Mac OSX LION the Vista release of Apple?!

22Jul

Mac OSX LION the Vista release of Apple?!

Vista is an absolutely beautiful word. If you look at the first definition you get this precious definition to behold!

A pleasing view, esp. one seen through a long, narrow opening:

Isn’t that stunning… beautiful. If a word could describe something so sincere, so true, so… Elegant. Unfortunately, THAT was not the definition that Mac OSX LION resembles. Instead it describes the recently more appropriate and updated definition of Vista.

A software release leaving you to WTF how Performance and Operational considerations from your audience are thrown in the gutter. One clearly defined and described by how much better performance you will get on the SAME hardware with a future bulkier version, restoring functionality you stripped from our cold dead hands.

Whoa! Why all the hatred?! THIS IS THE BEST RELEASE AND VERSION OF OSX EVER, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT, IT MAKES MY MACBOOK JUST LIKE MY IPHONE. Yea. Thanks. Really wanted THAT functionality. Do you know why I have an iPhone? It’s portable and I use it on the GO. Do you know why I use my MacBook in Pre-LION terms? Because it lets me do things like THIS:

I had just come back from a reboot so I clearly didn’t have ALL 16 of my windows activated. Oh and for you Forum Douches who say “WHY DO YOU NEED 16 WINDOWS”. It’s not my fault you can barely find a use for a single window. I did find the adoption of 16 separate isolated instances a lot more efficient to having DEDICATED machines to do my work [What I would have to do previously] So Apple first of all I want to thank you for taking this Primitive concept of 3D-ish worlds aligned to matrices and replacing it with this clearly ‘evolutionary’ serial mode.

I’m not even getting into how various members of us have. Performance problems like cited in the fine Louis Gray’s article Lion’s Big Bite Took the Air Out of My Sails. Nor how when you scroll from side to side you get this weird visual redraw rendering problem which for some of us has been causing severe headaches. Yea, really. Thanks for that. I do miss my FAN turning off when I’m doing a lot of things, vs right now where it’s on with LITTLE application running time… thanks for that too! You know what’s great about Mission Control though? the clear ability to disseminate between what is going on in ONE window vs ANOTHER window. Yea I’m glad we got rid of Spaces because the clarity it brought to my productivity made me work too well and get too much done.

I know there are a lot of Great Write-ups about how LION is Amazing and how Mission Control is great. Usually written up by people who clearly use ONE window at a time and at best will run 3 applications simultaneously. For those of us with on average 12 of our 16 windows busy, and find that we’ll hit the memory wall WAY before the CPU wall, LION is a serious piece of crap.

Here’s to hoping we get numerous Patch Tuesdays to resolve this Vista-like experience. Thanks. WTF. SERIOUSLY. WTF.

Oh and feel free to hate. Or even encourage suggestive ways how I can resolve issues and experiences I have had here. I’m game to resolve these things. However I know I’m not alone. :(

42 comments

Ron Freeman July 22, 2011 at 5:49 am

Nobody forced you to be an early adopter. You could have learned quite a bit about these changes *prior* to upgrading if you had wanted to. And true power users on Mac OS know better than to immediately leap onto new major releases without looking first. Even releases like Snow Leopard (ostensibly without too significantly changing from Leopard) caused issues with software we relied on every day. Did you need something in particular that Lion offered? Or just eager to complain? I wanted to see what would work and what would not, so I removed my SSD and installed Lion on another drive. At that point I guess I could’ve restored everything from Time Machine, but did not do so. Spent a couple of hours reinstalling the critical apps and now have a very nice, clean Lion install. Have noticed a few window handling anomolies and some screen redraw and background issues. And I agree that I miss the old Spaces deployment (with HyperSpaces). Will probably put my SSD back in and wait with Snow Leopard until some patches and/or 3rd party software updates (Cisco AnyConnect — need v3.0.3 for Lion support) come out.

Christopher Kusek July 22, 2011 at 5:59 am

Thank you for your comment Ron!

I wouldn’t go so far as saying I was an Early Adopter. When I early adopt.. the product is in beta, and not a released product. This is a released product (or so it claims to be ;))
And you’re right… I held off from adopting LION for quite some time due to lack of application compatibility, but when ‘most’ of the apps I used were supported, the product was officially released and I had friends and associates who were looking to upgrade to it, I took the plunge so I can tell them what treacherous waters waited ahead.

