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 ESTNow that we've talked a bit about how things look in general, let's talk a bit more about the Finder specifically.
My first impression of the Finder was that it had lost some weight - Finder windows, in general, can now show the same amount or more using the same number of pixels, though that does come at the expense of some functionality. The arrangement and spacing of the left sidebar has been adjusted to take up less space than before, which is especially welcome on 11” and 13” Macs. Note that the Devices field now shows up at the bottom of the list instead of the top, another small step toward obscuring the filesystem (and, as well, steering newbie users away from just dumping everything on the desktop or the root of their drive).
Finder windows also shed some pixels (and, yes, I’m going to harp on this some more, downplay the notion of “files” and “disk space”) by removing the bottom toolbar by default - the one that shows the number of items in a given folder and the amount of disk space remaining on the volume, along with the slider that allows users to easily change the size of the icons. Thankfully, those who miss these features can switch them back on by opting to “Show Toolbar” up in the View menu.
Also missing is the button in the upper right-hand corner that would invoke icon-only view - those of you who use it will have to become acquainted with Alt+Command+T, a keyboard shortcut that toggles this change.
The default view when you open up a new Finder window now is called “All My Files,” which uses Spotlight’s file indexing to show you all files of a certain type no matter where they are on your hard drive - this is similar to Windows 7’s Libraries in that it groups your files together in one place without actually altering the fundamental directory structure (i.e., documents show up in All My Files, but they're still physically stored in the Documents folder).
All My Files is organized by rows, and by default, you’ll be shown just the first few files of a given type in each row - clicking on the left and right-hand side of the row will allow you to navigate through the files, and you can also click “show all” to see your icons tiled in a more traditional Finder view.
Snow Leopard introduced the ability to thumb through multi-page documents, PDFs, and presentations, and Lion further enhances that functionality by adding a full screen mode to Quick Look (which is still invoked by selecting a file and hitting the spacebar).
Finally, Finder gains some abilities that Windows Explorer has had, like, forever: the ability to merge two folders of the same name, and the ability to keep two files of the same name during a copy operation by renaming one of them. It's boring stuff and Windows has done it for years, but that doesn't make me appreciate it less now that Apple has finally implemented it.
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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