Moving To OS X Lion - The Way OS Upgrades SHOULD Be

With the release of  OS X 10.7.2 (aka "Lion") - I decided it was time to make the jump from Snow Leopard (aka 10.6.x) to the new OS.

Now, I'm not a huge fan of major updates to any operating system. I dreaded going from Windows XP to Windows 7, and although it was less painful jumping from Leopard (10.5) to Snow Leopard - I still had to update a bunch of applications so they would work properly.

Plus, there are only two ways you can update to Lion - download the updater from the Apple App Store application for $30 - or buy a thumb drive at an Apple Store for $70.

I decided to go with the all-digital version - and downloaded the 3.3GB(!) update from the App Store application on my MacBook Pro.

After it completed the download, it took about 5 minutes to install some installer files - asked to reboot, and then there was simply a splash screen with a progress bar telling me it would be about 33 minutes.

Uh oh.

I know that when XP installs - it also gives a time "estimate" as well. It'll say 20 minutes, then jumps to 40 minutes, then 5 minutes, then 18 minutes then it finishes. I was ready for more of the same...

Nope.

33 minutes - and it was done. Just like the progress indicator showed.

And everything was where it was before. All my desktop icons were exactly where I put them (no auto "helpful" clean up and reorganization), all my shortcuts worked, everything was smooth as silk.

Then, ever a glutton for punishment, I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 5.0... it was the same kind of thing. Download, push down to the phone, phone restarts itself, done.

To be fair there were a couple of moved icons - it tried to put the bookshelf in the lower left of the first screen, so it moved the icon that was there to a (new) blank page 2 - and added the new icon for the video application on to page 2 as well... but that was easy to change in iTunes.

Then I decided to update Quickbooks on my virtual machine (running XP) - from QB 2008 to QB 2012.

What an utter nightmare.

I had to up the memory allocation (which mean re-booting XP), then I had to free disk space, then run the installer. So the installer first checks the download (4 minutes), unpacks the installer stuff (5 minutes), prompts for the registration code (in step 2), installs .NET Framework 4 (15 minutes) - and then crashes because of some unintelligible error it hit when installing the .NET framework.

Restart XP again, restart installer - goes through the download check (4 minutes), unpacks the installer (5 minutes), prompts for registration code, installs .NET Framework (10 minutes), installs who-the-hell-knows what else (10 minutes) - and then it says it needs to reboot (!).

Restart XP again. I've just spent a little less than an hour to install one application - versus 33 minutes to install a major OS update (plus about the same amount of time downloading the huge OS X installer).

My experience with the Apple stuff remains consistently good. I'm not saying Apple is 100% - there have been some "fails" as well - but they have been few and in between - versus consistently constant on the Windows side of the house. What's your experience been?