I have backups, but I’m not going to jump out of the water every time I encounter a fish. I try to find resolutions and solutions to these quandaries, and educate as applicable where I see fit.

I was NOT looking forward to complaining or having any kind of bad or awkward experience, so definitely wasn’t eager to complain. I especially wasn’t looking forward to having headaches associated with the screen redraw (Seriously, WTF is that? WHAT PROBLEM ARE YOU SOLVING THAT YOU’RE INDUCING THIS?!)

People always are the first to step up and defend Apple of any kind of wrong doing as if they’re infallible. I’m just here to say, OH YEA THERE’s FALLIBILITY. Because when thousands of others go to upgrade, with or without extensive research into the process, or buying new and ending up finding their MBA doesn’t meet their requirements and is slow (like Louis’ Experience) or the screen redraw becomes some kind of cruel and sick joke. Or the concept of Productivity converts into this sick ‘mission control’ nightmare.

Does Hyperspaces functionality still work (and/or is that a way to hack/get around this new spaces problem? :))

FYI: When the iPhone 5 comes out, I’ll be one of the first adopters of that, and you know what? If there are problems with it, I’ll call a spade a spade then too. And if it rocks it out of the park, I will be the first one to praise it as well. [If it’s mediocre, yea I won’t invest any time one way or the other :)]

I really do appreciate you taking the time to respond though, even if you started it off a little snarky ;)

I would love to hear suggestions of Spaces-like-environments to restore back to the olden days.. I spent several hours yesterday just trying to find a way to hack things back into a grid layout, grin.

Christopher Kusek July 22, 2011 at 6:22 am

While I may represent a minority of Power Users who REALLY DEEPLY use their system, I’ve gotten a consensus on these same problems from discussing it with other extreme power users who would use 10+ spaces on average. grin.

Ron Freeman July 22, 2011 at 6:28 am

Hyperspaces was cool. (http://bit.ly/4Cx6aW)

But, alas, the changes to Spaces and addition of Mission Control to Lion killed it. (See post at http://bit.ly/iH17Ar for more.)

Definitely going back to the SSD and Snow Leopard. And have the Lion disk that I can boot from if someone needs help.

I’ll be watching for fixes to the Spaces (and other) issues before continuing on with Lion further. Will let you know if I see anything.

Christopher Kusek July 22, 2011 at 6:34 am

Yea I just tried Hyperspaces – Completely does not work.
I loaded up Spaces.app from my 10.6 other MBP but it doesn’t do anything other than launch Mission Control in 10.7 :)

Aye, I do encourage going to back to the SSD/Snow Leopard, especially if it’s not going to improve your experience at all :)

I’ll be fighting this battle from the front-line, trying to find ways to be Productive as much as I was but in this ‘new platform’ we’ll see how that goes.

I do love the critical aspect (I’m getting it on other forums as well :)) You say ONE bad thing about Apple [no matter how true, like them removing spaces/etc] and people will attack you :)

Having 2 MBPs and 5 iPhones doesn’t quell their wrath at all :)

James July 22, 2011 at 5:42 pm

Firstly, stop using full upper case words, I know you’re trying to get your point across but it makes you sound/read like a petulant child. Use italics, quotes or if you really must, bold text. If you want to say “What the fuck”, then please say it rather than WTF. You sound like you’re having real issues so I suggest contacting Apple or your nearest Apple Store, show them your list of gripes and demand a refund, get back on to Snow Leopard and you’ll be a much happier person.

mrm July 22, 2011 at 6:36 pm

Please make a video of you using 16 spaces, I’m really curious how productive you are with those.

Pablo July 22, 2011 at 7:08 pm

Spaces was a QUINTESSENTIAL part of my OS X experience. Now… There’s nothing….. D:

Heath July 23, 2011 at 3:33 pm

Dude, I have 12 spaces and use them all the time, very efficiently. I don’t know how many apps you usually have going, but let’s see, I currently have Path Finder, XRG, OmniFocus, Mail, iCal, Chrome, Excel, Terminal, TextMate, and VMware running. Most are each assigned to specific desktops that don’t change while others like iTunes and XRG show on all spaces.

