First, lets touch on some of the bugs I’ve noticed so far.

Finder is one of those things in OS X that is almost universally disliked for one reason or another.  Finder in Lion has a new feature where it just stops doing things at all.  At times disk usage stops being updated and it won’t actually copy files.  While a restart of Finder resolves this issue, it’s odd that it is there at all.

Wi-Fi, formerly known as AirPort, has a strange tendency to just not connect after resuming from sleep.  That said, when it is connected I find it to be more reliable with more stable throughput.

Launchpad, the iOS like view of your installed applications has a tendency at times to lag heavily when launching an app.

There are a number of other smaller bugs that exist in Lion that are a bit grating but I have faith that Apple will fix them in short order.  Leopard was initially, at least in my opinion, unusable after the initial installation and I found myself going back to Tiger a couple of times.  Apple fixed those issues and then some.

But what really gets me are the things Apple will probably never fixed because they are working as designed and my real issue is that I don’t like the design.  Gestures for one are a cluster.  Many were changed from Snow Leopard and worse is that a good number of them contradict what a person would have learned.  Four finger swipe up now produces mission control rather than show desktop.  The show desktop gesture has now been replaced by a more awkward five finger gesture.  All in all, I spent the most time tweaking gesture settings on Lion than anything else after install.  Between the available options in System Preferences and BetterTouchTool I think I have things where I want them.

More annoying than the gestures is the addition of “natural scrolling.”  Natural scrolling reverses the scrolling direction when using the mouse wheel so that to scroll the page down you pull your fingers down on the trackpad or mouse.  The naming of this option is also interesting because unchecking the natural scrolling option says to the user they are about to enable something that is less natural.  I don’t think this could be further from the truth.  Like flying a plane, it’s natural for your body to want to push the stick forward to cause the plane to pitch down, but you push left or right to pitch left or right.  Natural scrolling makes complete sense on touch device where it is more like you are pushing a sheet of paper around.  At any rate, my issue comes in when you disable natural scrolling.  Not only does it reverse scrolling but it also reverses the direction used for changing spaces.  With natural scrolling off, using four fingers left causes you to go to the space on the left and four fingers right brings the space on the right into view.  In writing this makes sense, but in practice it feels awkward.

Lion also lacks the kind of polish I’ve come to expect from OS X.  Parts of it down right ugly.  Mail.app for example has a new layout which is great except for the hideous message count badging, shown below:

There is just something about the numbers that make them appear to be off in some fashion.

The boot process, at least what you see on screen, has been revamped some and I can’t help but feel that it all looks very clunky.  While the fading and moving the Apple logo from the center of the screen to above the list of users on the login screen is very clever, the steps required to move from boot splash to getting this animation setup is jarring.  The boot process basically boils down to showing the typical boot splash screen with the Apple logo which is then replaced with an image that looks the same and is ultimately used during the final animation that reveals the available users.  This transition just isn’t the kind of smooth and elegant thing a person would expect from Apple.  Couple that with the sometimes jarring color correction applied just prior to the animation effect and you have what is in my eyes a really poorly done boot sequence.  The shutdown process is also odd in that the desktop goes way and is covered with a plain gray screen.  The blue screen used in previous releases was much better and if it had to be replaced at all it should have been replaced with black.

All that said, there is a lot to like about Lion.  I find the autocorrect to be a fine addition.  I like Mission Control a lot, resume is a great feature, Mail.app’s new layout is superb and the refinements to iCal and Contacts are welcome.  I know Apple will fix the real bugs in the software but I can only hope they provide better System Preference options for customizing gestures.

I’m also surprised that none of the reviews I read seemed to point out the shortcomings of Lion and gave it glowing reviews.  As I said, there is a lot to like but it certainly isn’t perfect and I think Apple deserves to hear about it.  Lion isn’t Apple’s Vista by any means, but it’s obvious to me that Jobs had less input in this release than previous releases.

He cited sales “cheaper” smartphones like the the $49 iPhone 3GS as the primary reason for the lackluster performance.

It isn’t the $49 iPhone 3GS that is killing your tablet’s, it’s the lackluster performance. The Xoom is a dog and if it wasn’t for the badge at boot that proudly boasts there is a dual-core processor inside I would have never known.

