Snow Leopard VS. Lion

[Ctrl-Opt-Del]

Do you remember how long it took to get up and running with a new Windows PC with a new OS?

Honestly, an afternoon at most, usually more like thirty minutes to an hour... And I'm including my first PC running Windows 95... Still, everyone's different I guess...

 

[Hondaminican]

I wish I had stayed with Snow Leopard.. If its not one thing then its another..

First it was the wi-fi, it never wanted to be connected! Every time i wanted to browse the net I had to delete & create a new wifi connection at least 5 times before I could get it to work. & even when it did work it never wanted to be connected to the wifi of my house, it always used my neighbors connection as a default. Which would be fine if I knew their password. I even purchased a new router & when that didn't work I threw my mac in the closet & pulled out my windows laptop.

Next, after I started missing my mac & started using it again the **** thing must have thought it was summer because all it wanted to do was beach ball the whole day! open finder, beach ball. search, beach ball. quit safari, another beach ball. Eventually an update came along that fixed this.

Then Safari decided to have a go at giving me a head ache. Sometimes the "x" to close tabs disappears & other times it just can't decide on whether it wants to load the page or not.

I could keep on going but truth is, I'm used to all this & its still hands down better then my windows machines. Oh & the iPhone like display of apps is pretty cool, all i have to do is move the mouse to the corner of the screen & all my apps appear.

 

[Ctrl-Opt-Del]

its still hands down better then my windows machines

Well, forgive me for asking; but how, given how you've slated it down to the ground?

 

[Germany_chris]

I wish I had stayed with Snow Leopard.. If its not one thing then its another..

First it was the wi-fi, it never wanted to be connected! Every time i wanted to browse the net I had to delete & create a new wifi connection at least 5 times before I could get it to work. & even when it did work it never wanted to be connected to the wifi of my house, it always used my neighbors connection as a default. Which would be fine if I knew their password. I even purchased a new router & when that didn't work I threw my mac in the closet & pulled out my windows laptop.

Next, after I started missing my mac & started using it again the **** thing must have thought it was summer because all it wanted to do was beach ball the whole day! open finder, beach ball. search, beach ball. quit safari, another beach ball. Eventually an update came along that fixed this.

Then Safari decided to have a go at giving me a head ache. Sometimes the "x" to close tabs disappears & other times it just can't decide on whether it wants to load the page or not.

I could keep on going but truth is, I'm used to all this & its still hands down better then my windows machines. Oh & the iPhone like display of apps is pretty cool, all i have to do is move the mouse to the corner of the screen & all my apps appear.

Go Back, thats what I did.

 

[[email protected]]

Lion v. Snowleopard

Having used Lion and Snow Leopard side by side since a few weeks after Lion released, I can honestly say Lion is a step down from Snow Leopard in terms of reliability, usability, and resource efficiency. That said, you may not notice these shortcomings depending on how you use your Mac. I'll summarize the basic reasons for my assertions here for the sake of clarity:

Reliability
Every application that comes with Snow Leopard is stable and relatively bug-free. Lion, on the other hand, continues to plague a number of users with wireless connectivity issues and has the buggiest version of iCal that has ever been released. I have not personally experienced the wireless connectivity issue, but all the Macs at the office running Lion had to have BusyCal installed to be able to connect to our CalDAV server calendar, whereas the ones running Snow Leopard had no issue connecting via iCal.

Usability
Lion adds a lot of fluff, much of which is optional, and I am honestly fine with that - I'm not one of those blowhards that screams about Launchpad daring to exist even when I don't have to use it (and in fact I kind of like it). Mission Control, which replaces Exposé and Spaces, however, is an unmitigated disaster.

Have several windows open in a few applications and want to see them all at once (say, Photoshop and InDesign)? Sorry, you can't do that in Lion because Mission Control chooses to immediately obscure any window with other windows from the same application with its window-grouping mess. Apple even tried to soften the blow here by allowing you to use the four-finger-spread gesture to slightly spread out the windows - guess what, it still leaves parts of the windows obscured.

Want to drag that window from one space to another? Whereas you used to be able to very intuitively just click and drag while in Spaces view, now you have to first switch to the space where the window resides and then drag it to its destination.

Want to fullscreen a movie to your external monitor while you work on something light on your laptop display? Nope, Lion took that away because with Apple's fabulous new fullscreen implementation, all monitors you might be working on aside from the one with the content is grayed out.

Mission Control is a horrible implementation of what I'm sure were well-intentioned ideas that ends up being objectively less functional than what it replaced - as far as I can recall, this is the first OS X release to actually take away features. If Steve Jobs were alive, I imagine he'd give the team behind it a speech similar to the infamous one he gave the MobileMe team. Lion took a huge step backwards in multitasking workflows and window management.

