Back to the Mac: OS X 10.7 Lion Review
by Andrew Cunningham, Kristian Vättö & Anand Lal Shimpi on July 20, 2011 8:30 AM ESTLike Windows 7, the Lion installer creates a small hidden system partition on your hard drive - in Lion, this recovery partition is to be used in lieu of your install CD in the event that you need to run diagnostics or reinstall your OS (if you burned Lion to a DVD, booting from it will get you the same interface and tools as the recovery partition, so pay attention). This partition is normally hidden from the end user in the Finder and Disk Utility, but is selectable when pressing the alt/option key at boot (and visible in System Profiler as a 650MB partition on your hard drive).
Missing from this list are the System Profiler and the Password Reset utility - I don’t know why the former is gone, but the latter is presumably missing for security reasons, since basically anyone armed with the Password Reset utility and physical access to your machine can change any local account’s password at will. To replace the functionality of this tool, Lion now gives you the option to recover your account password if you associate it with your Apple ID, which should work fine for most individuals (though perhaps not so much for system administrators).
If you didn’t burn a disc as outlined previously, the recovery partition also gives you your only option for a clean install of Lion - erase your hard drive using Disk Utility and then elect to install a fresh copy of Lion. At this point, you will be prompted for your Mac’s serial number, which is then communicated to Apple, and if it clears your Mac will re-download (sigh) and re-install the OS. This serial number check is OS X’s first real implementation of what anyone could call activation, though it’s worth noting that if you install Lion from a .DMG copied to another disk, the OS will still install without any checks.
The last thing the recovery partition is used for is to store FileVault information, which we’ll talk more about later on in the review.
Once the installer is complete, people who did an upgrade install will be able to start using Lion pretty much immediately - aside from the (optional) registration form, there’s not really anymore to it. People who did a clean install (or who have new Macs preloaded with Lion) will be taken through the standard first-time setup process, which is mostly identical to that of OS X versions past with a couple of changes: first, the customary OS X welcome movie has been completely removed (possibly in another effort to save on download size). Second, users are now given the option to associate their Mac with an Apple ID, and to give that Apple ID the ability to recover their local account password. Last, on Macs with multitouch-enabled trackpads and mice, the OS literally forces you to use a two-fingered scrolling gesture to click the “Start Using OS X” button. How’s that for pushing new features?
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grahamperrin - Thursday, July 28, 2011 - link
Primarily FAO the AnandTech reviewersThank you for a very timely and useful review of FileVault 2.
The following microblog conversation links to an overview (work in progress) with some unanswered questions. Comments will be greatly appreciated.
http://identi.ca/conversation/77065575#notice-7963...
— OpenID enabled, I will welcome contributions in the Identi.ca area.
nardreiko - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link
And it is a big problem!The removal of Expose and Rosetta are big reasons not to "upgrade" for me both now and for the foreseeable future.
A lot of other things are clunky or ugly or annoying (like the inability to control scrolling speed in System Preferences) ... but those are minor reasons not to "upgrade".
This was a tough review to do, and I love Anandtech, but I think you guys skimmed over some very important negatives. I don't know a single person who is not an Apple employee or stock owner who claims to really like Lion ... come to think of it I haven't yet met an employee who really likes it, so it is pretty much stock owners who are saying it is an upgrade-without-quotation-marks. Although a lot of employees do genuine like the full-screen mode.
tomeg - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
nardreiko said:"I don't know a single person who is not an Apple employee or stock owner who claims to really like Lion ... come to think of it I haven't yet met an employee who really likes it, so it is pretty much stock owners who are saying it is an upgrade-without-quotation-marks. Although a lot of employees do genuine like the full-screen mode."
tomeg replies:
I have a circle of nearly 200 fellow Mac users—real, (mostly) unbiased, not-at-all picky or ego-inflated (I'm not suggesting that you are), everyday-if-not-hour-intensive Mac users—and our experience has been 95% positive or enthusiastic. Some are disappointed with the loss of or change to this or that, as am I, and we have to adjust, go As The Mac OS Turns, but not one isn't glad they upgraded. Any OS must continue to be evolutionary or die. Some things go, others stay, but the overall progress is forward. I will take Lion over Windows 7 hands down this or any day. Windows has its features and (of course) fans but I'm not buying, now or ever, unless something goes massively wrong with current OS development.
bjoff - Sunday, September 4, 2011 - link
Thanks for an enlightening test! One thing I wish you had tested was the time to wake from sleep. On my macbook air (with very similar specs to your setup), it seems that waking from sleep takes a couple of seconds more with FileVault enabled. This is pretty significant when you are used to the very quick waking of Apple products...raygos - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - link
The reviewer complains that Resume can be annoying for the likes of him/her when a clean slate is desired. He/she writes: "I found myself pressing command-W a bunch of times to close windows before I'd press command-Q to quit the program." There is, of course, the shortcut command-option-W to close all open windows in the active application. For mousers, press option while clicking the red "close window" button does the same thing. Gotta save those clicks!dtalari - Friday, October 28, 2011 - link
I am a work-study at a college and we recently bought a bunch of IMACS to make an IMAC Labs for all the students. We also have a few for the staff. We had Snow Leopard installed initially and we were able to connect perfectly fine to all of the servers within our network,however since our implementation of lion the servers don't show up under the shared tab in the finder automatically like before. The computers on the network show up but not the servers. Anyone have any ideas as to why? I figured it has something to do with samba not being implemented as it was in Snow Leopard? Is there any easy way to change a setting? Or do I have to manually add each server to each computer?Thanks