I have the option of switching to apps via command+tab or the dock, which I only use as an app switcher, not a launcher – LaunchBar is king for that. I also have the option of moving to another desktop with either Spaces Expose or by option+mousing over to the neighboring desktop via Warp. I have my bottom left hot corner set to Spaces Expose and the bottom right hot corner set to All Windows Expose to get a handle on each apps multiple windows. Every app and window is available in an instant.
I don’t understand when people don’t use Spaces. A buddy of mine who uses one space will use All Windows Expose and sees 30 various windows for all his open apps at once. Then he sits there trying to find the one he wants. Then he tries to use App Expose to narrow it down, wasting more time. With Spaces and Expose, you only see the windows in that space, which is so much more efficient. I know what space I’m in and what apps are there so when I use Expose I see the pertinent windows, not all windows for all running apps.

Obsidianart July 26, 2011 at 6:26 pm

I’m absolutly with you, I had 9 spaces and I use all of them.
For those who asked for: 1)firefox 2)netbeans 3)mail 4)msn, gtalk, skype 5)photoshop 6)jdownload 7)itunes 8)flash designer 9)flash builder.
I use all of them, I rember them, I could easily move with arrows (and the maximum distance using arrows is 2).
I could easily move apps from one screen to another (not just from the current to another) and screens are big enough to see if something happen in another screen.
The old expose was really better, you could see everything if you use spaces and just not 100 apps on one screen.
If mac was born like lion I’d probably had just continued on windows machine.
Lion is crap, it will takes me at least 2 days to downgrade.

Just to know:
1)Photoshop had memory problem on Lion sometimes (I opened a file and it took 40 gb in 30 seconds)
2)Skype sometimes had visual problem
3)Launchpad crashed a lot of time
4)delay time when switching screen is annoying
5)background crashes on some screens
6)temporary unmovable and undeletable files appears on desktop sometimes
7)chrome in full screen doesn’t allow to come back

Wysiecki July 27, 2011 at 9:20 pm

similar to me, nice but slow and unstable, like a new OS, however, apple knew it better in the past.

Is Lion is Apple Vista? Hearing it more and more (updated) « The Orange View July 28, 2011 at 6:51 pm

[…] Mac OSX LION the Vista release of Apple?! by tech consultant Christopher Kusek […]

Johnssen August 3, 2011 at 9:46 am

Have to agree totally. Went back to Snow Leopard. Am very much disappointed by Lion. Never thought this ad would apply to Apple .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwoWbQ9DmTs

Andrés Torres Scott August 13, 2011 at 6:07 am

Thank you for writting this I was about buying Lion when I read your blog and timely desisted. I’m sticking with snowleopard, spaces is my favorite tool in my mac.

Blwm August 17, 2011 at 10:18 am

Totally and absolutely agree. They slaughtered Exposé and Spaces and stitched the bleeding chunks back together into the Frankenstein monster they call Mission Control. An abomination, a clunky, counter-intuitive, eye-candied, overwrought piece of shit. Thanks, Apple.

iBeb August 19, 2011 at 10:25 pm

Unfortunately I 100% agree with you. I’m facing so many issues with Lion (freezes, bugs everywhere, slow, high memory usage, bugs and bugs, headaches, and bugs again…) I’ve never seen such a crapy OS from Apple for years… And the first update didn’t change anything (except the wifi issue).
Do something Apple!

Goose August 22, 2011 at 1:49 am

I totally agree– I’ve had too many issues with Lion to mention, but “Vista” sums it up perfectly: Upgrading from XP to Vista brought performance down, bugs up, incompatibilities, gratuitous changes, and a loss of features that “pro” users depend on. Lion is Apple’s Vista for many pro users, but we were lulled by the previous upgrades to OS X that were, for the most part, pretty nice. FCP should have been a warning, but I ignored it. Fortunately, my Mac Pro is still running SL, and it will stay that way. My new MBP is running a clean install of Lion, and it is a bug-ridden beast. Ugh– please use some of that $80B to fix this steaming Lion turd as quickly as possible. (Oh, and please bring back Spaces and Expose. MC is crap.)

David August 24, 2011 at 4:37 am

I agree. Just got a new i7 MBP from Apple with Lion loaded and I feel like I’m at the beach with the number of beach balls I’m seeing. This coming from using a Windows 7 machine daily. I am seriously considering dropping back to Snow Leopard or just using this bad boy as an awesome Windows 7 machine.

David August 24, 2011 at 4:40 am

Nothing like being in a meeting today and having to tell folks ‘sorry, this page isn’t coming up’ and having to reboot. I’m an IT Manager, switching to a Mac, and I’m rebooting like I would with Windows 98. Super.

Christopher Kusek August 24, 2011 at 5:02 am

Oh David, Say it aint so!

Honestly, it would make an awesome Win7 machine but don’t fret! I sadly unable to take the PAIN from this DID Upgrade myself to Snow Leopard (See what I did there?;))
But seriously I had to, the battery loss and CPU turning on far too often was way too much for me, not to mention an infinite other number of things going on.

I have been quoted as saying “Installing Snow Leopard instead of LION was the best decision of my life” ;)

SL is solid, hard core, I have been meaning to write about that, among other more things as well but I’ve been busy… and well, it just works now, so I’m far less frustrated :)
I DO consider loading 10.7 on my old MBP to see what happens there. I have found LION to improve the life of a MacBook Air but for real business (MBP) it’s an utter piece of crap.
:)

Good luck on the downgrade! Oh what’s that you say? I haven’t had a single problem or need to reboot SINCE BRINGING SL BACK ONLINE? Yea, I can go back to my 90+ day reboot cycles :)

patrick dodds August 31, 2011 at 7:15 pm

Yep, agree with all that you say. It is an abomination. Slow, buggy, fixes things that weren’t broken. Advice to anyone looking to upgrade: DON’T.

OsloWald September 4, 2011 at 12:15 pm

yeah and WTF is that new monster ugly scrollbar ?? seriously… I liked the little blue textured bar that has been improved over the last years… and now wtf ? we have a f*cking grey flat ugly scroll bar and a monstrous fullscreen mode that is more than useless and unproductive

Khalid Q. Al-Jaaidi September 5, 2011 at 3:16 am

AGREE. And the Vista description is perfect. The Snow Leopard has defeated the beast Lion. Best solution, Go back to the mighty and trust-worthy Snow Leopard, and enjoy Diablo 2. Fuck this Lion piece of shit.

mattd90 September 15, 2011 at 11:55 am

I can hardly be described as experienced in the way of OSX as a full 12 month veteran of it with a Macbook Pro but I found it easy to get into and way better than any other OS I had used when using SL. Then came the downgrade, or upgrade as it’s been touted with Lion and even for the Joe Bloggs man on the street the experience is bloody awful! If I could get through doing a single task without it taking an hour let alone 16 i would be eternally grateful and all this wit 8gb of ram and a Macbook Pro that used to fly with 4gb before.

Lion OSX, more like Horseshit to me.

OpenSourceAme September 23, 2011 at 12:38 pm

Totally agree. Unfortunately for me I’m forced to use Lion because that’s what my new iMac at work came with.

Boy have Apple made a complete screw up with Lion. All the issues with the ridiculous horizontal row of spaces aside, why can’t you set a default space for an app when it opens? Why can’t you drag a window from one space to another without having to change to that space first?

What also really annoys me is that the dashboard key now opens that stupid Launchpad. What kind of idiot wants to see a grid of massive icons on a 27″ mac?

Bloody useless Apple, GIVE US OUR FUNCTIONALITY BACK!

http://opensourceame.com

Mitch September 30, 2011 at 10:35 am

I love Windows 7 I guess Snow Leopard will be the XP while Lion the Vista and what ever cat after will be the 7.

I think Windows 8 will be better since its properly merged with out Alienating every one the normal OS UI with a Tablet/Phone OS UI and allow you to smoothly operate and transit between the 2 easily and allow you to chose which UI without forcing IOS design on a Computer OS and making it some sort of Monster Mash.

I think by seeing Windows 8 in use its on theb ball of the future of interations of Tablet/Phone and Desktop/Laptop OS

Vidar October 3, 2011 at 9:56 pm

Just reinstalled Snow Leopard, ahhh, what a relief. I’ll never use that piece of shit rubber band lion again. Thanks Apple!

David October 10, 2011 at 1:00 am

Yes, Lion is shit! Xcode is shit! Don’t buy a mac!

