Apple Releases Lion Into the Wild, updates Mac hardware

Today, Apple released the latest Mac operating system, Mac OS X Lion (10.7) via the Mac App Store which is the first time that Apple has released an OS which is only available on a digital download format.

Mac OS X Lion makes the Mac OS feel a bit more like iOS with the same scroll bars, multi-touch gestures, a very iPad-like way of scrolling though and opening applications and new ways of saving and restarting applications.

When I downloaded Lion at about 12:00pm eastern time, the download took about 20 minutes to complete (about 3GB total) and about 30 minutes to install. Thankfully, everything went by smoothly.

Users will find a change in the UI right away, with less glossy progress bars and a new slick log-in screen, with a new animation. There is also a new “spring” animation when launching new applications and whenever a dialogue box pops up. The “lights” on top of each window are now smaller and less shiny.

Problems: I’ve only been using Lion for a few hours and while the problems I ran into haven’t been huge, they are still worth mentioning. Finder looks quite different now and in my opinion a bit cluttered. You can now also no longer see your hard drive capacity on the bottom of the Finder window. The Finder also lost a bit of color since all the icons are now grey, similar to the latest version of iTunes. Mail looks quite a bit different but familiar if you use an iPad. This new Mail will take a bit of getting used to on the Mac. Full screen apps work perfectly, for native apps. There is a “full screen” button for Chrome which goes into full screen fine but you cannot get back to normal size until you quit Chrome. I’m assuming this will be fixed when Google updates the browser.

By default, the indicator lights under open applications on the dock are turned off and scrolling is similar to iOS where you push the content, not the scroll bars, in the direction of the scroll. I changed both of these settings back to the way they are in Snow Leopard.

Lion is a decent upgrade and for $30, it’s pretty cheap. As long as you are running Snow Leopard, you should be fine to upgrade.

Other Updates: Apple killed the white plastic MacBook. Now, the entry-level Mac is the MacBook Air at $999. Speaking of the MacBook Air, it was also updated with Sandy Bridge processors, a backlit keyboard and a Thunderbolt port. The Mac Mini also received a Thunderbolt port and Sandy Bridge processors but lost it’s optical drive. Just like the MacBook Air, the only way to get software on these machines is digital download. The Mac Mini starts at $599. The Cinema Displays got a name change to Thunderbolt Display. The 27 inch display has a 2560 x 1440 resolution, an LED backlit display and a FaceTime HD camera. These new displays will cost you $999.