It’s not so surprising that I get a lot of questions about whether or not one should upgrade their computer to Lion, Apple’s latest offering for folks with a qualifying Mac. Presumably, one of my very reasons for existence would be answer questions like that. But it is interesting (to me, at least, and I’ll admit to being easily interested) how many clients ask that question with a sense of excitement in their voice. This includes a pleading undercurrent that over the years I’ve learned to recognize as needing the subtitle of: I really really really want this shiny new toy, please please please?
These aren’t computer nerds, mind you, just people who are tempted by the thought of something exciting and new that might positively change the device they spend more time with than any other in a given work day.
In the past, my advice tended to follow a broad but consistent pattern of yes or no when it came to upgrades for users, whether they were novices, experts, businesses, or individual users. That question regarding Lion, though, tends to result in one of two (roughly paraphrased) replies:
1) I’m amazed you’re still alive. You need it like you need oxygen.
2) Um, no.
The reason for my new schizophrenic split is because, when it comes to the phrase “change the device,” Apple really delivered – and the trick with any change radical enough is that it can’t possibly be comfortable for anyone who likes the status quo.
At first glance, Lion has a series of changes that may or may not be nifty, which are easily undone by ticking the right checkbox. Blank desktop? Scrolling direction? What shows up in a Finder sidebar? Versions for documents? On and on, some of the most noticeable changes are easily reversible.
But that would be missing the point: with Lion, Apple is setting out to fundamentally change how you interact with your computer. It has every intention of killing the filesystem, or perhaps to be a bit more provocative, the Finder.
For most people, simply writing phrases like ‘filesystem’ and ‘finder’ is enough to make them go into jargon induced narcolepsy – but the difference between people who can use the filesystem and those who can’t is quite literally the divide between beginner and advanced. To use the filesystem means you understand how your computer stores and interacts with filesystems, it’s also something that people in my position have struggled endlessly to teach without any degree of success. I’ve had many people approach me about teaching formalized classes; one of the biggest reasons I haven’t yet is because I haven’t found a sure-fire way to teach people what is going on with their computer when it comes to storing and sorting data, at least not in a way that sticks. Explaining something well enough to get a head nod is easy, teaching something so that it is actually learned is another entirely.
Apple aims to simply eliminate that learning curve altogether. Their philosophy going forward, thinly veiled in Lion, is that not all data is created equal – how you might sort photos is different from how you would sort spreadsheets. As such, rather than creating a complex catch-all tool and hoping that people will learn it, Apple would create individual tools (iTunes for music, iPhoto for photos, as an example) for specific types of files that users will instinctively gravitate to.
That’s not to say that Lion is there, or even close; it’s just making a concerted bolt in that direction. Apple would rather you find your files using the ‘All my files’ sidebar entry rather than root about on the hard drive – the reason it neatly reversed the position of the hard drive in the sidebar. They would rather you use the iPad and iPhone-esque Launchpad than learn what an Application folder even is. Oh, they’ll give you the option. But in in the Book of Apple, there is a Right option and a Wrong option.
The other big hurdle for people has been learning how to save their documents promptly (or at all), and this is a problem that dovetails neatly with the ‘where did my document go’ issue (i.e., The Magic Box Ate It). In Lion, Apple puts a gun to the head of saving by completely eliminating it from all their applications.
All of this is just me babbling to make the point for novice users: Lion is a complete no-brainer. Just yesterday I had a client who had somehow managed to buy a new Mac without Lion pre-installed; I installed Lion for her before I even started to teach her how to use her new tool. The learning curve would simply be completely different.
On the other hand, for the people who have been in the trenches lo, these past many years, suddenly having all their hard-fought ways and means stripped away from them tends to come as an ugly shock. It’s the equivalent of an architect coming into your house, making an assessment, and completely redesigning your kitchen while you were away at work. If you cook a lot, nonplussed might be a good word to describe how you’d feel – regardless of how good the changes were on a conceptual level.
There are an almost endless number of considerations one could add here when it comes to speed, performance, product compatibility, enterprise applications, and so on. But really, it boils down to this:
If you feel comfortable with your Mac, if you do a lot of work on it, then you’ll probably be dragged kicking and screaming into this new computing future. But just about anyone who is new to computers, or a novice looking to expand their exploration, Lion is a well-polished, fascinating and worthwhile launch-board.