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After a 2 year wait the guys at Cupertino finally decided the wait was long enough and that it was time for the Mac OSX’s newest incarnation to take center stage. Was the wait worth it? Well if a shitload of overly positive reviews aren’t enough to make you go and get a copy yourself at this point you probably won’t be upgrading anytime soon. In the end it’s not a to-die-for experience, but definitely worth the 30USD they’re asking for. This has been the 2nd 30 or so odd dollared asking price for a Mac OS, yet big brother MS (or is it small brother now?) insists on charging an arm and a leg for theirs. I will not spend time bashing an OS that I haven’t had spent much time with but they should really start considering having more consumer friendly price points.

Here’s a short list of + and -

+ launchpad makes it easy to get to what you want (no more fumbling through the applications folder in the dock thing)

- launchpad still seems detached from the overall experience (i honestly don’t know what to suggest to get this remedied)

* I wish launchpad had the “light dots” to show if the apps are already open (like how the dock does this)

+ mission control has over taken exposé as the main window manager, and it’s far more powerful for managing windows/apps

- some may miss exposé’s neat window management presentation over mission control’s space’s integration

+ making the dashboard available via 3 finger swipe (far left) has given it its last hope for survival into the next OS

- don’t know why the dashboard is still around

+ fullscreen apps are kinda cool 

- it’ll be a few more days of waiting to get other used apps upgraded by developers for fullscreen goodness

+ new safari features for caching pages (back/forward) for faster load times is awesome 

- safari still sucks without an awesomebar/omnibar, or whatever they wanna call it when they do finally realize it’s what people want

+ not too often praised, airdrop really “just works”

- airdrop could be improved with iOS support

+ spaces is gone, and mission control is a very big upgrade over what spaces used to offer

- spaces was much simpler to grasp and teach people how to use on thier own, mission control requires patience to teach

+ gestures are making the mouse feel old for common day-to-day task

- certain applications will never really be able to live without the mouse, so buying a mouse + trackpad (for desktop users) is needed for the full Lion exerience