Have you gotten this? Is it worth it?
If you haven’t yet (it was only released today), are you planning on getting it in the near future?
I’m trying to figure out whether to spend $30 on it or not. I’m running Snow Leopard and I like it just fine, but frankly I really didn’t even notice any real difference from Leopard after upgrading. I’m curious just how different and/or better Lion is by comparison and all I can really find online is Apple’s own advertising or obvious shill glowing reviews.
I just came in here to see if there were any threads. I’m about ready to pull the trigger, but I need to do my homework to make sure it won’t break any of the software I rely on.
Also, I’m usually pretty amped when a significant Mac OS comes out, and most of the features look good, but there’s something giving me a bit of pause on this one. (Despite the cheap price tag)
I’m downloading it now. Will report back later. Much later. The download is…not fast. 
I find that it does change the way you work with the OS a lot more than other releases. I happen to like it better but if you’re set in your ways it could be pretty disruptive. I’ve been using the development seeds for months, for what it’s worth, and I miss Lion when I switch to Snow Leopard.
I just installed and have been playing with it for about 30 minutes. First impressions:
The reverse “natural” scrolling lasted about two seconds before I turned it off.
Scrolling is very iPad inspired. The rubber band effect is everywhere.
It actually feels faster than Snow Leopard! Things seem to have a lot more “snap” to them. This is even while Spotlight is re-indexing everything in the background.
Safari is now smokin’ fast.
Spell check is much improved. I like the suggestions box.
iCal and Address Book look like ass.
I’m not sold on this Mission Control thing. It isn’t as bad as I expected, but I’m not sure it is an improvement over Expose.
Auto-save in Pages seems nice so far. Very hands off. Nice.
Everything looks nicer. Very clean, not distracting.
All in all I’d say it is worth $30. The speed improvements alone justify the price. If you do any serious work with your Mac, I’d probably hold off until the next point release until they can get the kinks ironed out though.
It looks like there’s no problems with any of the apps I use (adobe suite, cinema 4d, final cut, et al), so I pulled the trigger… a very slooow trigger as I’m sure 50% of the entire Mac user base is downloading it at the same time.
MsWhatsit, get off my party line! 
I’ll report back on my impressions… I’m typically a first adopter, and love new features like Yoda loves to talk backwards. (although, Spaces and Exposé I never really took advantage of… at least not to the potential it seemed to promise. I hope Mission Control will cure that… it certainly looks more straight forward and much more thought out/integrated.) But I can’t live without Quicklook. When I had to work on a Windows maching a few months ago, that was the most annoying drawback… just something so simple, yet integral to the way I peruse my docs and images, from day one of using Leopard. I hope some features will be true in this update.
Be back on a Lion…
From what I read, they reversed the scroll direction. You may want to fix that in your settings.
How do they handle the $30 upgrades, anyways? I mean, what do you have to do to get them?
The only way to purchase and instal OSX Lion is by using the meta-App App store. Taking a page from their mobile iOS, they’re trying out this new model. No DVDs or anything else. It’s either preinstalled on a new machine, or you download it, and install it in one fell sweep.
OOP! It just finished downloading… so long, Snow Leopard…
Well… I downloaded it and burned a DVD. But I’m still not quite ready to spend hours faffing about installing the thing, so I’ll wait until the reports roll in.
I’m looking forward to it, though. Went to Best Buy and bought Magic Trackpad to enhance my “Lion Experience” once I gather the courage to do the installation.
Yeah, I got it this morning. Just installed it on my secondary computer (my laptop) so I could dick around with it without worrying about incompatibility issues. So far, my impressions are exactly like ImNotPaulAvery’s. First thing I did was turn off the “reverse” scroll. I like the three finger gestures for triggering Launch Pad and your Spaces. The full screen modes are really cool, except that getting out of full screen mode in Chrome took some Googling. You have to hit command+shift+F (there’s so return from full screen icon in the top bar when you use Chrome in full screen mode.)
Lots of extra eye candy I really don’t care about. Calendar is a little too precious looking for my tastes. Mail is taking me a little bit to get used to. The new icons have got me all confused, and I’m not sure whether I prefer the new mail layout to the old one, but I have a feeling this may be just a case of familiarity. The conversations/threaded approach to organizing your emails is working out pretty well for me.
That’s all I really played with so far. I’m not sure whether Launchpad is going to be useful for me. So far, I don’t see the point. A couple old programs no longer work (my Microsoft Office suite from 2004 is no longer functional, as they were Power PC applications.) I haven’t had a chance to check out whether my print drivers still work (this was an issue when I upgraded to Snow Leopard–Epson did not update their drivers for several weeks after the release, so it was good I still had a machine with regular Leopard installed on it.)
We’ll see. There’s still a lot to explore, but so far I haven’t noticed any issues. It runs snappily on my computer (a 2.53 MHz MBP Core 2 Duo with 4 GB RAM and 250GB of disk space).
minor7flat5: “hours faffing about installing the thing?” Start the download and for get about it, until it asks you click the mouse TWICE (i think), then wait an hour. It does the rest. It was painless.
I LIKE the reverse scrolling. I have caught myself doing naturally a few times, and doing it backwards a few times, but overall, I think it will be good. John Gruber suggests that you all give it a week. I certainly will. In fact, I forgot up until now, that when I first used my magic mouse, I was scrolling in reverse like I would on an iPhone, and it took me some time to get over that. I think with the apple touch products, the reverse scrolling is more natural.
