Getting a little bored waiting for the mortgage company to decide on our loan (or ask for yet more information), so I decided to upgrade my old (2008) MacBook.  This time yesterday, it was running Leopard (not Snow Leopard) and had a badly full VMWare Fusion / Windows Vista installation that I no longer need.  Today, as we speak, I’m up and running with Lion!

In the past, my Mac OS upgrades have been hit or miss.  They’ve all installed OK, but I’ve ended up having to manually move iTunes libraries — the last time getting my purchased music but losing everything else — and then having problems with re-authorization.  Or trying to find passwords to reinstall aps and e-mail accounts, etc. Still, they were easier than reinstalling Windows XP.

This time, I bought a cheap external hard drive, ran Time Machine once, then disconnected it and put in Snow Leopard (from a family pack left over from my wife’s installation), erased the hard drive (not necessary, but I wanted a clean install), and launched.  As it was finishing, it said, roughly, that if you happen to have a Time Machine backup, I can import all your apps, user info, iTunes libraries, e-mails and settings, etc.  Boy, do I ever, plugged in the external, and said go.  About half an hour later, I was in business — e-mail, iTunes, movies, login info and the lot.

A quick trip to the app store, a three hour download and installation, and voila, Lion.

Because my wife occasionally lets me use her iPad2, I was familiar with the basics of using Lion.  It’s great. I was able to scare my wife out of two years growth when I rang her iPad from my FaceTime app.  If my computer had a touchscreen and no keyboard, it would now be an overweight iPad.  My guess is that in a couple of years, the only difference between an iPad and a MacBook will be the attached keyboard on the laptop.

So instead of improving the laptop, Apple is growing the iPhone / iPad into its replacement.  Who would have thought, almost 10 years ago to the day, that a fat, overpriced portable music player would be the future of personal computing?  Makes you wonder where they’re going with all this.