Friday, December 21, 2012; 12:31:57 PM Eastern
My 3-minute review of Lion
- I got my new iMac on Monday, and immediately switched out the old one after doing the hot-copy upgrade, which is fantastic. Probably the nicest thing that Apple does. Of course it makes it easier for you to give them money too, but wtf.
- Okay, first the good stuff:
- It is really fast. This is important because I like to run a lot of bloatware, concurrently. More speed is goodness. It means I can keep more balls in the air.
- It's more beautiful. The screen is brighter, clearer, just qualitatively superior to the previous iMac.
- Now the glitches:
- They keep moving parts that shouldn't move.
- They keep changing the plugs in the back. So old devices stop working because there's no more Firewire on the thing, for example.
- The keyboard has the Control key in a different place. This meant that for the first few days I can't type quickly, everything has to slow. down. so. I. can. be. sure. my. fingers. are properly. positioned. over. the. right. keys. Try typing with a period after every word and you'll get a good idea what the re-learning experience is like. And what will it be like when I go back to the MacBook Air, which I still use when traveling? I'll let you know.
- A few pieces of software I depend on required upgrades to run on the new OS. One of them wasn't free, VMWare, which charged $45 for the upgrade. Not sure if I get any features I need for this, but it does work on the new OS.
- And the travesty:
They fucking changed the way fucking scrollbars work. That would be a glitch. But the travesty is that there are things you can't do on the new scrollbars that you can do on the old ones. - I am a serious professional computer user. This would be like Fender moving around the frets on a Telecaster. Or the knob that adjusts the pitch of one of the strings. Maybe I can adjust by composing my song in a different key, but tell me, what the fuck were you thinking when you did this, Apple??
- I'll forget eventually what bullshit this was. That's why I have to write this review now, to vent the sputum they added to what otherwise would have been a mostly-lovely experience, for which, btw, I paid $2500.