Upgrading to OS Lion?

[buffcoat]

Who's gonna?  Who's not gonna?  Why?

[SJK]

I did. 2008 macbook. Running a bit slower then I'd like. Hopefully that will improve. Some applications are no longer supported, not ones that I need. Makes me wonder if laptops will be phased out at some point. Still discovering pros and cons.

[yesno]

Yes, and it's faster for me. Good trackpad gestures and such. Read John Siracusa's 27,000 word review on Ars Technica for more details.

[masterofsparks]

Haven't upgraded yet but will soon. So much of it seems geared towards people with trackpads, so I'm hoping the fact that I don't have one doesn't matter.

Next question: Should I get one? I don't like using the trackpad on a laptop so I figured this would be the same, only bigger. Am I missing something?

[yesno]

I think you can do some of the fancy gestures with a Magic Mouse, and of course you don't *need* to use the gestures.  But Mission Control, gesture to reveal desktop, swiping between virtual desktops/full-screen apps, etc, is all very nice.  Lion also has a number of under-the-hood improvements (like security, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/21/mac_os_x_lion_security/).

I say this, because I've been running the developer betas at work for a while.  Some of the animations that happen when you drag-and-drop things bug me, and iCal and Address Book are too skeuomorphic for my taste.

You don't need to upgrade until software you want to use starts requiring that you do, of course.

I've recently upgraded my home computer from an older iMac to two computers, a new Macbook Air (got yesterday) to actually do work on, and a giant, ridiculously powerful PC running Windows 7 (to store media, back things up, play violent games, etc).  I like this setup a lot.

[yesno]

Oh, and backwards/"natural" scrolling will freak you out, but I think it does make sense and you get used to it pretty quickly.  People already scroll "naturally" to go left or right (i.e. you swipe/tilt scroll wheel/etc in the direction you want the content to move) so the convention that when scrolling up or down you're moving some sort of viewfinder that sits on top of the document, rather than the document itself, is not even consistently applied. 

If this doesn't make any sense, it will once you try to scroll on Lion with the default settings. 

[moonshake]

After watching this review, I definitely want to upgrade.

Mac OS X Lion review with Shanji

[buffcoat]

After watching this review, I definitely want to upgrade.

Mac OS X Lion review with Shanji

"This is a very nice goat."