Apple Ships OS X 10.7 Lion 'Gold Master' For July Push

An anonymous reader writes "Apple released to developers the 'gold master' version of Mac OS 10.7, known as Lion, in a move that positions the company for a July roll-out. 'With Snow Leopard, Apple's previous Mac OS release, the time between going from gold master status to hitting store shelves was approximately two weeks. However that release required Apple to stamp and produce boxed discs to send out to retail stores. Lion will be the first by Apple to be released only through its Mac App Store as a digital download.'"

Comments

"a simpler way to find applications"...

[countertrolling]

They all used to be in the applications and utilities folder. What could possibly be simpler than that? And now it forces users to open an online account with Apple. That's not very nice.. There's no mention in the article, does it come down as a burnable iso? And how screwed are the people who just don't happen to have fast internet?

Re:"a simpler way to find applications"...

[SilentChasm]

And how screwed are the people who just don't happen to have fast internet?

Have you seen how large OS and Application updates are now? Pretty much everything seems to require a fast connection. Even slashdot has bloated (58,633 B for an article with 898,406 B of inline elements, adding up to almost 1MB for a single page). It seems that slow connections are no longer really considered that much when people design stuff. Even slow DSL (although still "broadband") is now causing problems with not being fast enough sometimes.

Therefore I would say the people who just don't happen to have fast internet are screwed.

Re:Finally

[CAIMLAS]

The big things of interest for OS X to me, as someone who likes efficiency and stability out of his systems, are:

* will they finally fix the horrible threading and context switching implementation so that running something like a spreadsheet program with a large spreadsheet not cause the gnashing of teeth? (This has been a problem since the beginning of 10.x, but I started notcing it around 10.4 with the Intel macs and able to compare apples to apples - ie linux or Windows on the same hardware).
* HFS+ replacement so IO won't be a horrendous bottleneck?
* Better wifi implementation so that the macs I've got to deal with are not the main ones to have signal issues? (Seriously, when macs have more issues with APs than XP, you know you've got issue. You can't completely say it's the hardware, because Linux on the same systems is at least better...)
* will they allow me to do what I want with the 'dock' and the sparse UI elements, or am I restricted to using it how they say I should (particularly as it pertains to multitasking/not multitasking: it doesn't matter if they make that not suck at the techincal level if the UI is still horribly crippled).

Re:Is XCode included in the download?

[BasilBrush]

What? Providing the inspiration for the WWW, and then being made obsolete by it?

Not "download only"

[glitch0]

Apple will still offer the disk in stores, Google it. You'll find that Apple employees have confirmed that users with bandwidth restrictions or users without an internet connection can still update by buying a disk in store.

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[quacking duck]

Good luck buying any off-the-shelf replacement hard drive with a preinstalled OS...

Re:Let me clear a few things up for you all.

[stewbacca]

Have they "denied", or have they not affirmed. Those are two different things entirely.

Re:Apple tax

[Jeremi]

$29? For a software update? And you're happy about it? Wow. I've been running Windows XP for almost 10 years, and haven't spent another dime on it.

Upgrading a 10.x Mac to 10.7 is something like upgrading a Windows XP machine to Windows 7. How much would Microsoft charge you to do that?

Of course, if your main goal is to never spend a dime on your computer, then as a Mac owner you would be free to continue running your pre-installed version of MacOS/X without upgrading. Nobody is forcing anyone to upgrade.