Kieran Revision October 17, 2011 at 5:17 pm

OSX Lion cost me 2 days of work, a client, and about 15 jobs per month as it let me down right at the wrong time.
Bull****

DigiBob October 18, 2011 at 9:46 am

It’s awful. I’m a web developer/designer and Lion costs me about an hour a day. It is slow, unresponsive and when it crashes (about twice a day) it restarts with all my “open” programmes – and that takes about 15 minutes. I have a top of the range Mac Pro with 4 gig RAM and it is nowhere near enough!!!
RUBBISH and going back to Snow Leopard….

Bryan Lee October 27, 2011 at 6:24 pm

Oh come on now. Comparing Lion to Vista? That’s almost blasphemy! Vista was never THAT bad. :-b

max1zzz November 1, 2011 at 10:07 pm

agree with this totally, what really gets under my skin with lion is that you cannot get it to stop restoring all apps by default on reboot. thanks for that. if i try to reboot my MBP quickly and forget to tick that little box it now takes 5-10x longer to boot + login than my iBook g3. this actually really worries me, what happens if it crashes? will it still try to restore the apps, including the one that crashed it? and as for makeing it like a iPhone, I brought a MacBookPro. not a iPhone. if i want a iPhone, guess what? I pick up my iPhone. anyways, atleast i kept a Snow leopard on a second partition, and soon i will dupe my old pre lion hdd over the partition with lion.

Mark Hamlin November 29, 2011 at 10:57 am

Too true. Last month got a brand new Mac Pro, 8GB Ram. Running Netbeans, SmartGit, and a slew of other dev apps, Lion performance is deadly slow. Running on 4GB, which is what the machine originally came with, was quite simply impossible.

Think twice before upgrading any time soon, and make sure you have a rollback plan!!!!

Dont really know what to say, been using the machines for over a decade, this just stinks though.

Polliexmas December 10, 2011 at 12:10 am

Hi Thanks for the article, let hope someone that can rectify this takes note.

I only recently converted to OSX and found found spaces a good substitute for not fitting two appsside by side on on a 15″ screen. It takes me 2 gestures and 1 click to get to any one of my open apps. I only use 4 spaces.

The other thing I use a lot is the calculator (not sure what the button is called). Now the calculator is displayed on a blank screen!! The neat thing about the SL calculator is that it was always 1 button away and you could still see the amounts that you want to add. With Lion you now have to remember the numbers or write them down somewhere which is just as clumpsy as having to cut and paste.

My friend took the plunge and one of his gripes are that when starting a new email in full screen you are stuffed if you want to go check something, i.e. you essentially have to kill the email and start again.

I skipped vista and went directly to Win7. Was hoping the switch to Apple would be better, but it seems like I will have to do the same.

ere’s hoping Lion is as shortlived as Vista.

TCB13 January 10, 2012 at 6:59 pm

I’m with you! OSX Lion completely kills my productivity and workflow!… Seriously Apple!

Gabriel January 19, 2012 at 7:00 pm

Fully agree. It does make me angrier each time I work more with it.

Charlesluke January 24, 2012 at 3:32 pm

I just got off the phone, telling Apple what I think of them for making such a mess of Lion. The worst thing for me day in and day out is the dysfunctional nature of the slider bars and the fact that they did away with the directional scroll arrows at the bottom right on the page. Now the only was to scroll, if you are using a tablet and pen as many if not most professionals do, is to try and locate the thin, pale grey slider bars on the side and bottom of the page. Because this has become so hard to see at a glance with the new thin, pale slider bars, just moving the screen a little, something done thousands of times a day, becomes much more demanding of attention. I have 20:10 vision, and even for me it is a hassle to see the type on all the system, because when they raised the resolution they did not increase the number of pixels on all the controls and headers. Some of the type on those postage-stamp-sized little booklets that came with the machine are less than 1 mm high. This brilliant step was taken the very season the crest of the baby-boom turned 65. For years now it has been obvious that Apple has blown off and let down that generation that has been its primary market since its beginning, and as we age we are going to find ourselves turning back to PC systems or new Indian-made software for Chinese-made computers.

SithKnight2 January 26, 2012 at 12:46 pm

You do know that Vista was created by ex mac developers right?

