The much anticipated release of Mac OS 10.7, aka Lion is today. Many Mac users being the early adopters they are, the App Store will probably get clogged as they rush to download it for the unbelievable price of $29.99.
But I’m advising my clients to wait at least a couple of weeks. Why? Those that use Macs, and hire me, run businesses. And you don’t don’t want your business to grind to a halt because you have an issue with your printer or some mission critical application. Let everyone else find the bugs. Not matter how long the beta cycle, releasing a new OS to the general public shakes out new issues. And at least one of your applications or drivers probably isn’t compatibile. And if you run any applications that depend on Rosetta, like Quicken for Mac 2007 or earlier, you definitely have an issue. (A quick way to check is to go to About this Mac…More Info…and then click on Applications towards the bottom of the pane on the left. Look at the column marked “Kind”. See any marked PowerPC? Ooops – hope you don’t need that app.)
Also I have clients that still use QuickBooks for Mac 2010, which Intuit has announced they won’t support on Lion. A new OS is cool, but not as cool as being able to send Invoices out to your customers.
At a minimum, check here for a list of possible issues before upgrading. Back up your computer with Time Machine, so that you can roll back easily if it doesn’t go well. And expect to have issues.
Am I taking my own advice? Not really. 🙂 I’m going to download it sometime this week, but run it on a separate partition for the time being. I don’t have time to spend two days updating applications and drivers and fiddling with settings, which is always my experience with OS upgrades. But it is pretty cool looking…