So you’ve got Lion, or maybe you don’t, because you’re still downloading it. It’s over 4GB after all, and trying to grab it over the freebie Wi-Fi connection at the coffee shop down the street was, you know, maybe not your finest moment.
But let’s say you’ve managed to pull it down, somehow, and as Adele might say, you’re rolling in the deep.
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Everyone seems to love Lion so far, and why not? It has over 250 new features. It remembers stuff (even non-Microsoft stuff!) when your system crashes. It turns your laptop into an iPad. It’s named after the king of the jungle (well, the savannah, technically speaking). And it’s just $30.
Okay, it doesn’t really turn your laptop into an iPad—for that, I’m still hoping Apple opts to make its 11-inch MacBook Air’s screen detachable—but it does make your interface more iOS-like (though, as Georgia Tech video game designer Ian Bogost amusingly puts it, “Mac OS X Lion: everything you hate about your iPhone, on your laptop”). Fans and not-fans of Apple’s touchscreen interface, assume your respective battle positions.
I’ve been using OS X Lion for the past week, and I don’t (yet) have a battle position, though I’ll say I am impressed enough to keep using it. But you know all about Lion’s positives, right? They’re the, ahem, “lion’s share” (yuk-yuk) of all the wall-to-wall press coverage. What about Lion’s quirks, foibles and letdowns?
For starters, deploying a clean “from scratch” Lion install involves a bunch of extra steps (as well, extra hardware) to convert Apple’s 4GB+ download into a bootable slice of discrete media. Apple might like us to believe running over-the-top OS upgrades are digitally hygienic, and for all I know on some byzantine technical level that may be true. But for those of us who periodically rebuild our computers like Howie Mandel washes his hands, getting from A to Z (until Apple releases dedicated USB keys this fall) involves a bit of jury-rigging.
How about the new interaction acclimation curve? Apple apparently wants to shoehorn everyone into its touch-based iOS world—one interface to rule them all. In Lion’s case, that means pretending your mouse pointer is literally your fingertip and reversing the way the screen scrolls up or down. I’ve already made the mental switch—up is now down, down is now up!—but it’s worrisome that Apple seems to be trending toward “one-size-fits-all” thinking, when the interface gulf between an iPhone or iPad and a laptop or desktop is (and stands to remain) vast.
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Or take Expose’s replacement, Mission Control, which lets you grapple with a cluttered desktop by zooming out and re-ordering things categorically. It’s definitely handy if you’re besotted with the new full-screen app interface, but actually more confusing if you’re accustomed to Expose’s cleaner non-categorical look (I suspect my quibble evaporates on a screen larger than 13 inches). I also immediately disabled the default “show Dashboard as a space” option, which places your widgets over a dimpled background that looks like the underside of a floor mat. That’s just because I use widgets like Dashboard’s calculator while still viewing numbers within apps visible on the desktop (which, I thought, was part of Dashboard’s raison d’être).
And much as I love most of Apple’s touchpad gestures, the changes in Lion have me occasionally cursing the screen. Take “show desktop,” which used to work reliably with a simple four-finger upward flick. That’s out (rather, multiple fingers up now launches Mission Control), replaced by a clumsy pinching action: Hold your thumb and three fingers on the touchpad and “spread” them to push windows out of the way. It’s slower, and seems to work only 50% of the time, the other 50% “accidentally” conjuring Mission Control. Alas, Apple doesn’t allow you to reassign the “show desktop” gesture, so you’re stuck.
(PHOTOS: A Brief History of the Computer)
I can’t really weigh in on LaunchPad, since I’m not using it, see no reason to use it and thus view it as redundant (if harmless). I’m still preferential toward “LaunchPad version 0.5,” otherwise known as “the right-hand side of the dock.”
Don’t forget the inevitable launch bugs. For instance, Safari’s window scrolling in Lion sometimes bogs down, each tab juddering to an almost-stop, with crippling delays when swishing each page up or down, rendering the browser all but unusable (probing for rogue applets or closing tabs does nothing to resolve the slowdown). A quick scan of Apple’s Safari forum reveals hundreds of others having similar issues.
On my mid-2010 MacBook Pro, I’ll occasionally run into visual glitching, where some or all of my screen’s inexplicably hijacked by thousands of tiny “stuck” colors, like the artifacts you sometimes see during a video-streaming hiccup. Moving windows around resolves the problem, but it’s happened often and consistently enough to suggest there’s a driver issue afoot.
And iCal’s suddenly started throwing up annoying errors it never used to, like this gem: “The server responded: ‘403’ to operation CalDavWriteEntityQueueableOperation,” every time I try to create a new shared calendar entry (yep, I’ve already ensured I have read/write permissions to the calendar in question). What gives?
Don’t get me wrong, there’s lots to like (if not always love) about OS X Lion. But it feels clumsier than either Leopard or Snow Leopard did when they launched. Apple’s obviously attempting to fast-shuffle us collectively toward its iOS way (or the highway) of thinking, and some of that’s exciting, but some of it feels clumsy—almost glommed on.
I have little doubt Apple’s already pounding away at OS X 10.7.1, which ought to fix some or all of my glitch gripes, and who knows, even add back some of the interface tweak options currently missing in action. But the future’s looking awfully iPad. That’s Steve Jobs’ certifiably monomaniacal obsession with a “post-PC” ‘verse, whether that’s how Mac users want to roll or not.
MORE: Apple Rolls Out OS X Lion, Faster MacBook Airs, Kills MacBook
Matt Peckham is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @mattpeckham or on Facebook. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.