DennyH February 17, 2012 at 4:18 pm

I gave Lion (upgrade from SL) a multi-month test on my 3 Macs, seemed like those dreams where you move in slow motion. Put SL back on a mini and MacBook, boot times dropped from 1:30 (Lion) to 40 seconds or less. Safari loads quicker, all installed apps seem snappier. Former Windows user, very familiar with XP to Vista “downgrade.”

CableGuy. February 23, 2012 at 12:47 pm

I’m beta testing the also painful Mountain Lion at the moment, and Snow Leopard is still a clear mile better. I think the only reason Apple have done this is to make more money out of apps? I have yet to find a single thing that works better on Lion, I loath the new mail app and its so broken at file sharing to my media box because of the silly changes they have made with Samba3. I don’t want my MacPro tower to act like an iPad, and I truly hate touch screen technology. Come on Apple man up and give the public a better deal here.

Xespawn March 1, 2012 at 7:54 am

No way else to say it…Lion sucks ass.

Good grief. Steve leaves us, and the company goes to shit immediately.

Mario-Bros March 5, 2012 at 3:01 pm

Lion is total crap. After 4 months using this piece of shit I downgraded back to Snow Leopard.

Lion is just a stupid eye candy OS for Apple fanboy who buys anything Apple release, no matter if it is useful or not, working properly or not.

I’m an IT, and when Vista came out, we and the sysadmin never upgraded to Vista. Right now, Snow Leopard is the last Mac OS X OS it seems that we’re going to run on our Mac until the end of times (since Apple would never go back, they will never admit their fault and stupid choice, the same crap will be in the next releases).

Anyways, Apple doesn’t care anymore abou their business customers who actually have been using their product for ages. They destroyed Final Cut Pro, they destroyed QuickTime, now they destroy Mac OS X, they discontinued their Xserve servers, and there’s a shitload of rumor that they’ll discontinue the Mac Pro.

And since Snow Leopard doesn’t have the drivers to run on newer Macs, It is a shitload of problem to get it to work, it’s easier getting a PC and make an hackintosh…

Oh well, I guess they don’t care anymore, so I don’t give a shit about them, I’m already tired enough debugging the few colleagues who didn’t downgrade to Snow Leopard on their MacBook Pro.

And the upcoming business model of Apple is very bad. an OS per year (talk about stability and support for enterprise…), they push each tme more with their Mac AppStore. In less than 5 years, you won’t be able to install anything on your Mac unless it is downloaded from the AppStore. They’ll say some crap like on iOS “it is more secure since we are verifying each software and they’re all digitally signed”.

What a joke. This is like the Patriot Act. Restricting liberties in the name of security.

Mac OSX LION the Vista release of Apple?!

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42 comments

James July 22, 2011 at 5:42 pm

mrm July 22, 2011 at 6:36 pm

Pablo July 22, 2011 at 7:08 pm

Heath July 23, 2011 at 3:33 pm

Obsidianart July 26, 2011 at 6:26 pm

Wysiecki July 27, 2011 at 9:20 pm

Johnssen August 3, 2011 at 9:46 am

Blwm August 17, 2011 at 10:18 am

iBeb August 19, 2011 at 10:25 pm

Goose August 22, 2011 at 1:49 am

David August 24, 2011 at 4:37 am

David August 24, 2011 at 4:40 am

patrick dodds August 31, 2011 at 7:15 pm

OsloWald September 4, 2011 at 12:15 pm

mattd90 September 15, 2011 at 11:55 am

OpenSourceAme September 23, 2011 at 12:38 pm

Mitch September 30, 2011 at 10:35 am

Vidar October 3, 2011 at 9:56 pm

Kieran Revision October 17, 2011 at 5:17 pm

DigiBob October 18, 2011 at 9:46 am

max1zzz November 1, 2011 at 10:07 pm

Mark Hamlin November 29, 2011 at 10:57 am

Polliexmas December 10, 2011 at 12:10 am

Gabriel January 19, 2012 at 7:00 pm

Charlesluke January 24, 2012 at 3:32 pm

SithKnight2 January 26, 2012 at 12:46 pm

DennyH February 17, 2012 at 4:18 pm

CableGuy. February 23, 2012 at 12:47 pm

Xespawn March 1, 2012 at 7:54 am

Mario-Bros March 5, 2012 at 3:01 pm