The upgrade process was quick and absolutely painless, no issues whatsoever – except that I wanted to do a clean install and didn’t realize I was doing an upgrade. Once I realized my mistake, going back and doing a clean install was also painless, although not exactly intuitive for a new Mac user.

I purchased the OS through the Mac App Store (as is the new method prescribed by Apple), but once it downloaded I extracted the package contents to pull out the hidden .dmg file which I burned to a DVD – hello OS X Lion install media (good for clean installs, upgrades, and repairs). Cnet has instructions to create the DVD here; I highly recommend it as it will save you from re-downloading the Lion upgrade if you ever need to do a system restore (the installer deletes the 4GB upgrade file once it has finished upgrading your machine).

Things I like about Lion – well, pretty much everything; it’s a polished version of Snow Leopard. The hiding scroll bars are great, the new button shapes, progress bar colors / animations, it all looks very clean. The new login and lock screens are fantastic; really puts an extra level of “Apple” on the OS. When I unlock my computer I no longer forget that I’m using OS X vs. Ubuntu Linux. I also really like mission control, I never really used dashboard (or whatever it was called) before, but I can really see myself using mission control. It organizes your windows in a really intuitive way and multiple desktops is always a nice-to-have.

Things I don’t like about Lion (Steve, I hope you’re listening) – multi-touch gestures that are different from the gestures in Snow Leopard. I have become so accustom to swiping two fingers left / right in my browser to go back and forward as well as three fingers up / down to jump to the top and bottom of a page and you have taken that away from me! Swiping two fingers left and right (in any app) now takes me across my multiple desktops… if I’m on my desktop that makes sense, but not in my web browser! Three fingers up will now take you to mission control – I’m all about the multi-touch, but keep it consistent!

The “natural” scrolling feature doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. They have essentially flipped the scrolling (using multi-touch) so that it is upside down – flicking your fingers up scrolls the page down and vice versa. I get it, trying to make this more like iOS. On a touch screen it makes sense to scroll that way, but it really doesn’t translate to a computer. Luckly you can turn this “feature” off.

The final nit I have to pick is that my external drive still drops from the system if it has been inactive for more than 5 seconds. I suspect this is due to the fact that I have a Western Digital Green drive in the enclosure, but Apple should figure out a way to gracefully detach these drives; I mean, comon… they use the same “server grade” drives in their new Time Capsules!

All in all I really, really like Lion. Is it worth the $29.99? Yes, without a doubt. Is it perfect? No, nothing ever is… but this is pretty darn close.

What are you waiting for? Go upgrade today!

I’m sitting here using a new 2.13GHz MacBook Air which I currently have on loan from a client. I have never actually had an OS X computer to myself before; I have had friends with them, but I’ve never been able to configure one to my liking and really play around with it. I’m starting to buy into the hype!

The ease of use is fantastic and the OS looks great. Don’t even get me started on the physical machine itself, the craftsmanship is superb and the screen is breathtaking! If it were not for the astronomical price ($1,899 for this build) I’d have one already.

I am in the market for a new home computer, perhaps I’ll try my hand with an Apple product… although, I do have some other big ticket purchase plans coming up in the future. Time will tell.