A hype update, so far.

The real story of Lion.

While committed Mac OS X users have little choice but to update to Lion sooner or later and, at $30 it’s hardly a big deal economically, how much better is Lion than its rock stable predecessor, Snow Leopard?

I think there are two answers to this. For the casual user who grew up with iOS on the iPhone or iPad and who has a Mac laptop or is willing to spend another $80 on a trackpad for his desktop Mac, Lion probably works well. Many of the familiar iPad gestures are there, software is available by download only from the Mac store and eye candy in the guise of Mission Control and the like is there in abundance. Further, if you like the rendering of ‘Conversations’ in Apple iOS Mail, where it’s easy to scroll through a thread of exchanges, then you will also like this added feature in Lion.

But for longer time users Lion is nothing more or less than a pain in the you-know-what. You lose all your prized PPC applications, Apple having deleted the Rosetta emulator to force those with PPC iMacs to upgrade their hardware and software, making Lion the most expensive OS upgrade ever for these users. If your broadband is slow or bandwidth limited, forget about downloading the OS and many of the larger apps from the App Store. Life is too short and the telcos and cable companies too greedy. And if you use peripherals which require dedicated drivers, then you are going to be hunting around for these – or waiting for them to be released – before your hardware can be ‘un-bricked’. This happened to my external USB wireless dongle and my third display driven by a USB-to-DVI adapter. Mercifully, both vendors were really on the ball, and new drivers have been installed and functionality recovered. Also, thankfully, my Brother HL-2170W and HP DesignJet 90 printers continue to work every bit as well as they did with Snow Leopard.

Those suffering from confirmation bias – you paid for it so it must be good – will regale you with tales of how much faster Lion is than Snow leopard. Utter nonsense. Objective test measurements show it is 2-5% slower and your machine will run 5-7F hotter. Good luck if you are using one of Apple’s cooling-challenged iMacs where sleek design has made CPU and GPU cooling an afterthought. And if you choose to install your own SSD, search out TRIM Enhancer for garbage management because Apple has made sure that Lion’s built-in TRIM capabilities will be denied you, reserved for Apple-installed overpriced SSDs only. An indicator, if ever one was needed, of the growing ‘make a buck at any cost and squeeze your customer until the pips squeak’ mentality becoming increasingly pervasive at 1 Infinite Loop.

And those same long time OS X users will find they have to spend time reversing all the garish, dumbing down of Lion to make it look and feel like what was so well done by Snow Leopard. I address many of the more common issues here.

So what’s good? After one week of intense use with many applications I have had no lock-ups or glitches on any of my HackPro (Core2Quad 2.83gHz, 8gB RAM, Nvidia 9800GTX+ graphics, 2 SSDs, 2 HDDs), MacBook Air (11″ mid-2010 Core2Duo 1.4gHz, 2gB RAM model with integrated Intel 320M graphics. SSD) or Mac Mini (2010 model, Core2Duo, 5gB RAM Intel 320M, HDD). On my main work machine, the HackPro, hacking Lion for installation was the easiest yet, Hackintosh support having improved mightily in the past few years. Further, running a half-dozen big apps simultaneously is no big deal. This includes Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3, iPhoto, Safari, Firefox, iBank, Word 2008, Excel 2008, Numbers, Pages, you name it. Just like Snow Leopard.

For that we should be truly grateful. Most of the other ‘enhancements’ are simply a waste of time – the time it will take a demanding user to reverse them. But if you do not want to be locked out of the Apple ecosystem and its upcoming iCloud, updating to Lion becomes a requirement.

Lion with three Dell 2209WA displays.

Saving space.

If you use a Solid State Drive for your Mac OS and apps, then you know that the small, costly SSD can fill up quickly. If you download Lion from the App Store onto a machine with Snow Leopard installed, the download is what Apple calls an ‘incremental’ one. Only changed files are updated. OS X aficionados swear than the only real OS X installation is a ‘clean’ one, meaning you install Lion on a fresh drive or partition and then migrate over from your Snow Leopard drive or partition just what you need. I have never seen any comparative performance measurements to substantiate this claim so, until I do, I disregard it as so much urban myth.

So assuming you do an incremental install, one thing the installer will not do is erase apps and files you no longer need.

Which are these?