Resource Efficiency
I'll be blunt here: Google any Benchmark comparison between Lion and Snow Leopard, and you'll see that Lion is either identical or a minor downgrade. This is the first version of OS X to ever achieve this. But given that benchmarks often don't reflect real-life usage, let's focus on that.

Lion takes longer to both start up and shut down than Snow Leopard, thanks to the only mildly useful (and not very graceful unless you have an SSD) feature that restores your session upon startup.

Lion uses a ridiculous amount of RAM compared to Snow Leopard - my coworker only uses her Mac mini for office tasks (spreadsheet, word processor, calendar, email) and the base 2GB of RAM wasn't enough to keep it from lagging. Let this sink in. Lion is so inefficient with RAM that many of the machines Apple is shipping it with are incapable of running it smoothly even when doing the least intensive of computer tasks. Sure, many people have more than 2GB of RAM anyway, but consider where this places your machine now. Suddenly 4GB is the amount of RAM you need for light multitasking and 8 GB is a "good" amount of RAM. Your performance is going to get shot in the foot with this upgrade unless you have 8GB or more of RAM. And all for a few shiny new features that mostly add more flash than substance or actually make the user experience worse.

The one and only thing I can see someone upgrading to Lion for is the iCloud functionality that Apple refuses to put into Snow Leopard, assuming you own iOS devices.

All in all, I strongly recommend against upgrading to Lion. Apple doesn't need any more dollars encouraging them to go in this direction with the OS. I can only hope 10.8 brings back what Lion took away.

While I am a huge fan of Apple products, I am not a fanboy. I whole heartedly agree with your post and with all due respect to chas_m and his fine switcher guide, there is no disputing your assertions.

I run Mac Labs and have evaluated each OS as they have been rolled out both from an upgrade and factory installed perspective. My high end macs required 8gig RAM updates just to function the way that had prior to Lion.

I don't appreciate the rug being pulled out from under me either by way of software updates forcing hardware updates. I now run triple boot machines in order to bridge the gaps that Apple has imposed both for hardware demands and software limitations.

 

[dtravis7]

While I am a huge fan of Apple products, I am not a fanboy. I whole heartedly agree with your post and with all due respect to chas_m and his fine switcher guide, there is no disputing your assertions.

I run Mac Labs and have evaluated each OS as they have been rolled out both from an upgrade and factory installed perspective. My high end macs required 8gig RAM updates just to function the way that had prior to Lion.

I don't appreciate the rug being pulled out from under me either by way of software updates forcing hardware updates. I now run triple boot machines in order to bridge the gaps that Apple has imposed both for hardware demands and software limitations.

Back last year I would have not said this, but after living with Lion since the release, I also agree with 95% of Disceptor's comments. 4GB runs out all the time (a lot of it due to Safari going HOG wild) and I am having to quit apps and run iMemoryCleaner to get back RAM. Some will say OSX will release it, with Lion, no it does not and the machine is DOG SLOW till I run iMemoryCleaner then it's all fast again. I never had to do that with Snow Leopard even with 2GB Ram on the same machine.

 

[chas_m]

I am not a fanboy. I whole heartedly agree with your post and with all due respect to chas_m and his fine switcher guide, there is no disputing your assertions.

Sure there is. I dispute every single one of his assertions, on the grounds that neither I nor any of the students I teach or clients I service have experienced ANY OF THEM.

I have plenty of Activity Monitor records that specifically disprove the claims of increased RAM usage between the two OSes, just for starters. Anyone who has dug into Lion's code will tell you that SL and Lion are far less different than they are the same OS.

I don't dispute that some people have had issues. I dispute the idea that everyone on Lion has these issues, because I can easily prove that this simply isn't so.

But don't take my word for it. Take a look at the sales figures. The whole story is right there.

 

[dtravis7]

It's not Lion but Safari 5.1 that does and that I can prove quite easily and on many macs. Unfortunately since I prefer Safari, it hurts me directly. You can blame flash all you want but if I go to Firefox or Chrome or Opera with the same sites running flash, the extreme memory usage is NOT there.

If I did not like Safari so much it would not make any difference to me, but I do.

 

[John F]

I have a security camera looking up my driveway, connected to a Mac Mini. Whenever there is movement in one of two "sensitive areas", a ten second movie is saved to DropBox. I can take a look at these clips where ever I am. In Snow Leopard I select the latest movie files and take a "Quick Look" to view them. Perhaps there is a way to do that with Lion, but it is certainly well hidden if there is. What was wrong with the "Quick Look" function that it had to be taken away?

John F

 

[cwa107]

I have a security camera looking up my driveway, connected to a Mac Mini. Whenever there is movement in one of two "sensitive areas", a ten second movie is saved to DropBox. I can take a look at these clips where ever I am. In Snow Leopard I select the latest movie files and take a "Quick Look" to view them. Perhaps there is a way to do that with Lion, but it is certainly well hidden if there is. What was wrong with the "Quick Look" function that it had to be taken away?

John F

It's still there. Click the file icon to select it and hit the space bar.

You can also customize your Finder toolbar to add the Quick Look button.

 

[chas_m]

It's not Lion but Safari 5.1 that does and that I can prove quite easily and on many macs

Problem is, that's not what discerptor said. What he said is demonstrably false.

If you want to have a discussion about how Safari compares in RAM usage to other browsers, that's fine. I don't see it as a showstopper issue but there's certainly something to people's claims on the subject.

 

[chas_m]

What was wrong with the "Quick Look" function that it had to be taken away?

QuickLook has in no way whatsoever changed between Snow Leopard and Lion.

 

[dtravis7]

Problem is, that's not what discerptor said. What he said is demonstrably false.

If you want to have a discussion about how Safari compares in RAM usage to other browsers, that's fine. I don't see it as a showstopper issue but there's certainly something to people's claims on the subject.

Strange thing is at the very first when i installed Lion I did not have the issue at all, after some safari updates, especially the last one, it got worse. I deal with it though as like I said, I love Safari. Liked it in 10.2.8 when I first used it!

 

[G4 ibookboy]

i have been using mac os x for the past 4-5 years started with 10.3.9 updated that to 10.4.11 stayed with that for awhile until i got a laptop that used 10.5 then got my intel 2006 iMac running 10.6 and a week ago got my mid 2007 macbook running lion. I have to say lion seems to work much faster than my iMac running snow leopard but that simply could be that my macbook is a core 2 duo instead of a core duo. lion is awesome just like any of the os x versions i have used, and 100-200% better than any windows system however win 7 isn't that awful but i wouldn't do a switch from apple ever.

 

[Kawasaki636]

Updated to lion

When I updated to lion I see the spinning beach ball all the time how do I fix the problem

 

[chas_m]

Too many variables to give you a straight answer. How much RAM do you have? How much disk free space? Have you tried reinstalling Lion?

Model of Mac, version of Lion, etc etc would really be helpful.

 

[John F]

Since my oldest but still useful MacBook will not even run Snow Leopard and I have several computers running Linux, I do the cloud stuff with DropBox which runs on all of them. It doesn't do everything that iCloud does, but they are mostly things I do not need. Meanwhile I only have Lion on an older 15" MacBook which has turned it into a pig particularly when starting. When I need fast and efficient, I run Linux in a VM.

 

[chas_m]

Since my oldest but still useful MacBook will not even run Snow Leopard

This isn't true. Unless you are calling a Powerbook a MacBook by mistake, ALL MacBooks can run Snow Leopard. Perhaps you mean "cannot run Lion" or "cannot run Mountain Lion" -- these statements could be true depending on the model you have. But all MacBooks (ie Intel-based portables) can run Snow Leopard.

Meanwhile I only have Lion on an older 15" MacBook which has turned it into a pig particularly when starting.

I'm not aware of the existence of any 15" MacBook, I suspect you mean a MacBook Pro. As for Lion running slowly, that seems unusual at least in my experience. Lion gets me to the login page FAR faster than Snow Leopard did.

In any event, you may want to check that you have sufficient RAM (more than 2GB is strongly recommended) and sufficient free disk space (more than 20GB is strongly recommended).

 

[dtravis7]

Chas is 100% correct. All Intel Macs will run Snow Leopard. Lion cut out Core Duo Macs. ML will cut out a few C2D Macs.

 

[Groovetube]

It's not Lion but Safari 5.1 that does and that I can prove quite easily and on many macs. Unfortunately since I prefer Safari, it hurts me directly. You can blame flash all you want but if I go to Firefox or Chrome or Opera with the same sites running flash, the extreme memory usage is NOT there.

If I did not like Safari so much it would not make any difference to me, but I do.

I was going to comment on this before but got sidetracked. Yeah I too have seen Safari go worse, and so have many of my web dev guys. We used to use safari exclusively for first tests and previews etc., but since I've held my nose and been using chrome these days.

I'll flip back once the safari issues and ram gobbling slows down.