OS X 10.7 Lion Not For Everybody
Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer suggests that not everyone should be planning to make the jump quickly to upgrade their Mac to Apple’s OS X 10.7 Lion when it’s released next month, noting that Lion’s suitability will be circumscribed by an array of requirements, prerequisites and limitations that will lock out some users entirely and discourage others.
Among those who should hesitate about, or pass altogether on, the Lion upgrade would be folks who’ll be using slow summer Internet connections for the next few months or still stuck with only dial-up availability at home (a larger constituency than Apple seems to imagine or acknowledge), since Apple will apparently only distribute Lion exclusively through the Mac App Store, at least initially — a 4 GB download that will take hours on a low-end DSL connection and theoretically days on dial-up provided you could sustain a dialup connection for long enough or survive the likely interrupted downloads without data corruption. To calculate the time it’ll take to download Lion, enter “4GB” and your connection speed into this online tool:
http://adamsworld.name/copy_calc.php
Lion will also require at least a dual-core or quad-core Intel processor, minimum being the Core 2 Duo, on up through Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 and Xeon. Lion is dropping support for PowerPC architecture, so if you’re still on a PPC Mac, it’s a no go from the get-go, but you’re also out of luck if you’re running one of the earliest Core Solo and 32-bit Core Duo Intel-based Macs (including Mac minis sold as recently as August, 2007), since Lion is 64-bit.
And even if you have a Core 2 Duo or later Mac, if you’re one of the hordes of users who still depend on Rosetta emulation in OS X to run old PowerPC apps, you’ll want to eschew Lion as well, since Apple is dumping Rosetta support with the latest Mac OS.
In the latter instance, a workaround would be to create two boot volume partitions on your hard drive or SSD — one with Lion installed and the other booting from Snow Leopard for continued access to your PowerPC programs, although that’s not really a practical way to go if you need said PPC programs in your production flow.
Yet another possibility if the critical app. is available in a Windows version, would be to install parallel-bootable virtualization software like Parallels Desktop and a copy of Windows 7, plus the Windows app substitute.
You’re also going to need a minimum 2GB of RAM to run Lion, twice Snow Leopard’s minimum memory requirement spec., although I personally consider 4 GB to be the practical minimum to run even Snow Leopard if you’re doing serious production work or other demanding tasks on your Mac. Ergo, note well that some fairly recent Macs (eg: mid-2008 MacBooks and iMacs) shipped with only 1GB of memory, so you may need a RAM upgrade to run Lion. Unhappily, the largest proportion of second-generation MacBook Airs have shipped with 2 GB of non-upgradable RAM, so while they support Lion’s minimum memory requirement, they’re already marginalized. It will be interesting to see if Apple bumps the Airs’ standard RAM spec. to a more reasonable 4 GB in an update refresh anticipated for release around the same time as Lion. (Even better would be a switch to upgradable memory, but that’s not a very lively hope).
You’ll also need to have Snow Leopard installed in order to upgrade to Lion, so if you’re still running Leopard, plan on first upgrading to Snow Leopard ($29) before you move on to install Lion (for $30).