WWDC 2011: OS X 10.7 Lion
by Andrew Cunningham on June 6, 2011 1:04 PM ESTApple kicked of its Worldwide Developers conference this year with a keynote meant to showcase three of its biggest software undertakings at the moment: Mac OS X, iOS, and iCloud, the latter of which being its new cloud computing service.
Apple covered their new products from oldest to newest, which means that Mac OS X 10.7 was first on the chopping block. Apple's Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi took the stage to demonstrate ten of Lion's purported 250 new features (don't get too excited - things like desktop wallpapers have been counted as new features in the past, so Apple is likely being very generous with its counting here).
I'm going to take you down that list, but because most of it is stuff we've seen before in one form or another in other Apple demos of Lion, I want to front-load the piece with pricing and release information for Lion, since those are the most interesting new facts we got out of Apple today.
Price and Release Date
First: Lion will go for $29, the same price as the current Snow Leopard upgrade, and it will release at some point in July. Pre-Snow Leopard upgrades of the OS were typically priced at $129, with a 5-license Family Pack being available for $199. Next, Lion will be made available only on the Mac App Store as a ~4GB download - there is, as of this writing, no plan on Apple's part to release Lion on a physical disc that you can buy. That $29 App Store purchase is good for all Macs you have registered to your App Store account.
There are, of course, positive aspects and negative aspects to this approach, and there's other stuff that we just don't know: how will this impact businesses and schools who would like to volume-license the OS? How will clean installs be handled, in the case of a crashed hard drive or otherwise trashed OS? What about people with slow or unreliable Internet connections? We'll just have to wait and see.
System Requirements and OS X Server
The first one: System Requirements. This is one of the many areas in which Microsoft and Apple differ in their OS strategy - while Microsoft makes certain recommendations about the type of PC that will give you a good Windows experience, there are very few configurations that will actually prevent the operating system from installing. Apple, on the other hand, prefers to drop support entirely for Macs that it feels are insufficient to run OS X. This goes all the way back to the 10.4 days, when Macs without FireWire were no longer eligible for OS X upgrades.
This time around, the OS will drop support for the 32-bit Core Solo and Core Duo chips shipped with the first Intel Macs in 2006. This is Apple's latest baby step toward a world where Macs use a 64-bit OS, 64-bit programs, and 64-bit drivers by default. They've been pushing this issue slowly but surely for most of OS X's development - indeed, recent Mac Pros and MacBook Pros are already set to use Snow Leopard's 64-bit kernel right out of the box, though most models still default to the 32-bit kernel.
Some have had success hacking the developer releases to run on these processors, but since these computers can only support up to 2GB of RAM, since they were only sold for a few months before being superceded by Core 2 Duo Macs, and since there are already 64-bit only apps in the App Store that won’t install on these older Macs under Snow Leopard, the decision to drop official support for these models is probably a prudent one that shouldn’t impact a huge portion of the OS X userbase (though expect those who it does impact to be very vocal about it).
Lastly, a brief word about Mac OS X Server: Back in the day, Apple's server OS either came preinstalled on the (now discontinued) XServe, or as a separate $999 unlimited-client package installable on any desktop Mac. Then came the $999 Mac Mini Server, which axed the Mini's optical drive in favor of a second internal hard drive - this drove the unlimited-client server software's price down to its current level of $499. In Lion, OS X Server is now an App Store download instead of a separate OS, and it costs $49.99. This is a substantial discount on what was already a substantial discount, and it should help to drive adoption of OS X server by small businesses and schools with a lot of Macs.
Now, on to Lion's new features!
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aldiswilson - Saturday, June 25, 2011 - link
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stm1185 - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
WOW THAT IS SOME INNOVATION! How does Steve Jobs keep coming up with these ideas? Icons on a grid, OMG! How did he possibly come up with that idea. Pure Genius.MySchizoBuddy - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
Steve never claimed it to be pure genius he said they are bringing iOS stuff on to the OSX Lion and how it will work. go troll somewhere else.stm1185 - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
It's not iOS stuff, its just big icons. They got rid of the menu bar at the top and increased icon size and act like its some great new feature. What is the difference between launch pad and making the regular OSX icons bigger?Leonick - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
Well first of the icons aren't any larger than they are in the app stack showed in grid view. There is however a whole lot more space.It also have pages instead of scrolling as well as what i presume most people would say are more beautiful folders.
True, it is basically the app stack improved, but that's hardly lame...
realmike15 - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
To be fair stm1185 has a point, marketing this tile of apps is so $&#*ing silly it's almost laughable how much some fan boys eat this up as innovative.Here's the way Leopard handles Apps right now.
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/6457/screenshot2011...
I see no improvement by the new design. It's all marketing, that's it.
Leonick - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
yea, doesn't fill up the screen so i isn't using the space as efficiently.The stack icons are even bigger in that image...
It just looks better overall, add to that the multi-touch gestures for it, don't know how you can't see it being an improvement...
michael.ka - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
You are guessing wrong that Launchpad will only show apps you purchased in the App Store. In the current developer preview every app on your Mac no matter its source is shown in Launchpad. I have no reason to believe that Apple will change that – why should they?Zandros - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
… will cost $49.99. At least I saw that somewhere on Apple's site, but I cannot find it again.