Apple OS X 10.7 Lion review

OS X 10.7 Lion is the latest major update to the Mac operating system Apple first released in 2001. It brings a number of significant new features for users of its desktop and laptop computers, but may new aspects will be familiar to iPhone and iPad users, since they draw heavily on those already available in iOS.

The first major change is the distribution mechanism. You won’t find Lion in the shops. Instead, it can only be purchased online through the Mac App Store as a 3.7GB download. Unlike with Windows’ multiple versions, there’s just one version and one price for Lion, and your £21 lets you install it on as many personal Macs as you like. The only catch is that Lion can only be installed on Core 2 Duo (or later) Macs that are already running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, so anyone who’s been putting off operating system upgrades for a year or two will also need a £26 copy of last year’s update before they begin.

The Snow Leopard requirement arises because the Mac App store won’t work with any earlier version of Mac OS X, plus a working Mac is required to download and install the Mac OS X Lion application. This does pose a problem for anyone wanting a clean install of Lion, but as long as you can download the installer you can extract its constituent disk image and use it to create a DVD or USB flash drive that can be installed on any Lion-compatible Mac with any operating system, in any state. Once Lion is installed, it creates its own bootable recovery partition containing a handful of system tools for diagnostics and recovery, removing the need for a physical copy of the OS installer. That said, reinstalling Lion with the recovery partition means downloading it all over again (the recovery partition environment has network access and will run Safari), so creating your own boot disk for safe keeping isn’t a bad idea.

Installation takes around half an hour. The first sign of the iPhone and iPad iOS influence is apparent when you open a Finder window — there are no scroll bars. Or rather, there are, but just as on the iPhone and iPad, they appear only when something is being scrolled. This gives a few extra pixels of space for windows, but it sets an odd precedent for a desktop OS. In addition to showing that there’s more in a window than meets the eye, scroll bars also show how long a document is and your current position in it. Remove them and there’s no visual clue that a Finder window contains more files, for example, which is something that can easily fox a new Mac user. Microsoft Windows users will also be bemused to discover that Lion windows can now be resized by dragging any edge — it’s been the bottom-right corner only since every previous version of Mac OS since 1984.

These two interface tweaks are relatively minor, but they’re far from the only ones Apple has made to align Lion with the way iOS works. One of the oddest changes is the new trackpad setting that reverses the long-established scrolling behaviour for windows. In short, a two-finger swipe on a trackpad now works just like it does on an iPad or iPhone — drag down and the window content, such as a document, moves down, swipe up and up it goes. The problem is that while this makes perfect intuitive sense on a touchscreen device, where you move content around directly beneath your finger, there’s a mental disconnect when its done with a trackpad sitting on a desktop, particularly when you’re used to the normal Windows or Mac OS scroll-down-to-move-cursor-down behaviour. We suspect new Mac users, and anyone prepared to stick with it for a few weeks, will take to it, but if not both scroll bars and scroll behaviour can be restored to their usual selves.

Lion has quite a few new multitouch gestures that bring it into line with the iPhone and iPad – we feel that Apple may be favouring touch pads rather than mice for Mac control. A two-finger double-tap activates the same kind of smart zoom in Safari as it does in iOS – where the browser zooms in to make text fit the screen automatically – and a three-finger swipe switches between applications when they’re running in Lion’s new full-screen mode, where all extraneous window furniture is hidden. Multi-touch gestures also activate Mission Control, the souped-up replacement for Exposé and Spaces, as well as the new Launchpad application launcher that’s a familiar sight on iPads and iPhones.

This iOSification also drives two other major new Lion features designed to make Macs easier to use. First, there are now safeguards to stop you forgetting to save a document or accidentally saving over a file, losing the original. Lion’s new Auto Save feature not only saves an open document automatically whenever a change is made (using ‘untitled’ as the name, if need be), but it also maintains a version history that can be browsed in a Time Machine-like interface. So, when you quit an application you’re no longer shown a save prompt, and an overwritten document can always be recovered by opening it and reverting to an earlier state — assuming it’s a file created with an Auto Save-compatible application. For example, it doesn’t work with Microsoft Office at the moment, so Microsoft will need to upgrade its suite to take advantage of the feature.

Auto Save works in perfect conjunction with another new Lion feature – Resume. When enabled, the last state of the Mac is restored after a reboot, just as it would be after waking from sleep — and Lion’s abolition of save dialog boxes means that reboots are much quicker than usual. This won’t be that useful to anyone who mainly puts their Mac to sleep, but it’s handy for coping with reboots forced by software updates, not to mention stretching out laptop battery life by shutting down rather than sleeping. There can be a bit of a wait while Lion gets everything up and running again after a restart, but the feature can be disabled on demand using a toggle on the Restart/Shut down dialog box.

With a new version of Mac OS X comes a new version of Apple’s bundled applications, and Mail sees the biggest overhaul. Apple Mail 5 is now a spitting image of the iPad version, which might delight iPad users who dislike learning curves, but the simplified vertical two-pane layout will drive anyone who uses email more seriously to despair. Fortunately, you can revert Mail to its classic look, complete with full lists of mailboxes and inbox folders, without disabling its other new features – some of which are genuinely useful. Drag a mailbox or inbox folder to the new Favorites bar and it can be opened with one click, which is useful for getting at a deeply nested subfolder, for example. The live search that displays results as the search term is typed is handy too, as is the new conversation view that displays all messages in a thread without having to expand it first.

Unfortunately, the makeovers applied to two other key Mac OS X applications in Lion are much less successful. The clean, straightforward designs of both iCal and Address Book have been ditched in favour of iPad-like applications that pointlessly resemble their real-world paper counterparts and just look silly and out of place in Mac OS.

Although any new major operating system update is bound to upset the apple cart for some existing users, the bag of improvements gets more mixed the more you dig into Lion. The availability of more logical file and folder groupings in Finder is a welcome addition, but the iOS-style pop-up text autocorrect is a visual distraction and somewhat redundant with a full-size QWERTY keyboard — expect damnyoulionautocorrect.com to appear any day now. A more useful steal from iOS is the ability to press and hold a letter key to see a pop-up list of accented alternatives, but the trade-off is that now the only way to type “oooooooooo” is to press the O key 10 times in rapid succession.

Apple’s removal of Front Row will irk anyone who uses a Mac Mini with an HDTV, or an iMac for work and pleasure, so you’ll have to get hold of an Apple TV for that. Rosetta, which provided support for Mac OS X PowerPC applications, has gone too, but it’s perhaps unrealistic to expect Apple to continue support for software designed to run on hardware it last made five years ago. More painful are the changes made to the SMB and AFP network protocols that cause problems for certain shared network resources, particularly NAS devices used for Time Machine backups. If you’re heavily reliant on such features, it’s best to check with the appropriate manufacturer about Lion support before upgrading.

You won’t have to worry about performance with the upgrade – when run on a brand-new 2.5GHz Core i5 iMac running Snow Leopard and then Lion, our benchmarks showed a small improvement in video encoding and multitasking, leading to slightly better overall performance – see the table below for the full comparison.

So, on the whole, Lion is a success. The leaner, cleaner look is lovely and almost all the new features make using a Mac an even more pleasurable experience. The iOS influence does misfire in certain areas, but it’s entirely possible that everyone will simply adapt to them and then wonder what all the fuss was about in a few months’ time. In fact it will take at least a few months before the full Lion experience can be fully realised, since third-party developers must update their applications if they’re to exploit the new operating system features – Autosave in particular. Even now, though, Lion is a steal at £21 and certainly worth the upgrade.