OS X Lion: July

The recent WWDC has lead to a major announcement of Apple’s latest OS X Lion. It will be coming out in July for just USD 29. A jawdropping, hard to beat price that certainly sent some shockwaves within the Apple community and fans alike. During the press conference, it certainly had my jaw dropped when I heard it live that it would be priced at just USD29.

It will only be available via digital distribution, in that case the Mac App Store. You simply buy it, download 4gb worth of data and install it right away. I don’t know exactly how a clean install route could be performed, especially when it is digitally download with no boot cd to install from, but my best guess is that they would provide an option to do a fresh install when the download is complete, since i read from somewhere that it is capable of creating a bootable partition in your hard drive so that it can resort to that partition when there is something wrong with the OS, leading to a fresh install. Another way is to do a clean install with Snow Leopard before proceeding with installing Lion. Either way, I would want to do a fresh install so that everything runs smoothly. I can slowly redownload and reinstall all the apps and softwares again.

Initially, when news of a new OS was announced, I was hesitant in buying it and installing it on my almost-2-year-old mac mini. If it was at the usual price of either USD 79 or USD129, it would be hard for me to convince myself to upgrade. Another option was just to use the mac mini till a more suitable time for a hardware upgrade comes. I love my current mac mini. It has given me ZERO problems so far and I would like to keep it that way. If it ain’t broke, there is no reason for me to go and get a new one, especially when Apple’s products comes at a premium. But even then, I am glad that its hardware quality is above and beyond expectations and the price is totally worth it.

Now after announcing that it would just cost USD29, it will be a definite upgrade for me. I have a number of reports that the OS in general feels much snappier, thanks to better adoption of 64bit software on key applications. Making an OS feel snappier and generally faster is a big plus point for me especially when my mac mini is aging in terms of hardware performance relative to its younger cousins.

Other features that I’m really looking forward to is the new Mail interface, since I use mail quite a lot nowadays. Better management of various programs in the background via spaces and expose would definitely lead to better productivity. A faster safari won’t hurt as well, since I currently don’t quite like how Safari performs right now. Firefox is the way to go for me. But if Safari is much faster as some users proclaim, it would be a nice addition. Other features like autosave and versions on working documents and files would be a nice addition and added convenience when writing. Better management of Time Machine to choose certain folders instead of entire hard drive to backup to Time Machine is godsend. iTunes running on 64bit architecture definitely add a better experience when using it. There are many more features that I look forward to using them and there are just too many to list. For a complete list of improvements made on the new OS X Lion, click here.