So what are the differences in the "graphics subsystems" that you're talking about?

Oh, to add to my laundry list -- The Preview.app in Lion is a useless slow, crashing, clusterfuck. I deleted it and copied Preview from a SL install. That actually made me enjoy Lion slightly more.

Yes, Mac Pro users are a minority of mac users. So what? Support effort would be minimal. We're not talking about supporting a parallel architecture or even outdated hardware! I didn't downgrade immediately--how many people actually downgrade when it's harder to do that? How many people make a snap decision in a day or even a week? I would hardly say that by NOT downgrading I am unusual! I have to support newer Macs, so I eat the dogfood, so to speak. Unfortunately in this case, the release was dogfood (imho of course). I'm not sure how getting samba from ports is supposed to solve Finder browse issues or Finder samba access problems on Lion workstations?

Basically, the only way I am cutting against the grain is by not faithfully upgrading my computer every 4 years. My MBP is almost the same age (and runs better than new thanks to memory and an SSD), yet it supports Mountain Lion? Its specs are inferior in every way to the vastly more expensive (and expandable and upgradeable) Mac Pro.

Look, you can justify this however you want. Apple will do the same. The bottom-line is, for a lot of users, it's a kick in the face, and yet another symptom of an Apple that increasingly cares about nothing but iOS and iOSification of OSX. It's sad for me.

Expose now has the option to "ungroup application windows". I had read somewhere of some spaces improvement, but I am not sure about this.

Don't get me wrong, PPC is still a feature we use. In fact, I still have one computer at work running 10.4 (Dual g4 1.25ghz) for one server application that would require a $10,000 upgrade to run on Intel. We used Classic mode for years. What I meant with my statement was, I'm ok with Apple dropping PPC support roughly 7 years after a major hardware transition. It affected several programs we do use, so we had to phase them out on new purchases and keep older computers on older operating systems. Mostly iMacs. I don't think this is analogous.

Let me put my overall complaint like this. How hard would it be for Apple to code their own Chameleon equivalent? Or to buy Chameleon's technology? What kind of investment? 100k? 500k? A million? Pocket change for Apple, and they would have made a lot of Mac Pro owners (who are ALREADY not happy about upgrade paths) happy, and increased sales of Mountain Lion. Yes, this is amplified by the fact that I'm stuck on Lion unless I want to spend a lot of time migrating back to a prevision Snow Leopard install. This is the first OSX upgrade (Lion) that I felt has been a regression. There's not one feature I miss on my Snow Leopard computers. MacPro1,1's aren't going to be driving Retina displays, but neither are the earlier 64-bit macbooks and imacs that ARE supported. That's entirely a red herring.

*I* wasn't talking about anything. The post you just replied to was my first post in this thread.

I do, however, agree with the OP. My MacPro 1,1 is quite a snappy computer. I dare say it's faster than many of the 2-year-old iMacs or Mac Minis we have at our office for daily use. I think it's ludicrous that Apple isn't extending support. The Mac Pros have barely been upgraded in what -- 2-3 years? Saying "well, just wait another year" seems the epitome of the uncritical (indeed ANTI-criticism) Apple Boy.

Realistically, given the 3rd party solutions (that I will probably try) to get ML running on a MP1,1 Apple could have easily done the same. Apple could have bought out the project even. Instead they focus on twitter integration, facebook integration, gamecenter, and so forth. It's been a very good ~10 years of Apple computers. I'm afraid the software quality is on a downward spiral, however.

Dropping classic? No problem.
Dropping PPC? No problem.
Dropping support for perfectly good, fast, powerful hardware? Not good in my book.

I don't believe you can restore from a Lion Time Machine backup to Snow Leopard. Do you know?

Except for the ungroup application windows option! I'm glad this is one of the instances where Apple listened to a groundswell of disappointment over the removal of a feature. Spaces is also improved (ie, returned more to the way it was)?

In terms of the built-in samba/smb integration. We have had some persistent browse / connection issues with multiple Lion workstations on our office network. I've read reports that Mountain Lion seems to work better in mixed environments.

