89
Criteria
Comments
Rating
- Ease of use Typical Mac.
- Speed I get tons of clunkiness, no improvement from Snow Leopard. Applications take a long time to truly close, and I get the Beach Ball of Death a lot.
- Configurability It's a Mac. Heaven forbid would Apple let you customize it. All Macs look pretty much the same.
- Ecosystem (apps, drivers, etc.) The App Store is quite thorough; not all apps are there but it's still a nice hub. Driver support is also impressive as always.
- Openness Openness from Apple? That's a good one.
Detailed review
I've been an unhappy Mac user for quite some time; I've been experiencing a lot of clunkiness from the Mac. When upgrading to Lion, I hoped that Apple would blow my mind and give me a nice fresh, new experience that would make me want to use a Mac again.
But they failed. I looked through the feature list, and I don't see much to be impressed by. I really feel like Apple is opening the doors for Linux to take over the desktop. I'll go through some of the features that Apple has been touting, and explain my opinion.
Multitouch - I think it 's great that Apple is integrating multi-touch into the experience. It's not very applicable to me, being a mouse user, but it's nothing to complain about.
Fullscreen Apps - Apps that could make use of fullscreen functionality already had it built in. I don't really understand how this is an OS feature.
Mission Control - When I heard about Mission Control, I thought it would be a cool feature-- but it's not. My expose workspaces should already be present; I don't want to make them on the fly. GNOME 3 does this a lot better by automatically creating more empty workspaces as new ones are added. Having to do this manually seems like a pain in the ass. The Expose functionality isn't anything new, and I've never found much use for it.
The Dashboard is not combined into Expose. It's actually just another button... seems more like an inconvenience. Of course, you can always get there by simply pressing the Dashboard button, so it's not so bad.
App Store - It's a nice hub to get apps from, not everything is there, though. Luckily it's not as locked down as their mobile platform so I can always download things straight from the tubez. Xcode 4 is now free, but I think that the $15 iLife apps really is just a way for Apple to nickel and dime you. I should get those apps for free.
Launchpad - This feature is a joke. In Snow Leopard I had a folder/stack (whatever you want to call it) on my Dock that would nicely show me all my applications. Launchpad takes up the full screen, which I don't want, and forces me to navigate through them like I'm on an iPad-- which I'm not on either. The scrollable Applications stack is much easier to use. There is also spotlight search, which is probably the dominant way to load apps.
Auto-save and Versioning - I am sort of confused if this is a new feature. Autosaving has been done for me in gedit, textedit, LibreOffice, Google Docs, and MS Office. The fact that iWork didn't have this feature before proves that it isn't really a viable word processing tool. Versioning is already available in Time Machine so I don't think that is a new feature either.
Mail.app - Uhhh, cool. I'll stick with Gmail.
But they failed. I looked through the feature list, and I don't see much to be impressed by. I really feel like Apple is opening the doors for Linux to take over the desktop. I'll go through some of the features that Apple has been touting, and explain my opinion.
Multitouch - I think it 's great that Apple is integrating multi-touch into the experience. It's not very applicable to me, being a mouse user, but it's nothing to complain about.
Fullscreen Apps - Apps that could make use of fullscreen functionality already had it built in. I don't really understand how this is an OS feature.
Mission Control - When I heard about Mission Control, I thought it would be a cool feature-- but it's not. My expose workspaces should already be present; I don't want to make them on the fly. GNOME 3 does this a lot better by automatically creating more empty workspaces as new ones are added. Having to do this manually seems like a pain in the ass. The Expose functionality isn't anything new, and I've never found much use for it.
The Dashboard is not combined into Expose. It's actually just another button... seems more like an inconvenience. Of course, you can always get there by simply pressing the Dashboard button, so it's not so bad.
App Store - It's a nice hub to get apps from, not everything is there, though. Luckily it's not as locked down as their mobile platform so I can always download things straight from the tubez. Xcode 4 is now free, but I think that the $15 iLife apps really is just a way for Apple to nickel and dime you. I should get those apps for free.
Launchpad - This feature is a joke. In Snow Leopard I had a folder/stack (whatever you want to call it) on my Dock that would nicely show me all my applications. Launchpad takes up the full screen, which I don't want, and forces me to navigate through them like I'm on an iPad-- which I'm not on either. The scrollable Applications stack is much easier to use. There is also spotlight search, which is probably the dominant way to load apps.
Auto-save and Versioning - I am sort of confused if this is a new feature. Autosaving has been done for me in gedit, textedit, LibreOffice, Google Docs, and MS Office. The fact that iWork didn't have this feature before proves that it isn't really a viable word processing tool. Versioning is already available in Time Machine so I don't think that is a new feature either.
Mail.app - Uhhh, cool. I'll stick with Gmail.
good review!
3 people find this review helpful
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