Ready to upgrade to Lion - Are you sure?

Mac OSX 10.7 aka Lion was recently released and many Mac users jumped on the band wagon and upgraded. It's always wise to wait until the dust settles after major releases, even Apple's extensive testing cannot predict some of the quirks that arise. There are two reasons why I'm glad I didn't jump at loading Lion onto my laptop.

The first reason is several of my programs are not Lion compatible, meaning they use the old PowerPC architecture, which Lion no longer supports. You too can check your compatibility by going to the Apple Menu > About this Mac

Then select More Info...

Then select the Applications list from the left hand column and look for any programs that have PowerPC in the Kind column. Any of the PowerPC applications will not work in Lion (or so I've read from others, haven't actually tried this yet).

The second reason I'm glad I didn't upgrade yet was this article. Apple accidentally re-charged customers for their Lion upgrades of $30 multiple times and in one case 122 times for a total near $4,000! I hope they get this figured out shortly.

Also - always remember to backup your files before upgrading. My next post will be about making a bootable backup of your Mac using the built-in Disk Utility.

Looking for our next home

Recently Brandy and I have been talking more and more about our next place. We currently rent an in-law apartment from my parents. The space has been great for us while living on my income with Brandy in school, rent is cheap and my parents have been able to help us out in many ways. We are contemplating moving out soon and have waver back and forth on our options. We see several options:

1)We can continue to rent the space until we've put a good dent in college loans and saved up a downpayment on a house. - Looks great on paper but it would take another two years (not sure our, nor my parents' patience is up for that!)

2) We could rent an apartment. - A decent apartment in our area is $900+ a month which is almost a mortgage payment but doesn't require the downpayment.

3) We could try to get mortgage for a small starter house. - Not ideal space but avoidable and would be an asset to resell later in order to purchase our dream home. 

It's hard to make big financial decisions with so many variables. Some things that come to mind are: the housing market is down, I wish we could take advantage of it - or - an apartment seems like counter productive - or - if we bought a starter house, we could get stuck with it later... Ahh so many things to think about. I keep telling Brandy and myself that we shouldn't think or stress over it until she has reliable employment as a dental hygienist, but it is difficult to maintain that mentality.