And the Lions did Roar

So, Apple’s highly anticipated Mac OS X Lion — or Mac Oh Ess Ten Point Seven for short — has finally shipped (Weds. July 20), to a mixed initial reaction among the chattering class of Mac bloggers, critics and pundits.

Here at Creative Goose, we have not jumped on it first day (we almost never do the early adopter thing).  That being said, we *do* have plans to set up a dedicated Lion laptop, and a Lion Server Mac Mini, in the near future.   The nuance here is that I will *not* be updating my “main axe,” my day-to-day computer, in this first wave of updates — and probably not for some time to come.   Before you do, loyal reader, there are some truths of which you should be aware:

- Lion does not support older programs, many of which ran fine on Leopard and Snow Leopard.   Specifically, any app written for the PowerPC chip will no longer launch: that includes such favorites as Microsoft Office 2004 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage — Office 2008 and 2011 are OK though), Quicken 2007 and earlier, and many other programs.   Also affected are some print drivers and scanner drivers.  Here at Creative Goose, I expect to get a lot of calls from people who upgraded without being cognizant of this fact, since Apple has not exactly warned folks

- Lion requires an Intel Core 2 processor or better.   This rules out early MacBooks (Pro and otherwise), iMacs, and minis.  Nor can any G3, G4, G5 or iBook run this new system.

For these reasons (and more), I plan to retain a fully functional 10.6 Snow Leopard system for some years to come.   After I’ve played around with Lion, and maybe some updates and such come out, wrinkles get smoothed out, I might migrate to the Lion Laptop as my primary, and then keep my 10.6 laptop for servicing and supporting clients who will require use of their older Macs and software for some time to come.

Another thing that is different this time out, is that Apple will not be supplying Lion on DVD discs any more.   The update is sold through Apple’s online store — and the store requires an updated install of 10.6 Snow Leopard.  At this writing, it is still somewhat fuzzy what users who are still running Leopard or earlier on an otherwise eligible machine are supposed to do, especially as Snow Leopard is no longer sold by Apple as of this launch.

Currently — as is always the case when a new system ships — I will be counseling clients to take a cautious approach to the new system.  No-one with a mission-critical need to use their Mac, should be updating that Mac to Lion first week out.  Business customers who rely on their computers should use technology that is tested and known stable in the real world.  At Creative Goose, we’ll be watching closely for the gotchas, updates, patches, workarounds and pitfalls to get mapped thoroughly before we start bringing working computers up on the new OS.  Meanwhile, if you’ve just got to play with it, do what we’ll be doing:  fire up a new computer, or a capable “old” computer, on Lion and give it test drive.   We can compare notes!

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