auto save feature so I'm good for now.

If you just do it before you quit (like I imagine everyone always has) the prior session, that takes care of itself.

Really? I didn't know that. What happens if you just close the document, which is something I often do when I am not happy with the changes I've made? As I said, I'm not at all familiar with the feature since none of the applications I use have auto save.

If you close the document, it's saved as it currently is when you close it. I don't know if that constitutes a Version, though.

I do know that every manual save becomes a Version, so if you manually save, close, reopen, make changes, and don't like them (and since as you make said changes, they're immediately saved), you can then go to the Versions browser and select the last Version available, which will be when you manually saved before closing it the last time.

The system, I think, assumes you're not going to be making many (any) mistakes, as often as it saves.

All of that sounds like an absolute nightmare. There are many times a day where I absolutely do not want my changes saved , and I sure as hell never want my hard drive clogged with multiple version of the same document. The way it already was where it would ASK ME if I wanted to save when I closed is a lot better.

Can you at least turn this new way off?

No. \

I will be disappointed if CS6 implements this. I don't use any of the new iWorks stuff except as an intermediary for Windows Office documents, so I just delete them when I am through copying the content out of them. The only way to turn it off is to not upgrade or at least don't use applications that implement the feature.

You can go back to any version you want, you can also lock and duplicate.


Apple sells a USB drive with Lion for $69. You could also create your own install media.

i don't know why people have issues when updating, but I would wager more people talk about having issues than people who have actually had issues.

I would also wager that a fair amount of the issues fall into the same category as the number one cause for IT calls. That would be the "check the plug" type.

Lion sucks. It's buggy, laggy and irritating. It's like Vista for the Mac. Try using Preview if you want a "preview" of its sucky features. S L O W beyond belief, crashing, freezing, violating long established UI conventions.

Here's one: when you double click a folder in the column view of the open dialog, Preview used to refresh the column view list but now it opens all the files in that folder. Slowly.

I tried using Lion for about a week and gave up. I reinstalled Snow Leopard on my 2011 MBP and the sluggishness and annoyances went away.

I'm (sure | hopeful) that it runs great on a system with an SSD, but on a 500GB 7200 RPM equipped MBP 2011 15" it was a Dog, not a Lion...

You're upset that double-clicking the action used for executing an open command for decades doesn't simple refresh a view that doesn't need to be refreshed because all contents are dynamically refreshed when they are changed?

Yes - what was wrong with FILE -> SAVE AS? Make a new copy in one step. I use this app a LOT to prepare software documenation.

Try using Preview under Lion and prepare to pull out all of your hair with the three-step process for "saving as". It's just annoying and stupid. Whatever software engineer that placed this abomination into Lion obviously never uses it . . .

I'm sure someone here will attempt to defend this change, but turning a one-step process into a three step process for the sake of some kind of software-evangelistic "consistency" is a giant step backward.

I'm warning all friends and clients to avoid Lion like the plague. If we can't have iCloud access as a result, well, I see it as a feature, not a bug...

I doubt that Lion itself is buggy with a lot of lag on every system. My MBA runs Lion just fine but I'm really glad that I didn't install Lion on my 5 year old Mac mini.

There's something wrong with your computer. Lion is as stable as my mini running Snow Leopard. I just tried to double click a folder in column view from within an open dialog window in Pages and could not replicate your issue.

You should probably run some diagnostic tests on your computer. It's not behaving like a computer should with Lion IMO

Tell us how choosing File » Export... instead of File » Save As… adds three steps to the process?

You not only get more options to choose from (something people like to complain that Mac OS doesn't have), but the current file format is kept by default so it remains just as dumb as the basic Save As… option that preceded it if you choose to do nothing but rename it and place in a new location.

You are wrong. Double clicking an icon on a desktop, yes, opens the file. Double clicking a file folder in an open dialog in column view didn't used to open every file in the folder. I know this because I do it all the time in Snow Leopard without issue. Perform the action I am describing before criticizing.

A primary tenant of user interface design is don't surprise the user. Also, "contents are not always dynamically refreshed" when stored on a non-Apple server, which is what we have at work.

If I wanted to open all the files in a folder (this one had over 50 files) I would click the folder once and command-A to select all the files. But I don't want to do that.

Or in the case of an existing document you get a "Duplicate" option that allows you to save a new branch of the document.

At this point a good majority of the Lion complains I've seen haven't been about Lion deficiencies but rather someone complaining because it doesn't work exactly how "they" want it.

I really don't care if the name changes from "Save As" to "Export" to "Duplicate" if the end result is the same.

Just tried with Pixelmator and once again it did not open any files by merely clicking on a folder in an open and save dialog.

There's something potentially awry with your install.