Look forward to many hours of frustration with Lion's Launchpad

Both of the new Macs that Apple shipped today come with the latest version of OS X: 10.7 Lion. The update brings many new features, as you’d expect of a new operating system, but there are some fundamental changes both to the user experience itself, and the way Apple has chosen to deliver the new OS. One — the lack of any physical install media — is both convenient and annoying. The other — adopting UI metaphors from the touch-only iOS — is likely to appeal to new users and upset old ones.

Download Only

The very first thing that is impossible to ignore is that Lion only exists in the ether. There are not, nor will there be, physical media carrying the installer. Instead, you have to either buy a new Mac with Lion pre-installed, or download the 3.5GB installer from the Mac App Store.

There are ways to make this file into bootable USB sticks and DVDs, but that’s for the nerds and sysadmins who want to install on multiple machines. For the regular customer, the installer disk is dead.

And what happens if your computer goes belly-up? Is there a recovery disk in the box? Nope. Apple gets around this by partitioning the boot drive and putting a utility called Lion Recovery onto it. When you have trouble, press Command-R when you start up and you’ll be booted into recovery mode. From there you can repair the disk, reinstall Lion or restore from a Time Machine backup.

I know what you’re thinking. What if the drive is completely dead? How do I rescue my Mac then? Well, the news is good and bad. The good is that, even if you slot in a brand-new, bare hard drive, the Mac will boot into “Internet Recovery” mode. This connects to Apple’s servers and grabs a copy of Lion Recovery, and you go from there.

The bad news is that you need an Internet connection to do it, and we all know that hard drives always fail at the most inconvenient moment. The worse news is that, even if you have an Internet connection, it’s going to take a long time to download that 3.5GB installer file.

It Looks Like iOS

The other big change is the look of the OS. Apple titled it’s introduction of Lion “Back to the Mac,” signaling that many new discoveries made in iOS are being folded back into the Mac mix. Thus you’ll find Launchpad, which turns even the giant 27-inch screen of the iMac into an icon-infested home screen. Just like on your iPhone, only way harder to use.

You also get full-screen mode, allowing you to concentrate on one app at a time, again like iOS. Windows users will chuckle at this “new” feature — Microsoft’s OS defaults to full-screen windows, but it is great for certain kinds of app — photo and video editors for example. Our own Brian X Chen praises it in his Lion review, but I’m not sure how useful it will be for a blogger’s simultaneous, multi-window needs.

There are plenty of other tweaks, from Resume (which lets an app pick up where it left off last time you quit it) to Autosave, which does what you’d expect. For more details, check out Brian’s review. And if you’re not sure if your favorite apps will be compatible with Lion, check out this rather handy wiki from Roaring Apps to find out.

Lion is available now in the Mac App store for $30.

Lion Features [Apple]