My Apple quandaries: upgrade to Lion? buy MacBook Air?

Oh, Apple, you're making life difficult for me. Decisions... decisions. This is summertime. Living should be easy.

But I've spent the past few days wondering (1) whether I should upgrade my MacBook Pro from the Snow Leopard to Lion OS, and (2) if a MacBook Air would be a nice early birthday present from me to myself.

First quandary first: it's scary to install a major operating system upgrade. Before I switched back to the Mac world I was traumatized by Microsoft's Windows "improvements."

(The quotation marks are necessary because installing a supposedly new and improved operating system sometimes would leave my PC computer inoperable.)

So like a previously battered spouse who now doesn't feel completely sure if the new marriage partner can be trusted, I'm worried about forking over $29 and letting Lion replace Snow Leopard.

My inclination is to wait a few weeks, maybe even a month, in the hope that evident glitches in Lion's installation process will be ironed out by then.

After reading about Lion problems on an AppleInsider post, I headed over to Apple's support page for the new OS to get a feel for how early adopters were faring. For many, not very well.

Problems abound with either installing or using Lion. But since Lion downloads already number over a million, it isn't surprising that even a small percentage of problematic installations would lead to many unhappy Lion purchasers.

Still, I was disturbed to learn from a TUAW post about a nasty Mail problem. And it wasn't encouraging to see many Apple support complaints about dropped wi-fi connections. Since Snow Leopard is working fine for me, it'd be a major bummer to find that installing Lion left me with balky or non-existent email and wi-fi.

Turning to the second quandary (which has some relation to the first): I'd like to have a backup laptop in case my somewhat aged MacBook Pro gets sick or dies unexpectedly.

I've considered getting another MacBook Pro, but the changes in this model since I got mine several years ago have been evolutionary riather than revolutionary. So I can't get excited about a more-of-the-same computer purchase.

The newly revised MacBook Air is a different deal, though. Several pounds lighter. A solid state drive (like the iPad and iPhone). And about twice as fast as the previous Air -- which likely is a lot faster than my current MacBook Pro.

Plus Thunderbolt for superfast input and output (leaving aside the not-so-minor detail that currently there are no Thunderbolt external drives to input from or output to, something you'd think Apple would have considered before making Thunderbolt a big marketing feature. You've got to have it! But so far, you can't use it.)

Plus, plus -- and this is important to me -- a backlit keyboard has returned to the Air. I love this feature on my MacBook Pro. I rarely type in complete darkness, but even in a dim room a lighted keyboard is handy (and looks cool).

So I'm attracted to the MacBook Air.

I also like how Lion would come preinstalled on one. No worries about upgrading the operating system. If I had a Lion'ized MacBook Air, I'd feel a lot more comfortable taking the plunge and installing Lion on my MacBook Pro, since if there was a major screw-up, I'd still have a working computer.

Thus my inclination is to stifle my immediate craving for both Lion and the MacBook Air. Not forever, but for a month or two. I'll watch and see how reviewers react to these new Apple products. Likely some glitches will be fixed. Early adopting is fun, yet you can also pay a price by being one of the first to buy.

Patience, grasshopper. That's difficult to do when Apple comes out with a lustworthy new offering. I'll try to follow that Kung Fu advice, though.

Comments

[Johann]

Let the Lion sleep. It's too buggy at this point in time. Wait for more updates. Go ahead and back up your MacBookPro. Have a good summer!

[Sean Arnold]

As long as you have a current time machine backup rolling back to 10.6.8 is pretty easy