Need advice on upgrade from Snowleopard to Lion on MacBk Pro (15" late 2008)

Question

I want to be able to synch my calendar on new iPhone, home MacBook Pro and office PC (with MS Office)... and I think I have figured out that I need to get Lion on my Mac instead of Snow Leopard.  Are there things I need to do to make this upgrade actually work?  I am a big user, but not so much a smart Mac user... kind of new to it.. advice appreciated.  pitfalls or suggestions... any reasons not to do it?

Answer 1

Sara MacApple wrote:
So, do you have any advice about how I can synch my MacBookPro calendar with my iPhone?
Apple has incorporated features like that into iCloud, then restricted that to only users of 10.7 Lion as  leverage. They won't allow iCloud on 10.6 because people wouldn't upgrade. 10.6 runs a lot of expensive previously purchased software that there isn't a upgrade out yet. If people install Lion anyway on older hardware it slows most machines down and that encourages them to buy a new Mac prematurely. So you see what's going on here.
Apple changes stuff way too fast, then they quickly burn their bridges and previous users  behind them in the process. For instance, Apple doesn't support 10.5 at all anymore with security and stabilty updates, and that's a mere 4 year old OS X version.
Not to praise Microsoft, but they do support 10 year old XP still, 5 year old Vista and Windows 7 is going to be supported for at least 10 years or even longer. Windows 8 is going to run Windows 7 software too. So with Windows PC you can run your hardware until it drops dead, buy your software once every 10 years.
Apple has this crazy notion that we all should be replacing our hardware and expensive software on a 3 year basis. When in reality properly taken care of Mac hardware can last a decade easily, I have a XP friend who's Dell desktop is over 10 years old and still works fine.
If your a luxury consumer and just use your Mac for the basics,  can keep up with the 3-4 year expensive hardware and software changes, then buy all means buy a new Mac with Lion and get iCloud and then sync to your iPhone. Use the old Mac as backup for software that isn't ready for 10.7 yet.
If your more a Pro and/or conservative user, perhaps have a heavy investment in software, your machine is working perfectly, have a more longterm objective, then you should consider forgoing the new OS X features until third party software has released Lion compatible versions/updates and then make a decision to upgrade hardware and software at the same time so your workflow continues with the least disturbance.
Apple prefers to cater to the luxury consumer more than the "Pro" market because the luxury consumer can be leveraged to buy hardware on a faster upgrade cycle. The Pro user is trying to make money and therefore thinks more longterm to extract value out of their purchases.
I know this is a long winded answer, but since your machine is 4 years old and Lion will be slow on it, require opening up the machine to install RAM and replace all your software, you might as well buy a new machine to get the feature you want. If your not prepared to buy a new machine, then forgo it and learn to live without the new feature, your machine could last another 4 years easy and by then there might be no more computers, just all tablets or something, because Apple is ALWAYS changing.
If you take a serious look at Lion, you'll realize it's a transitional OSX version, to what exactly and what form of new hardware it will run on (perhaps even Apple's own processors) is a mystery. So Iv'e decided to stay on 10.6 for all the software choices, printers works just fine to, even on my new 2011 Mac and just wait it out and not thrown several thousand dollars away in a mere 3 years for no reason. When Apple gets to wherever they are going and settles down, the software industry catches up, by then my hardware will likely be ready for a upgrade, if I don't like waht Apple is doing, then I will switch to a alternative. But I won't be lead around on a leash and my wallet abused by Apple any longer, they need to grow up and act like a mature computer products company and quit dropping support for older OS X versions.