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Athens · Jul 21, 2011, 01:41 AM

If those that have already installed Lion could post how you feel it performs on your hardware it would be helpful to those wondering if it would be worthy to upgrade. I myself want to know for a 2Ghz older Macbook with 2GB of Ram.

Ideal post your CPU/Model and Ram and general feelings on its performance related to youtube videos, movies in itunes, application launches and general web browsing performance. Im sure many people will find the information useful.

Helmling · Jul 21, 2011, 08:50 AM

2.4 Ghz MBP w/ 4 Gb.

Absolutely no discernable change in performance.

OreoCookie · Jul 21, 2011, 09:19 AM

Do you have a Core (non-2) Duo-based MacBook? If so, you will not be able to upgrade anyway since Lion requires a 64 bit cpu. The Core Duo is only a 32 bit processor and you need at least a Core 2 Duo.

I find Lion a bit smoother, e. g. Safari tends to use up less memory and the new version of iTunes are great. But you can get both on Snow Leopard. Since Lion is so cheap, I'd upgrade if I were you.

TETENAL · Jul 21, 2011, 09:21 AM

Mac mini 2 GHz Core2Duo / 2 GB

Lion feels a lot slower than Snow Leopard. What is really annoying is that as soon as there is some hard drive activity (Spotlight, Time Machine, page outs) the system becomes almost unusably slow. Snow Leopard didn't page out that much or it wasn't as noticeable to me. Safari 5.1/WebKit2 also seem to require a lot of RAM. It doesn't require many open tabs before you get the "white pages" hanging renderer process effect.

I plan to put the full 8 GB into my mini to get the performance back. I can't suggest running Lion with 2 GB RAM.

ajprice · Jul 21, 2011, 10:23 AM

MacBook, C2D 2.16GHz, 4GB RAM.

Once it finishes indexing the drive it runs about as well as Snow Leopard. No problems so far.

Athens · Jul 21, 2011, 11:52 AM

I spent a good part of last night testing Lion on my 2.5Ghz 2008 Macbook Pro. And I found it to feel a lot snappier. Stuff loads faster, the visuals are smooth. With the exception of a couple Apps, most app's which would bounce 2-4 times before opening from the dock now launch in 1 or less bounces.

Helmling · Jul 21, 2011, 12:03 PM

My performance issue is related to Time Machine. I'm getting errors on my backups and "disconnect all" pop ups more often. The funny thing is that when I check the modified date on the files in my Time Capsule, the time stamps indicate that the file is being updated.

frdmfghtr · Jul 21, 2011, 08:07 PM

Originally Posted by Athens

I spent a good part of last night testing Lion on my 2.5Ghz 2008 Macbook Pro. And I found it to feel a lot snappier. Stuff loads faster, the visuals are smooth. With the exception of a couple Apps, most app's which would bounce 2-4 times before opening from the dock now launch in 1 or less bounces.

On my mid-2010 21.5 inch iMac (3.06 GHz i3, 12 GB RAM) it certainly feels a lot faster than SL. Maybe that's because I was somewhat groggy at 4 AM, so the next few days will tell me more.

DigitalEl · Jul 21, 2011, 08:15 PM

Mid-2008 Core 2 Duo iMac. Lion feels a lot slower than Snow Leopard. Wish I could add more RAM, but I'm maxed out at 4 GB.

P · Jul 22, 2011, 07:01 AM

The fact that Lion is compiled with a newer compiler should imply some performance boosts on newer CPUs (use of SSE4, the AES instructions, different optimizations), while a Core 2 wouldn't see those boosts.