osx lion upgrade fails
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Today I upgraded to OSX "Lion" -- then I downgraded again.
The basic problem is this: it doesn't support my scanner. The film/negative scanning software that I use doesn't work on Lion, and the upgrade to the scanner software isn't available yet because they haven't gotten as far as my old Minolta DiMAGE Scan Dual III scanner. And I'm sticking with the now rather old scanner because, amazingly, it's far higher specced than anything that remains on the market. Given that I only really need the mini for working with my photos, the upgrade is just me shooting myself in the foot.
I might have toughed it out, waiting for the scanner software company to release an update that supports my scanner, but in the mean time Lion had a number of other problems that I didn't want to deal with. For instance, the reversing of the meaning of up and down arrows in applications like Terminal. And the reversing of the scroll button on my mouse. And the removal of the scroll bars within web browsers. And the way that scrolling is now a twitchy, sickening affair. Also, I don't get any of the "utility" of the gestures that Lion supports, because I don't have a trackpad. Overall, I get the sense that Lion is meant to switch Apple's laptops to the iPhone way of doing things but for a desktop user it's a mess. The breaking of scrolling, which has existed since before there were mice and window-based systems, is just bizarre.
So it was Time Machine to the rescue. Time Machine worked flawlessly once I'd rebooted from my Snow Leopard CD, but this raises another question about Lion: Apple's not selling a physical CD for this release. I've no idea how I would effect a Time Machine restore without the CD to boot from. Perhaps there's some utility in the Lion-based laptops (such as the one I just bought for Mari) but that utility doesn't exist on the mini.
All in all, this release makes it clear that Apple no longer had any interest at all in their desktop clients.
PS Mari "loooooooves" her Macbook Air. It's obviously a fantastic leap about Windows (especially XP or Vista). But I suspect that I've seen the beginning of the end for Apple and me.