Mac OS X Lion was released yesterday and millions of Apple owners are busy downloading and installing it right now. You probably noticed a slowdown in networks access last night once you got home, that was due to the billions of bits of data flowing out of Cupertino into welcoming households across the world.
I installed Lion on two machines yesterday, my 2010 MacBook Pro laptop, and my late 2010 27″ iMac. Both installations went flawlessly from download to install. Then it was time to dig into Lion to see what it offered. The new “natural” scroll bars will take some getting used to as the new recommended direction is directly opposite what I’ve been using on Macs for, oh, 27 years, but overall I’m liking the changes so far. Time to learn some new habits to become as efficient with Lion as I was with Snow Leopard.
My biggest disappointment is giving up the ability to run 32-bit Power PC programs. No more will I be able to play Civilization III on my 27″ display, sigh.
This release represents another big shift in Apple, from costly packaging to digital downloads. They’ve been working on this change for years and this is their big test to see how it works, or if it doesn’t. Just like they did with floppy discs (5.25″ to hard shell 3.5″), multiple port support (parallel, SCSI, ADB, and more to USB), removing disk drives, and numerous other innovations that pushed people into a more coherent and advanced future. Now the move is on to replace physical media, like CDs, with digital downloads for everything.
Don’t believe me?
Last December Apple introduced the App Store, a common place for Mac users to find, purchase, and download Macintosh programs. It’s been a runaway success since release with some developers selling over a million copies of their software in short order. Mac users now had a place to find some of the best software available in one location for their Macs, something you’d be hard pressed to do in any Best Buy, Frys, even Apple’s computer stores.
The switch to digital delivery has several benefits to the software user, including:
- Access – users only need to open the App Store app and browse. No more piling into the car for a drive to the local computer store praying they have something you need, or ordering it online and waiting for delivery the next day or later, its all there at your finger tips.
- Speed – need a specific piece of software now for an important job, find it in the App Store, purchase and download it, and start using immediately. See Access.
- Comparison – once you open the App Store, you’ll find that for just about any app you’re looking for there are choices. Choice is good. Instead of having to take whatever’s offered on the shelf at the local computer store, you can pick and choose exactly the software app you desire.
- Price – by avoiding the cost of packaging, delivery, stocking, and numerous other charges added to the price you’d normally pay, Apple and other developers can offer you grear software at great prices. Just two examples, Final Cut Pro X went from $999 to $299 when it went digital, and Mac OS X Lion sells for $29 instead of the once normal $129 for most of the previous releases (Snow Leapord was considered an upgrade, not an entirely new release).
- CD drives – CD drives are going the way of the dinosaurs folks. Mark my words, within 2 years you will be hard pressed to find any new Apple computer being sold with a CD drive. Apple did it to floppy drives, don’t think they won’t do it again.
Need more proof?
Okay, when the MacBook Air was released it only had an add-on CD disk drive. People thought it radical at first, but since the goal of the Air was portability, giving up the CD drive, which most people don’t use that often anyway, was no big deal. And boy, did it make the Air small and light. Apple added a new software feature that allowed the Air to access the CD drive of any networked computer so it could install new OSes, movies, music, you name it. By removing the CD drive from the MacBook Air, Apple made it lighter, made it thinner, made it cheaper, and began training people to not be dependent upon having a CD drive in their machines.
Two years people, that’s what I give it. The only computers that will retain CD drives will be Windows PCs, simply because they can’t stand to give up anything.