Expose was my favorite feature in OSX when I switched from windows. I tried to like spaces but it always confused me with how it didn’t play nice with expose. Mission control puts them together nicely, and I like it.
Launchpad is pretty nice as well, though i’m used to how it works, because you could mimic its behavior with a stack of the applications folder in the Dock. Now that feature is a “squeeze” away on my track pad.
If you want a thourough review, try John Siracusa’a on Arstechnica. get comfortable, its 19 pages.
My biggest performance problem is I get the spinning beachball all the time in Safari, and sometimes when switching between applications. I think this is due to me keeping lots of Safari tabs open and it using too much RAM. Would Lion improve this? I think I’ve maxed out my RAM at 4 GB.
Do be aware that Rosetta (the PowerPC emulation environment) is not present in Lion, and can’t be installed as an option (like it was in Snow Leopard). PowerPC software is just plain dead here, there’s no way to make it work. This really applies only if you’ve got fairly old apps, but I was surprised by a couple of things I didn’t realize were PPC.
I’ve been using it for a couple months or so now (developer), and I generally like it. You get used to the scrolling direction in a day or two. Mostly I like the much-better-integrated fullscreen, expose’ and “spaces” (now Mission Control). I just run most stuff in fullscreen and “flick” (ok, mouse-wheel-tilt) between apps and desktops.
Launchpad is useless for devs, gamers, and anybody with lots of apps: mine runs for like a dozen pages, including a page and a half of “World of Warcraft updaters”–it basically finds anything that looks like an app, even sub launched utilities and the like. Cleaning it up is too much effort to even think about; it would be hundreds of clicks, just like on an iPad. I assume someone will come up with a utility for it soon.
I’m torn on the new Mail. I like the layout and the features, but it seems even slower than the already stagnant previous version.
I think it is horrible. It has taken the elegant, simple Exposé and over complicated it. I still can’t work out how (if you can) switch between apps using the keyboard when Mission Control is activated. With Exposé you used the arrow keys, but that doesn’t work now.
I’m hating the over-reliance on gestures. I am a mouse and keyboard guy. My iMac doesn’t have one of those magic pad things and on my MacBook Pro I try to use the trackpad as little as possible.
I didn’t realize that PPC was dead, so I’ll now have to go looking for a new version of Office (I was running 2004.) Lost a couple other things I kinda liked, but nothing big. (A calendar right in the menu bar, NetHack, those sorts of things.) I turned off reverse scrolling right away. My MacBook is too old to support multitouch, so all those “features” are useless. Don’t mind the change in Spaces, as I hadn’t used it regularly in three years. Got rid of Launchpad and Mission Control from the Dock, and I also haven’t regularly used Dashboard in years. (I’ve got some handy little programs there, but nothing I need very often.) It is faster though, and I think I found something I am happy to pay $30 for. You can finally use more than one corner to resize a window. It only took them what, 27 years?
I’m sure the Lion install will be swift. I am more concerned with “Oh no… my laser printer now doesn’t print two sides. My sheet scanner doesn’t seem to be working.” and so on.
And I really do like to do a clean install, so the process of figuring out every little thing that I have done on the machine since Snow Leopard is a bit daunting.
I had to go to bed before it finished downloading, so I finished installation this morning.
So far I’m quite pleased. It took me about five minutes to get used to the reverse scrolling, but I’m a pretty heavy iPhone user, so I’m sure that helped. I really like some of the new gestures. For example, three-finger double-click to see the dictionary entry for a word is pretty cool, and something I will likely use quite a bit.
Safari seems to be running more quickly. I like the new Mail layout. (It seems more Outlook-like to me, so maybe that’s why; I was an Outlook Express user for years before switching to my Mac.)
And full-screen apps are pretty cool.
I’m a fairly low-level user, though, for what that’s worth. 
The last time I upgraded (to Snow Leopard on a 1st gen Intel Macbook), it was a terrible experience. General system responsiveness and stability was worse. The version of Parallels I had no longer ran, and when I upgraded to the newest version of Parallels, it ran so slowly that the windows programs I kept it around for were unusable.
Now, part of that is my fault (I should have researched whether my installed applications would still be supported), and part of it is Parallels’s fault (how, if version 3 runs well on my hardware, did they manage to make things so much worse by version 6?!). But I’ve become wary of upgrades.
I’m still reading the review, and I might upgrade if there’s something that sounds really awesome, but so far I’m not planning to.
I just installed it.
I really like the iPadification of the whole thing. I’m certain this will polarize users.
I love the magic tablet, and it seems quite intuitive to flip back and forth between viewed pages using a two-finger swipe, and three fingers to switch spaces.
Quickview has improved as well. You get a much nicer PDF viewer when you hit <space> with a PDF selected.
I think Launcher will be my go-to application launcher. This has always been the weak part of OS X: they simply toss everything in Applications, and assume a new user knows to look there. I like being able to group them and such in a proper “launch” area.
Nothing serious has broken yet. My Wifi was hooked up to the wrong router on reboot, causing some weirdness. Parallels didn’t work right until I removed all Spaces but the main desktop and relaunched.
It was totally worth thirty bucks. And I haven’t yet seen the cool stuff like file versioning.
(Some day I’ll go through the full painful process of backing everything up elsewhere and doing a clean install, since my machine is getting full of cruft)