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.