First, any PPC app – one written to run on Apples using IBM G3/4/5 CPUs, will no longer run. The brilliant PPC emulator software known as Rosetta, included through the last version of Snow Leopard, is no more. Which of your apps are PPC? Go to Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor and click on the ‘Kind’ column heading to sort your apps by Intel, Intel (64 bit) and PPC.

Activity Monitor displays which CPU apps run on.

Well, guess what. As long as you have copies of your PPC apps in a Snow Leopard disk or partition, you might as well delete these from your Lion installation because there’s no way they will ever work.

Well, how about all the other crud which has built up from generations of machines? Time to fire up the free Omni DiskSweeper which, after a few minutes grinding (or few seconds if you use an SSD) will tell you where all your files reside, sorted by size in decreasing order. Now you can get serious about purging stuff, but do make a backup before you go ballistic.

Here’s my Users directory – the biggest part of which is MobileSync (backups of iPad/iPhone etc which could be erased); Music can be moved to an HDD. VirtualBox is only needed if you must run Windows. That lot comprise some 18gB of the 30.3gB,meaning you only really need 12gB for Users:

Add to that Applications, which means Applications+Library+usr:

All the Lion stuff adds another 5gB.

Here are my biggest Apps:

From the above approach you can figure what you need on an SSD boot drive which is to contain OS Lion + Users + Apps/Library and hence how large the SSD needs to be, allowing +10% for free space used for temp/scratch files, Mac OS X updates and any new apps you decide to add.

I suspect that, unless you have tons of big apps and/or a huge mail database, 40gB will do it nicely for you – meaning use 36gB and keep 10% free. My SSDs are 120gB but if I was normal you wouldn’t be reading this.

Update:

Reader Fazal Majid has pointed out below in his Comment to this post that there’s a free app named Monolingual which does all of the above and more. I used it and gained 0.51gB on my SSD (Monolingual erroneously reported a gain of 1.0gB) compared to the status immediately after upgrading to OS Lion. It took a couple of minutes to run and I could see it extracting PPC code from many current apps like iPhoto and Lightroom. The apps remaining on my HackPro continue to run fine.

You can download Monolingual by clicking below:

Click to download Monolingual.

However, a check of the Library->Application Support directory disclosed that related files in this directory were not removed. They are, for the most part, small, but it’s a shame the app authors did not go all the way. Still, the price is right.

Thanks Fazal!

For the masochists among you.

My prime, nay, sole, motivation for installing Windows on my Lion Hackintosh was to allow me to look at some computer games our 9 year old had programmed which run on Windows only. (At this juncture feel free to speculate at the wisdom of a parent who sends his son to a class which uses Windows).

If you have your original Windows discs it’s free, as easy as any Windows task ever is and works. Mine is Windows XP SP3, but any version through Windows 7 is supported, not to mention many flavors of Unix and, for those unwilling to hack their PC, you can even run Mac OS X from within Windows.

The product is the updated version of the one I ran under Snow Leopard and is named VirtualBox. Created by Sun it’s now part of Oracle and it’s free. Set it up right (the instructions are good but ‘techie’) and you can run Windows in an OS Lion window and cursor directly to that window like any other OS window. Windows runs in its own space and viruses cannot migrate to the OS installation. Several years with VB under Leopard and Snow Leopard have not resulted in any problems on the Mac side. Yes, I still get the inevitable lock-ups on the Windows side.

You can download VirtualBox here; it’s professionally supported and I have found it to be bug free.

Here’s a snap of Win XP running in Lion:

By all accounts Windows 7 is far better than XP or Vista so if you must have Windows and do not want to have to boot into a separate partition or use another machine, this is one way to go. Speed is fine on my Hackintosh and you don’t have to be Einstein to do this successfully. Sound worked out of the box as did wireless broadband. Once I installed the included ‘Guest Additions’ software (it’s under ‘Devices’ in the VB menu) I was able to set screen definition to full screen and the mouse cursor no longer had to be clicked in the Windows window to make it work. Looking at the simply awful font rendering in this OS I can’t help wondering how anyone with any aesthetic values could use this garbage. Whatever.

During the long, rambling installation process, which I had to redo from scratch as the Lion installation trashed my previous VB/Win, I grumbled about Windows to a friend, who is an iPad/Mac babe. Her reply was priceless: