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 ESTApple introduced the Mac App Store (MAS) in its Back To The Mac event last October. It was released to public on January 6th and was automatically included in the 10.6.6 update. It’s obvious that the MAS is a spinoff of Apple’s extremely popular iOS App Store. While the MAS has been available for over six months now, Lion will bring some healthy improvements.
First, there will be support for in-app purchases. Since Apple does not allow trials, this is mainly useful for applications that can have additional commercial features or are subscription based.
Second, developers can now send push notifications to alert users. As in iOS, the usefulness of this feature varies from app to app, but the presence of third-party plugins like Growl speaks to the demand for this sort of thing.
Third, app updates are now just patches instead of full copies of the app. Apple refers to these as "delta updates," which is the traditional development term for an update delivered by replacing only the changed files/bytes in a application. In Snow Leopard and in iOS, you had to re-download the whole application to update it. That was very inefficient, especially if you were updating a bigger app. After iOS 5 comes out this fall, both it and OS X will feature app updates via patches, just like most other programs have been doing forever.
On a technical note, the structure of OS X application bundles makes them fairly well suited to these kinds of updates. But it's not clear at this time whether Apple is replacing whole files or doing binary patching to minimize the update size. Valve’s Steam service recently transitioned from doing file replacement to binary patching for this very reason, as games typically use a handful of large archives to store their content. For regular applications the difference is subtle, but the difference will have an impact on games distributed through the MAS.
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parlour - Monday, July 25, 2011 - link
The revenue includes all the money that is payed to developers, music labels and media companies. Apple keeps no more than 30% (probably quite a bit less) of it.bwmccann - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Just started playing it a month ago and my entire family is hooked!ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
I don't suppose you could compare OpenCL performance between Snow Leopard, Lion, and Windows 7? Given the increasing emphasis Apple is putting in OpenCL and the requirement for it in Final Cut Pro X and no doubt future iLife and pro apps, it'll be good to see how their latest implementation stacks up in performance rather than just feature-set (Lion bumps things to OpenCL 1.1 from 1.0 in Snow Leopard.)jensend - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
The claim that GPL3 "prohibits inclusion in retail products" is an outright lie. It's not just an inaccuracy- there's no way anybody who was even slightly informed about these things would think that; the ability to sell the software is one of the basic freedoms the GPL has always been about protecting.It is true that Apple refuses to use GPL3 software. The only reason I can think of for this is that the GPL3 says that if you distribute software under the GPL3 you implicitly grant patent licenses to everybody for any patents you may have which cover the software. Apple's wish to use its portfolio of obvious and non-innovative patents as a weapon to destroy its competitors conflicts with this.
Confusador - Thursday, July 21, 2011 - link
Came here to say this and you've got it covered. This is an unusual case of blatantly false information on AT, you guys are usually much better informed than this.batmang - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
I'm a little surprised that Anand didn't include any gaming benchmarks in this OS review just for simple comparison. Overall though, fantastic review and I'll certainly be upgrading to Lion in a week or so. I'm waiting to see if any oddball bugs arise before taking the plunge. Thanks for the review Anand.Kristian Vättö - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
I think he was going to but didn't have time (we wanted to get this out right when Lion went live). I don't know about his plans but maybe he will update this with GPU performance or do a separate article about that.Gigantopithecus - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
"Business customers can get Lion for $29.99 per copy in units of 20 or more, and educational institutions can buy it along with the latest iLife and iWork upgrades for $39 in quantities of 25 or higher. Especially when compared to Microsoft's complicated and expensive Windows licensing, these simple, low and clearly defined upgrade prices are extremely welcome."I can't speak for business customers, but pricing for higher ed institutions is extremely variable for MS software.
To wit, at the University of Wisconsin, our tech store offers zero discounts compared to retail on all Apple software, whereas both W7 Pro & Enterprise are $10 for one license and $25 for a fiver. At the University of Michigan, Apple OS software is similarly sold at retail with no discount, while W7 Pro is $19. Michigan State offers no discounts on both OS X and W7 vs retail. Indiana University sells OS X for retail & W7 for $20.
I'm not familiar with direct-from-Apple educational pricing, but if you go to actual universities' actual computer stores, MS software is sold at enormous discounts at 3 of the 4 Big Ten campuses I'm familiar with. Saying Apple offers lower OS pricing than MS to higher ed customers is flat out inaccurate.
mrd0 - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Same at Washburn University's School of Law...I purchased the full enterprise Office 7 and then 10 for $9.95, and Windows 7 for $29.95. Apple software is not discounted.SmCaudata - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 - link
Minnesota is Free to download or the cost of printed media ($8). This was when I was there at least.At Colorado both Windows and Office are also free to download. Before that (last year) they participated in the $29 usage option for office.
The fact is Windows/Office is really only expensive if you are building your own computers and installing your own OS. Even then you can get it rather cheap and the money you save more than makes up for the extra $50 Windows 7 runs over this. Also this only updates on SnowLeopard. If you didn't have that upgrade it will cost you more. Win7 upgrades back to XP, correct?