Hi Mac Users,
In between telling the press that Apple has made billions of dollars and that everybody owns an iPhone, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer mentioned that Lion (Mac OS 10.7) is due to hit Apple’s App Store on 7/20/2011. I thought I would give you some insight about Apple’s new operating system and what to think about before you upgrade.
First off, to upgrade to Lion, you must meet these minimum system requirements:
- Your Mac must have an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor
- 2GB of memory or RAM
- 4GB of free hard drive space to download Lion. If you only have 4GB of hard drive space left, you need a bigger hard drive.
- Snow Leopard and the latest update (10.6.8)
To find out if you meet these requirements, you can click on your Apple menu and choose “About This Mac”
The major change with this upgrade is how you get it and install it. Lion is going to be available through the App Store for $29.99. This means that you will download it and install it, no physical media (DVD) is provided. This is why one of the requirements is to have Snow Leopard. The App Store was introduced in the 10.6.6 update. Since it is purchased through the App Store, you will be able to install it on all the Macs you own and use the same Apple ID on. The Lion installer is 4GB in size, so hopefully tomorrow won’t bring down the Internet.
Here are some things to remember before you upgrade:
1. This is a major upgrade to the operating system, make sure you backup your data before you do this upgrade.
2. Do not upgrade a computer that you depend on and can not be without until you know that your critical applications will work with Lion.
3. Rosetta is no longer supported in Lion. Rosetta allowed PowerPC (remember the G5?) applications to run on Intel. If you are using applications like Office 2004 or Quicken 2007, they will no longer work. To see if you are running any Rosetta applications, launch all the programs you use and then launch Activity Monitor (located in Applications/Utilities/), look at My Processes, and look at the Kind column. If you see an Application with PowerPC in Kind column, you are running a Rosetta application.
What is Lion going to do for you? Well, I’ll leave that up to Apple’s marketing.
Of course, I will be upgrading right away, so you can use me as a guinea pig. I will post what happens to me in the next few days.
Click the button below to purchase Lion!
Happy upgrading,
Jason
Thanks jason, who would you recommend the upgrade to?
I have hundreds (maybe thousands) of old MS Word files that are valuable to me, and I can only open them in older versions of Word. Thus, you are telling me that I can’t upgrade to Lion and retain acess to those files. That is like building a new library building and announcing to the public that it will only house books from the 21st century. Stupid!
So, if we don’t hear from you for a while, should we take that to mean the Lion upgrade wasn’t all that successful??? 🙂
I would recommend it to anyone that has Snow Leopard and has a Mac that will run Lion. A new operating system upgrade from Apple is always a treat. Make sure that the applications you use most are compatible. If you are using Apple applications mostly (Safari, Mail, iLife ’11), then I would say go for it. To tell you the truth, my work laptop will have to wait because the point of sale system we use is not compatible with Lion.
Word is a Microsoft product, what happened when you were suddenly not able to open your old Word docs when Microsoft upgraded Word? I can’t pretend to know when and why Apple chooses to drop support for old technology, but it has happened so many times. Apple moving from 680xx to PowerPC, OS 9 to OS X, PowerPC to Intel, no OS 9 support with Leopard and now no PowerPC applications running under Lion. There is probably a way to get those Word docs to open and translated into a more open format like PDF. You know how to reach me!
Hi Jason,
So can you kindly tell me how I upgrade to the MS Word (from my current unusable one on Lion) to the version that will work with Lion? I’m confused on how to go about it. MUCH thanks!
Hi David,
You will need to purchase a new version of Office. Office 2011 is currently available and compatible with Lion. If you can find Office 2008, that is also compatible with Lion. We have Office 2011 at the store.