According to 9to5mac the newest OS from Apple will be available for download from the Mac App Store on July 14th. While this is all well and good for new transfers to Mac, Mac has a history of flashing something shiny and new in our faces while forgetting about the old guard. I'm talking about those people who may not be able to run OSX Lion on their legacy hardware; ie any G3/G4 Processor or non Intel Core 2 Duo and the people who just spent a chunk on all that new Mac gear.
What should these people do? Well here's a quick guide so you won't agonize on whether or not you really need Lion.
1. If it AIN'T broke, don't fix it.
You use your equipment everyday and you don't have any major issues. Sure, it's a bit slower but so are you, it's called age people. You probably won't be using all of the features Lion has to offer anyway if your still playing with one of those smaller cats (Leopard, Tiger, Panther and heaven forbid Jaguar).
2. It won't work correctly immediately anyway.
In this brave new world of hackers, encryption errors, red rings of death internet connection failures, I have full confidence that even if you are one of the first early adopters, it just won't work. Unless you like to brag, you can wait to give Apple more of your money while they update it to at least 10.7.3.
3. Buy USED not OLD.
I have seen this mistake made by people constantly. They want the appeal of owning a Mac so they buy one from eBay or another similar site but they buy one that is far to old. How do you know if it's too old? The price. If it is more than $300 less than Apple's current compatible model, it's probably not a good candidate for upgrading software. The best time to buy used is when Apple refreshes their product line (which just happened). People who just purchased hardware that has been revised will want to sell quickly to possibly purchase the newest model.
Once again, keep what you got, wait or but used to be apart of the pride.
Once July 15th hits, we shall see if Lion really can be King of the OS Jungle.
I hope this helped to Ninja some of that fat...
-Ninja T
