OS X Lion and the Post-PC Era: Yay or No Way?, Part 2
Continuing his series on the OS X 10.7 Lion Revolution, Low End Mac’s Dan Bashur suggests that it may be advisable for many veteran Mac users to retain access to the best of both worlds by partitioning hard drive’s with separate Lion and Snow Leopard boot partitions (provided you have at least a Core 2 Duo or better machine, since 64 Bit only Lion doesn’t support Core Solo or Core Duo Macs). Also, a point to factor in if you’re planning to buy one of the forthcoming upgraded MacBook Airs or any other new Mac that ships consonant with or after Lion’s release is that Snow Leopard will not be and option for them, and you’ll be stuck without support for any Power PC based software applications or utilities – famously Intel’s Quicken, but a lot of other legacy stuff as well.
However, Dan is not a Mac OS Luddite, and allows that after having used Intel Macs for more thsn five years, it’s time for something fresh and new that can fully unleash 64-bit computing without legacy code bogging down system performance – and that will make the increasing legions of iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad owners feel right at home, especially with the imminent integration of iCloud.
Dan observes that many iOS device owners are not Mac-users, but that nevertheless something about the iOS devices has captivated them, and with iOS interface conventions like swiping to turn a page, and pinching and dragging to expand a window, and so forth having become second nature to them, creating a Mac with the same feel should make convincing them to purchase new Macs and switch to OS X easier than ever.
Hard to argue with that reasoning, but it’s still lump-in-the-throat time for many of us who’ve been with the Mac now for a decade or two, and who find the iOS way not necessarily an improvement on what we’re used to. I own and use an iPad 2, but I still much prefer the traditional Macintosh interface conventions.
Dan Bashur acknowledges that those who’ve long embraced the Mac always knew the Mac was simply better engineered, allowing allowed us to do many things more efficiently than a Windows PC, but observes that things have come full circle with iOS and OS X Lion, with the latter poiswd to be a gamep-changer, convincing tens of millions of iOS device owners who own a Mac to want one.
In that context, he thinks, post-PC era computing is not such a bad thing, since Apple obviously has a leg up on Microsoft in every way possible.
Whether we are enchanted by this dynamic or not, I think it’s the way the world is going, so it will have to be accommodated, so a somewhat muted Yay! Sort of. I think.
For the full commentary visit here:
http://lowendmac.com/ed/bashur/11db/post-pc-lion-part-2.html