Mac OS X Lion Almost Ready?

Absolutely no way they'll release at WWDC. Release date maybe, but they have to give developers a decent heads-up.

Going by my experience with Developer Preview 3, Lion is nowhere near ready to be launched to the public.

This.

Safari went from a Crash-Spam-Bot-Machine to something which is no less annoying. Its not ready. There's hardly anything majorly new. Sure, it looks better. Sure, Fullscreen (which sucks for Spaces Users using CTRL <Insert Number>, since it takes the Fullscreen App to an alternate Window.....), sure, we get a few App re-vamps, but there's nothing truly new.

iTunes hasn't even received a single change, no new side-bar, nothing. This is not ready to go Live anytime soon. We're not even on a GM Candidate Build. There's a mile-long list of issues to fix, and Developers need to get their Apps sorted out still.

People have started base-less rumors that Lion will be launched at WWDC because they WANT it to be launched at WWDC. Its not ready to be launched at WWDC. I doubt they ever even planned to have it launched in time for WWDC.

At WWDC all that will happen is simple: We will get an iOS 5 Preview, and MAYBE, we'll get a few more incoming Lion Features Preview, along with a Release Date and Price Tag (unlikely). Most likely, they'll show off to the public the features that they're really not supposed to know about yet, seeing as the Lion Developer Preview is (technically) under NDA.

Its funny. They gladly slap a Teenager with a Lawsuit, but nothing on any of the various sites that are publishing Lion NDA Info. Not that I'm complaining.

Going by my experience with Developer Preview 3, Lion is nowhere near ready to be launched to the public.

To anyone who says that it has useless features, it really depends on your needs. If you're a gamer, you'd probably want Lion since it has OpenGL 3.2, which is a major upgrade over Snow Leopards offerings. If you're someone who is fine with the current offering in SL, then you could probably let this one go by. You should also note that since iOS 5 and Lion are being mentioned at the same time in WWDC, you should expect some sort of connection between the two, most likely through iCloud. In that case, new features would be added to Lion. I have used the Developer Preview of Lion and I can say that it is not yet ready for the consumer market. While it is much stabler than DP1, Safari and other applications still have various problems with them, some very serious. On top of that, if Apple announces new features at WWDC, then they'll need another DP, probably a GM release, that has all of the new features before actually releasing it to the public to iron out bugs. Don't expect any release of Lion at least until late July or maybe early August.

I feel like I'm on an iPad....

This is NOT a plus.

Really? Apparently TUAW has never actually used Lion, it's still very buggy.

But that wouldn't stop AOL from manufacturing link bait to get pageviews, it is the "AOL Way" (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way) of media engineering after all, right?

TRIM Support is already Live, I wouldn't really consider it a Lion Feature.

People have cracked the TRIM Support, you can use it with almost any SSD, Google "Trim Enabler."

Snow Leopard barely brought anything that Leopard didn't already have, it was a minor bump, so they sold it cheap. Was basically Leopard for free + a bunch of minor changes.

Its already been confirmed that there will be Lion DVDs for sale, its too early to go Digital-only. Most people's download speed is still too slow for this, and on Day 1...... It takes me about 2-3 hours to download each Lion Update, so you can only imagine how long it would take to download the whole thing from the App Store, especially with about 100 Million other people waiting at the same time.

I hope they really are secretly working on iTunes. Not a big Cloud fan myself yet, so just want to se what they've got planned, even without the Cloud. Maybe next Build they release to us.

If they're dicking about then they'd better take care of the Safari issues, and Mail is having an issue showing me the amount of Unread Mail I have in that big red circle in my Dock sometimes.

While we might really be on a GM Candidate Build as people say, IMO these Builds are not true Apple Quality GM Material.

Oh and, WWDC will probably have hands-on Final Cut Pro X (hopefully), so yeah. Just throwing that out there. Everyone seems to have forgotten about it since it was first announced. Maybe we'll finally get an introduction to the mythical iWork '11 too.

Speed?

Does anyone know how the perceived speed of Lion will compare to Snow Leopard?

you forgot the TRIM support. that has to count for something.

Only if they add support for non-Apple drives.

My questions are price and method of delivery. Seeing as snow leopard was $29 I am assuming somewhere around that price point which brings me to my second question of method of delivery.

The only reason SL was $29 was because it had little to no end-user features.
That said, I highly doubt they will go back to the $129 price point.

Given apples push to online distribution I am betting the update will be exclusively sold through the Mac AppStore. Just a hunch though

Exclusively that way? No. Internet needs to get better in more places first.

No. Lion simply makes OS X work a bit like iOS.

since I'm a little bit of a geek iOS features perhaps aren't that interesting for me :)
the only thing i find interesting till now is the save feature, which constantly saves files