By Staff | Published: June 6, 2011

Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion” Announced

Lion

Note: Our apologies for the inaccurate title/url, we assumed they would do a release today and didn’t catch the title before publishing -ed

After 22 months of development, Apple has finally released the next major version of Mac OS X: 10.7 codename “Lion”.

First the availability details: new Macs will come with Lion preinstalled, but everyone else will have to get it from the Mac App Store. That’s right, no discs, no retail boxes of any kind.

We do expect them to continue making USB restore drives available to Mac buyers, and there will likely be a way to create one if needed.

Developers will get a “preview” version today, with customer availability in July.

Pricing is $29.99 this time around, and once bought you can install Lion on all of your App Store “Authorized” Macs.

We won’t be reviewing Lion but here are some of the new features:

  • Full Screen Apps, just like on iPad
  • System-wide MultiTouch gestures, like double-tap for zoom, momentum scrolling
  • Mission Control, an enhanced Exposé-like overview of your system
  • LaunchPad, a way to quickly access your Apps
  • Resumable Apps that remember what you were doing when you last closed them
  • Auto-save for documents of various kinds
  • Document versioning, so you can go back to an earlier state if you make a mistake
  • AirDrop, a new local file sharing system integrated with the Finder
  • Overhauled Mail app with influence from Mail on the iPad
  • Optional Full System Encryption, which we previewed a few months ago

More details to come!

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  • Anonymous

    Can you turn off features you don’t like? For example, using more than one application at the same time has been wildly popular since System 6; what if I don’t *want* one app to take up the whole screen? Or: as things stand now, if my computer is acting peculiarly (rare as that is) I can restart it to straighten it out, but if it brings everything back up as it was before, then what? I know, I know, the folks at Apple aren’t stupid, and they’d never be so boneheaded… but then again, everybody’s an idiot now and then :)

    (For that matter, if Lion is only available as a download, does that mean that if I upgrade and then replace my hard drive I’ll have to dig up my old, scratchy Leopard disc, hope it can be made to work just one more time, and then buy Lion again? Surely not; surely you’re right that they’ll leave a way to create a disc or USB drive or *something*.)