On 22 Oct 2011, at 1:01 PM, William wrote:
> Hello to the Group,
>
> Well it now appears I have to upgrade my MacBook to Lion since I recently upgraded my iPad to iOS5. The synching between the two is not working smoothly. I surmise I have to be using iCloud on both platforms for synching to work properly.
Sync was working fine for my iPhone 3GS with iOS 5 and Snow Leopard. I just didn't get the extras like Photostream and iCloud data. So you may want to investigate that before changing anything else.
> So my question is to those in the Group how is the upgrade doing? Any issues I need to know about before doing the upgrade? I have heard the download takes about an hour or so.
The download time depends on your connection. It is very large at 3.53 GB, so I started it when I went to bed. After it downloads, it holds on the first dialog for your approval. So you can let it sit there while you're away.
That's actually a good time to quit the installer and dig into the application's contents for the recovery disc image. After the installation is complete, it deletes itself. You can always re-download from the Mac App Store, but it's another 3.53 GB to wait out.
I backed mine up to a $9 8GB USB flash drive. It took all of 11 minutes..
http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/08/make-a-bootable-mac-os-x-10-7-lion-installer-from-a-usb-flash-drive/
Running Lion is surprisingly nice! I held off on this Mac Pro because it's my audio production machine. Most important was making sure all of my software and external hardware would still work. (98% of it did.) Next was making sure this was even worthwhile with a lot of the marketing boasting of gestures that I wouldn't use. But I can say that, as long as nothing else is broken, it was still worth thirty bucks for the numerous refinements.
If you don't use your Mac for audio or video production, the other big thing to watch out for is old PowerPC applications that are currently using Rosetta to keep working on Intel processors. I had a few of those, and had to make sure I had alternatives. One was an old barcode generator--which used to be $250+, but can now be found on the Mac App Store for $29. Done. Then I had old versions of apps I stopped upgrading like Office 2004, Freehand and Flash MX. For the Office stuff, I'm using iWork (I never really touch fancy macros in Excel, I write web apps instead). I've migrated from Freehand to Illustrator finally, and from Flash to HTML5/JS and/or Tumult Hype or Adobe Edge. Short version: Check your pre-2007-ish apps to make sure they are not "Application (PowerPC)" or just "Application". You want to see "Application (Intel)" or at least "Application (Universal)" when you Get Info.
Aside from that, the water's fine. :) Good luck!
G
