First thoughts on OS X Lion

Last week Apple released OS X Lion through the Mac App Store and apparently a million people downloaded it. It wouldn't be surprising actually because the price is so low it's a no brainer. An OS upgrade for just £20? That's cheap and it's probably to get as many people to upgrade as possible. Apple needs people to be running the latest version of OS X because it has key technologies like the Mac App Store, which doesn't work on Leopard or earlier versions of OS X. Will iCloud coming this autumn, only work on Lion or will it support Snow Leopard? Even if it does support Snow Leopard, it will work better with Lion.

Like many other people, I downloaded and installed Lion. My ageing MacBook isn't the ideal hardware and a newer model with a better trackpad is required for some features like the swipes, pinches and other gestures borrowed from iOS devices. However, I could always add a Magic Trackpad. At £59 it seems a bit overpriced for something that just enables me to swipe and pinch. Apart from this, Lion works fine on my 2007 MacBook with 2Gb RAM and 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo processor. Ideally though, 4Gb of RAM is best and you'll be struggling to do some tasks with 2Gb RAM. Just running Chrome and iTunes uses up over 1Gb of memory.

There are some big changes in Lion, but also lots of little ones too. One change that MacBook owners will notice is that it automatically logs on to Wi-Fi hotspots. This is an idea borrowed from iOS devices and when you switch on the Wi-Fi on your iPhone and select a hotspot, it will connect and display the login page automatically. Now the MacBook does this and as soon as the desktop appears a window opens prompting me to login to the Starbucks Wi-Fi.

This would be useful if it remembered my username and password, but it appears not to. Previously I started Safari and by pressing one key it automatically entered my username and password - stored in my keychain. The auto-login feature does not, so I have to manually enter them. This makes the new feature less useful than it could be. What's worse is that the login window disappears and there's no way to log out either. Starbucks is free, but if you were using a Wi-Fi hotspot that charged by the hour then you would need to be able to log out to avoid usage charges when you're not actually using it. It's a bit like taking two steps forward, but slipping one step back.