Blogger Ben Brooks sometimes has a hard time distinguishing fact from opinion.
Tonight, he's got his knickers in a twist over another of the increasingly common Vista/Lion comparisons. To refute ZDNet blogger Adrian Kingsley Hughes' first-person experience with Lion, Brooks offers his first-person recollected experience with Vista. He concludes:
With Vista my computer was barely useable, and honestly wasn’t useable for what I wanted to do on it for months. Lion is not worse than Vista and saying so is a flat out lie.
-Brooks Review, August 16, 2011
The funny thing about this is that almost all of Brooks underlying complaints about Vista apply to many people who upgraded to Lion (although some are just silly, like he didn't know whether to use the 32-bit or 64-bit Vista upgrades).
-His sound card didn't work for a month. People using Lion have reported all manner of hardware and software incompatibilities particularly home servers, high-end camera software and printers. Using a dial-up modem? No more support. (These examples and links are meant to be illustrative, not comprehensive).
-Frequent permission dialogue boxes popping up in Vista bugged Brooks. Such dialogues could be reduced by changing some settings. Somehow Brooks has missed the complaints about several of Apple's highest-profile system changes in Lion that are driving people crazy. Ted Landau, a pretty big fan of Apple generally, has an excellent post about the problems with automatic saves and quits in Lion. Others have noted that the new features break in common office or large group settings where version control is critically important (see Matt Schultz on Macintouch, August 8, Lion experiences, for example).
-Older games weren't usable, Brooks whines. I'm sure he is aware that Apple's choice not to include Rosetta has broken any number of older programs, particularly Quicken 7, a very popular personal finance application.
-No upgrade path for Windows XP Pro. Vista came out in 2007 and XP Pro came out in 2001. Lion has no direct upgrade option from OS X Leopard, which came out less than four years ago.
-Well-known blogger Louis Gray says the Lion upgrade wrecked the usefulness of his Macbook Air. "It's a little maddening to be obsoleted in just under two years," he writes, sounding a lot like Brooks on Vista.
I'm not arguing that everyone who upgraded to Lion is suffering from these bugs, incompatibilities and feature removals. But it's pointless to attempt to refute an anecdotal attack with an anecdotal reply. For lots of people, the Lion upgrade has been a crummy experience. And it's just over-the-top silly to use such hard language.
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