The Shoes keep dropping...with regard to Lion

I want Lion but...I will wait for it.

Lion won’t run PowerPC programs. I depend on Quicken 2006, which came with my MacBook. In talking to my source, they recommended I look at iBank. It uses military -grade encryption. Go to www.thequickenkiller.com

We discussed the process of making a boot disk. Up to now Apple sold us CDs or DVDs to install OS X. If the OS broke or the hard drive went bad, we always had a plastic shiny disk to reinstall OS X.

Now Apple wants to distribute Lion, and has distributed developer previews, via the Mac App Store. That’s about 4 gigabytes. Even now, developers complain of waiting all night just for a new version. A similar-sized movie, by comparison, downloads in 20-30 minutes. Unless Apple rents a lot of extra server capacity, I’d expect a lot of complaints the first few days Lion becomes available. Think of the mess Amazon found itself in when it sold a new pop album for 99 cents and the singer’s fans crashed Amazon’s servers. Yes, similar to that.

But back to my topic of making a Lion boot disk. One of my sources showed me a boot disk. It took them several tries to figure out how to do it. IT IS NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART. IT IS NOT APPLE-SANCTIONED.

Beyond some home users, who lack a high-speed Internet connection (“eh, I only need e-mail. I get my movies from NetFlicks!”), this lack of physical media creates problems for institutional users who need to install OS X to tens, hundreds, and thousands of Macs. I can see IT security officers thinking of hundreds of temps installing OS X machine by machine with a company-supplied Mac App Store e-mail account and password. Not to mention a credit/debit card. The opportunities for mischief...

So Apple has to figure out a way to (1) provide physical media for those situations that demand physical media and (2) figure out a way to how to install Lion across an institution. I hope that they have a plan. They just haven’t told us.

Oh, and before you downloading Lion from the Mac App Store? Make sure you’ve got it set up. If you use an insecure password that worked for the iTunes Music Store, the Mac App Store will reject it.

I’d get another e-mail account for the Mac App Store in case that happens. That’s what I ended up doing.

The Mac App Store may still malfunction. It doesn’t like a program you run in the background. My problem came with Unsanity’s Fruit Menu 3.8.x. I disabled it and finally the Mac App Store allowed me to buy Angry Birds.

So in conclusion...

I’m going to wait for Lion myself. When I get my tax return next year, then I’ll buy a Mac Mini with Lion and Thunderbold and a quad-core CPU. Is that too much to hope for? In the meantime, e-mail me at thomasbriant@me.com.