Search for Vista in the Mac OS X 10.7 Apple Support Community discussion boards and you’ll see some folks who are stating that Lion is Apple’s equivalent of Windows Vista.
As much as I don’t care for some of the design decisions regarding Lion and have stated here that I’ve little intention to upgrade my main systems to use it, equating it to Vista is way over the top. Sure, many of us who were directly involved with Lion for the past few months felt that 11A511 was not really ready for primetime. However, since Apple was holding up hardware in order to preload Lion on them, (and like the lead time normally required when pressing disc media, Apple needed several weeks to get those new systems imaged with the GM version of Lion). As a result, it was pretty obvious there would be the usual .0 release issues (just how much or how bad was not known).
Rather than judge 10.7 against Windows Vista (or Windows 7 for that matter), it makes more sense to judge it against its predecessors (10.6, 10.5, 10.4, etc). Each one of those .0 releases had their share of problems and for some of these releases, took several updates to resolve them. And as mentioned before, I early adopted only 2 major releases; 10.2 and 10.4. Heck, from 2001 to 2005, I continued using Mac OS X Server 10.1.15 before finally upgrading to Tiger Server. And as detailed in my “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” post, I’m still using my G4 running Tiger Server to handle routing, NAT, and firewall services. Furthermore, I actually went and acquired a refurbished 2007 Intel Mac mini just so that I can run the universal binary version of Tiger Server to handle those same chores. Sort of reminds me of those who refuse to get off of Windows XP.
Sometimes, the need to upgrade to the latest version is a result of forced obsolescence. Yes, I understand the potential for unpatched security flaws in older versions of these software but I’m minimizing that by just using the box to handle these specific tasks and turning off the unneeded services and manually patching on my own. In this day and age, if I was able to get by with a 500MHz uniprocessor G4 handling all those server related tasks for the better part of 10 years, these two Mac mini’s have a long life in front of them. In terms of Lion Server compared to its predecessors, that in my opinion is an understated failure. Apple (IMHO) should not have released it in the state it was in without warning users of all its caveats.