If you read the forums where people are talking about their Mountain Lion experiences, even with the beta many people are reporting decreased memory usage and greater stability in ML than in Lion. With my one computer running Lion, I have had more freezes or situations where the system gets into a weird state (my computer got locked into Mission Control a week ago. In the miniature windows I could type, press buttons, etc, but Mission Control would not dismiss. Very bizarre. Had to hold down the power button) than any other OSX revision I've used. That's what I mean by stability and memory usage.

Wow, I've been called an Apple Fanboy on Slashdot before, but you're really taking things to new level. You even make ME hate Apple users (and I'm on a MBP, use a Mac Pro, have an iPhone and 2 iPads, etc).

Have a stable non-crappy operating system. Can't do that with Lion...

I kept my home systems on 10.6. I upgraded my work MacPro 1,1 to Lion. I wish I hadn't. It sounds like Mountain Lion fixes a lot of the stupidest annoyances of Lion: restores Exposé functionality, restore Spaces functionality, more save Save/Save As/Versions/Duplicate semantics and functionality, stability fixes, samba fixes, memory handling fixes, etc.

I don't like Thunderbird (hilarious bugs like this one are part of the reason why), but it's what most people at work use on Windows. Mac users primarily use OSX mail.app. I also find the searching majorly FUBAR.

So now that Thunderbird is getting fewer resources, are there any other options? What other clients are people using on windows?

The word meteor comes to us from ancient Greek, with some kind of meaning of lifting up. Obviously the original etymological meaning is irrelevant to users of the modern phrase, but it's perhaps ironic that the meaning fits.

The phrase "meteoric rise" has been used at least since the 1860s in print, and probably earlier than that in speech. Today we may know that meteors are drifting chunks of rock that burn up in the atmosphere or crash to the ground, but what about 200 years ago? What did (at least most) people know about meteors? They knew what they saw. Remember that night skies looked very different 200 years ago. Meteors were flashes of light that appeared out of nowhere, raced across the sky, and were gone. Inexplicable.

Thus the phrase "meteoric rise" traditionally (I would say "always" but I think you might argue this point? it certainly in common usage implies all these things) had insinuations of the rise being ephemeral. A "meteoric rise" is unexpected, fast, and ephemeral. Two out of three ain't bad for describing the iPhone; we'll have to see about the ephemeral part!

So no, your assumption is basically completely wrong. What did you mean by "it's almost as if people are being tested to see how stupid they are"? I'm really not sure what you're saying,

I THINK the reason the software doesn't work is that it uses a hardware dongle for license verification, and I think the dongle kernel extension doesn't work for Intel. Not sure.

I have one server app that I have to run on a PPC still (it never worked on Rosetta). There is a new version, however upgrading to an intel binary would cost $10k and add no new features or speed.

So I keep an old G4 running OSX 10.4 running in a closet. When it dies, I have 3 other (no longer used) computers to scavenge for parts or replace in whole.

I'm not losing any sweat over the transition. The only really painful thing was having to buy all new Adobe CS licenses for Intel when we were happy with the old versions.

True, but given the contexts in which they are used by 99% of the people on the planet, there's little effective difference.

Maybe the distinction will gain more relevance with future developments, but I don't see the lb making it off the earth as a unit of any use.

You'll love this then -- just go to google and type "50,706 lbs to kg". There, now you know a brachiosaurus might have have weighed roughly 22,999 kilograms. Since you didn't know kilograms and lbs could be converted, you might not know that 1 kg is approximately 2.2 lbs. I guess that's only useful if you want to hang out on US websites, watch US films, or read US books, but it might come in handy.

Keep up the good fight against other people doing things differently than the way you're used to. Internet message boards are a perfect place to make people change their minds by insulting them!

You're missing the point completely (and have a lot of angry-sounding posts on this article!).

Pros and cons / price and utility.

The utility of a platter disk is a lot of space. The cost is low.

The utility of a SSD is a lot of speed (heat/noise/droppability also in the list). The cost is high.

For me, it sounds like the GP, and many others, the pros and cons are solidly on the side of the SSD. I too ended up deleting some stored videos and images on my laptop. Like the GP, I sometimes miss some of the extra data that is now on a different computer, but it's totally worth it. Getting an SSD was the best upgrade I've done in the past 10 years. I would make the same decision again any time.

Who in the what now?