OS X Lion Coming Wednesday at 8:30 am?

Will OS X Lion drop this week on Wednesday? One report says it will show up in the Mac App Store at 8:30 am Eastern Wednesday morning. Based on the stability of the latest Lion gold master, it looks to be ready for the average user with some exceptions.

UPDATE: Apple just announced in their earnings call that OS X Lion is shipping tomorrow.

OS X Lion Mission Control Screenshot

If you are planning to update to the new OS remember that it will most likely update your system through a download from the Mac OS X App Store instead of the traditional method of buying an update DVD. We hope that Apple will include a way to create a separate OS X Lion USB boot disk so that users can reinstall the operating system on the Apple MacBook Air, which does not have a built-in optical drive. A USB install speeds up installation on other Mac too.

You can update your current system with Lion and it will likely result in a perfectly working system. However, we like to install a new version of an operating system on a cleanly reformatted drive. This strategy results in a clean system without all the software you no longer use or files you no longer need like downloaded programs or unused files. Check out our guide for getting ready for OS X Lion before you get started.

If the new version comes Wednesday, spend the next day or two preparing your Mac. Be sure to follow the third item in the guide by creating a Time Machine backup of your current system. That way you can more quickly get back to a working system with most of your programs and files in place using our guide to the OS X Migration Assistant.

The immanent release of Lion will result in a number of other software updates. LogMeIn is an excellent remote control system with clients for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. Unfortunately it is not completely compatible with Lion. When a user remotely logs into a system running the beta version of Lion and Lion all they see is a black screen. There may be others that are incompatible too.

To find out if your favorite apps will work as of the release of the Lion Gold Master, see the comprehensive chart at Roaring Apps.

Source: Apple Insider