The Macalope Weekly: The Noyes machine

Source

The reason is that binaries in /System are signed with Apple’s keys, which the haven’t made public. As far as I know this is also disallowed by GPLv3.

Of course it might also be that Apple isn’t satisfied with the progress of samba.

Source

While the eight step install process on android devices is annoying today, imagine if Amazon produced a their own tablet with their store already loaded on it.  I once said on twitter that for Android to really be as successful as iOS someone would have to take it and rebrand it as their own and build a great ecosystem around it.  Amazon has that ecosystem, they just need a mobile platform to sell on.

If Amazon were to create that mobile platform, and it included a phone and a tablet, I think Apple would truly have a competitor to worry about.

Apple’s new iPad 2 is currently so popular that it’s difficult to buy

Anyone still think Jobs was wrong to say iPad 2 “is the first dual-core tablet to ship in volume”?

“First dual core tablet to ship in volume.” That’s funny, I tested a Dell (DELL) Streak 7, which had a dual core Nvidia Tegra 2 chip in January. They’ve been shipping ever since on T-Mobile.

In volume.

Of course, the Motorola (MMI) XOOM also has this same dual core processor and is certainly shipping in volume as well. In fact, I’ve been using an Android phone (the Atrix) with a dual core chip for weeks and it wasn’t the first to ship in volume.  As for Apple (AAPL), they haven’t shipped one iPad 2 yet — iPad 2′s hit shelves on March 11.

Seth isn’t the only one to latch onto this quote and try to debunk it but what a lot of people are failing to realize is that, while others may be shipping dual-core tablets, it’s very safe for Steve Jobs to say that Apple will ship and sell a higher volume of iPad 2′s than any other dual-core tablet available today simply based on sales of the first iPad.  Indeed, if previous iPad sales are any indication at all, iPad 2 is going to be a huge hit. What other tablet device can claim that today?

And to say that Apple hasn’t shipped any iPads is completely naive.  Apple has a stock pile of second generation either en-route to stores or in stores already.  This is very common for any product.

Seth also tries to pick apart Jobs’ “>90% market share” bullet point.

Apple would have needed to sell 3.2 million more to reach 90% of 2010′s tablet market share against just Samsung alone (in triple the time).  That’s not including all of the Android-powered Nooks out there, those cheap $100 Androids you can buy at Walgreens or Amazon and even Windows-powered Tablet PCs (which are mentioned two bullet points above!).  If you choose to include the Kindle, Apple may not have even reached 50% of the market.

While he might have a point about the actual market share number his supporting arguments are just ridiculous.  First, the sales of “cheap $100 Androids” don’t even register, to the point where nobody is actually tracking them.  Second, there is no such thing as a Windows powered Tablet PC when you consider how tablets have come to be defined because of the iPad.  Nobody is selling a Windows powered tablet.  And last, attempting to bring in Kindle sales simply doesn’t make sense as the Kindle is a reading device, not a general purpose tablet device.  Talk about skewing data in your favor.  “Pot, meet kettle.”

Seth goes on to point out hardware specs and pricing.

Perhaps Jobs could have also compared the iPad 2 to other Android tablets’ prices? Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Dell’s Streak both now start at $499 and have better cameras, 3G radios and GPS, which seem to compete well with Apple’s $499 Wifi-only offering.  Reality distorted.

Know why the Tab and the Streak both now start at $499?  Because they’re not selling.

But hey the XOOM has better specs right?

But then consider that the XOOM has a much better, bigger 720P+ screen compared to the iPad’s 1024×768 job (it has less Retina™).

Where Seth wants to pick on Jobs’ use of the word “volume” saying it is subjective, so to is saying the XOOM’s screen is “much better.”  The iPad’s screen is an IPS panel giving it a much wider viewing angle where as the XOOM does not.  While it is true that the XOOM has a 720p display Seth, like so many other reviewers and Apple nay-sayers, fails to realize is that the iPad’s 4:3 format display makes much more sense than a 16:9 display format.  By giving a tablet a 16:9 display format you’ve essentially limited the device to a horizontal layout.  The iPads 4:3 format allows developers to create apps that favor either layout and still get good use from it.  Remember, the iPad is a general purpose device, not just some common movie player.

The only thing Seth got right in his troll piece is that Jobs misquoted Samsung’s CEO.