I haven't bought Lion yet, but the price is very reasonable for an operating system upgrade. If Microsoft charged only £20 or $30 to upgrade from XP to Vista or Vista to 7 I'm sure there would have been much higher take up.

I would not suggest you buy a Mac if you have a perfectly useable computer already. It is something to think hard about when it comes time to buy a new computer, and Macs can still run Windows in dual boot in case you need or want access to Windows software such as most audio games.

Interestingly though Apple has also released Lion Server on the App store as a separate set of applications which can be installed on any Mac running Lion, costing £35 which should be perhaps around $60? For just this price you can set up your own email server, web server, file transfer server, VPN server, wiki or any number of other things on a home computer. I don't know how accessible they are so I can't promise it'll work with voice over, I can't imagine it being excessively fancy but you never know.

Hey.

Got the upgrade as well, it's beautiful indeed.
Apple did some overhauls of VoiceOver in garage band, making things such as resizing regions, moving the end of song indicator and such way easyer as well.
They also added multilingual voices, which is beautiful if you're a dane like me.
They simplified drag and drop too, there's a full list of things revamped with Voiceover on the apple site.
On the whole I agree with cx2, launch pad and mission control are neat, but I haven't really used them so far.
Also, note that the downloads in safari are now a button on the toolbar, which opens a pop-over. I haven't found a way to open the pop-over without interacting with the toolbar and pressing the button, someone correct me here if I'm wrong please.
Sorry for the unstructuredness of this post, but those are my views so far.
Malthe.

Ah. The iTunes thing might be because of some indexing stuff that's going on the first couple of hours as far as I read.
Yeah, VO is pretty good about running in the installers, I've only done recovery in snow leopard from a bootable dvd, but I'd think it would work. I'll have to try it out at some point

One thing someone might want to do before upgrading is back up the app file and get the DMG file out of the app package, so you can burn a dvd or make a USB drive that is bootable so you can do recovery and such, even if your disk fails completely.
the installer removes itself after lion is installed, so you need to take the backup before you actually run it (just quit it when app store launches it, and do what you have to).

Luckily I've managed to find an option to turn off saving the state of software, I personally much prefer opening them fresh. I've also tried out the recovery partition and yes Voice Over works fine in it.

I know there is a way to redownload Lion even if you've already installed it but I don't think it's accessible. Apparently you have to click the purchases tab in the app store while holding down the option key, the voice over command to perform a mouse click requires you to hold the option key so I'm not sure that counts.

CW, yes that's pretty much the case. Of course being able to reinstall without sighted help if you ever need to is a very reassuring ability, I don't think you even need to worry about CD keys and voice over should work completely in the installs once you turn it on. You just have to let it boot first with no feedback, just leave it a minute or two then hit command F5 and it'll be talking right away. Mac OS is also very low maintenance, you don't need to defragment it and software conflicts are rare to non-existent. Drivers for most well known brands of printer and scanner are built in so you don't even need the disc for drivers, though you might for OCR software and that kind of thing. I miss being able to fiddle but it is an unbelievably hassle free experience.

Hi,

You almost got it. I am not sure if this works in the appstore but what i do in iTunes for option-click, for example to custom restore my iPhone:
Move mouse to voiceOver cursor, then turn voiceOver off and do option-click on trackpad, then turn voiceOver back on

I'm going to get a mac very soon and I have mixed feelings about lion.
The international voices are a definate improvement... seeing before you had to pay 200 euros for acapela voices.
What i'm not really keen on, however, is the new autosaving feature and all the revision stuff. Probably because I've really got used to having a file without the system handling keeping backups behind the scenes, so the idea seems rather disturbing... though now that i'm writing about it I can see the positive end of it.

I'll say that Lion is awesome and have some great improvements. However, the new Safari is great in many ways, but the mouse won't follow Voceover which makes me unable to right click and open a link in a new winow. I see a lot of focusing issue which I really hope will be fixed very soon. And yes. I've tried webkit!

It's the rendering engine that safari uses.
Nokia, google and amazon use it in their browsers as well.

Webkit is like the engine Safari uses for viewing websites. You can download webkit as an application so you always run the latest build. The guys who are working on the engine works much faster than the guys who updates Safari, which means lots of bugs are fixed in webkit which might be fixed in Safari months later it has been released in the webkit app.

Hi, this is kind of off topic well it is to do with macs but not with lion exactly... well ok, not at all. smile

i am going to a sighted college and am going to study music tech and am going to buy a macbook  with lion already installed on it off someone. will my question is because i am going to have to use garage band and maybe protools. (pro tools)  in the loop brouser for garage band how do you play a  loop?
i mean how do you play and stop a loop that you have selected in the loop table.
any help would be greatly apresheated.
thanks.
love and light,
brad.