Mac OS X Lion Now Available from Mac App Store
For those of us in the media, and especially for those of us who have books shipping (“Take Control of Upgrading to Lion” and “Take Control of Using Lion”), last week’s release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion was the end to months of conversation and speculation about when Apple would release the new operating system to the public.
Well, that day arrived, and Lion is now on the main screen of the Mac App Store, which remains the only way to acquire Lion at the moment, for $29.99. Those without broadband access, or who have bandwidth caps that prevent the downloading of a 3.76 GB file, can download Lion at Apple retail stores (or anywhere else where high-speed Internet access is available; also see “How Long Will Lion Take to Download?,” 5 July 2011). Users in other countries are also reporting that Lion is appearing in the Mac App Store for them.
If the download option simply doesn’t work for you, you’re not out of luck, but you will need to wait a few more weeks. In August, Apple will also start selling Lion on a USB thumb drive through the Apple Store for $69. It’s a shame that Apple couldn’t have announced this option earlier, which would have saved much consternation among Mac users.
Despite the ease with which it seems you can install Lion over Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, we still recommend moving cautiously with the upgrade. In “Take Control of Upgrading to Lion,” Joe Kissell strongly recommends running Software Update to make sure you have the latest updates (see “Update Migration Assistant before Upgrading to Lion,” 19 July 2011), making a duplicate before upgrading in case something goes horribly wrong during the installation process, and dealing with any Rosetta-dependent software conversions while it’s still possible under Snow Leopard. For instance, if you need to convert financial
data from Quicken or email from Eudora, some conversion tools rely on Rosetta as well, and thus won’t function after you upgrade to Lion.
Anyone interested in the Lion's new foreign language capabilities can find list here:
http://m10lmac.blogspot.com/2011/07/os-x-107-lion-adds-major-new-language.html
I feel like I've been reading forums and Tidbits for hours, but I still can't tell if I can carry my laptop into the Apple Store and upgrade my Leopard 10.5.8 to Lion 10.7?
The hardware is a MacBook 4.1, with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
And I don't even care how much it costs.
Apple hasn't said anything about what they'll do for people like you, but Joe Kissell explains how to do exactly that sort of installation in the 1.1 version of "Take Control of Upgrading to Lion." We're doing final editing and production on it now and it should be available in a few hours.
It is with horror that I read that Eudora will not work with Lion. I keep looking at the current crop of email clients, hoping one will be adequate. They all fail to match Eudora. I have all of my correspondence going back to 1994 on Eudora.
Has this community found, or come to a consensus about, an email client that comes close to Eudora?
I try to keep all of my software up-to-date, so I was expecting to acquire Lion within its first week or so. Email is central to my day and is more important that my CPU's operating system.
Suddenly, I am not looking forward to anything about Lion.
I would appreciate any wisdom here.
Dispair!
I wish there was a good answer. Eudora OSE and MailForge are the two clients that will look the most like Eudora (and again, convert before you upgrade to Lion). Mail is certainly the default choice from Apple. And I personally switched to Gmail's Web interface, since all the traditional clients felt like bad Eudora clones to me, and Gmail continues to innovate past everyone else.
And then there are the new crop of clients, some of which have gotten good reviews, including Postbox, Sparrow, and MailMate.
Thanks Adam. I have sent (using Eudora) the links to your excellent series "Zen and the Art of Gmail" to the members of my family who use Eudora.
Adam, are you folks planning to run a list of applications incompatible with Lion, like you did for (if memory serves me right) Leopard a few years ago?
My list of incompatible applications so far includes such Intel-based apps as Transcriva 2 and BackJack, the EOS utility for Canon cameras, and older applications like Listen @ Type, which worked on Snow Leopard with Rosetta. Way to go, Apple!
We aren't, because the loss of Rosetta means that the list would be vast. There's a good database at:
http://roaringapps.com/apps:table
that has a bunch of information on this, though.
Thanks, Adam. 1Password is another of my favourite apps that won't work with Lion.
There's a blog post about it here.
http://blog.agilebits.com/2011/07/os-x-lion-and-the-state-of-the-new-1password-extension/
This is the first version of OS 10 that I will avoid (and I was a beta tester with 10.0 - that was slow!). Maybe 10.6 will be the last I will use.
I use Front Row a lot to view movies and control iTunes. I have programs that need Rosetta, and there are incompatibilities with existing software I own. I don't need or want all the "improvements" to iTunes that make it bigger and more complicated - it is becoming a monster like MS Office.
I have found that UBUNTU does much of what I want. It may be the future for me.
When installing the driver for an older HP Deskjet Printer I noticed that the installation searched for Rosetta - Does this mean that a number of HP printers will not work with Lion?