macOS Lion — The macOS Archive

Announced: October 2010
Released: July 20, 2011
Follows: Snow Leopard (10.6)
Followed by: Mountain Lion (10.8)
Architecture: Intel, 64-bit

Overview

Back to the Mac — carrying everything the iPad had learned.

Apple called the event "Back to the Mac", and meant it literally: ideas that had gone out to iPhone and iPad were coming home. Launchpad, full-screen apps, natural scrolling, autosave, resume, and an operating system you bought from a store on the machine itself.

There was no disc. Lion was a download from the Mac App Store, thirty pounds, and if you needed media you bought a USB stick separately. It also removed Rosetta, ending PowerPC software on the Mac for good, and it introduced Recovery HD — a repair partition that meant you no longer needed the installer at all.

Launchpad

Every application, on a grid.

The iPad home screen, transplanted whole: pages of icons, folders made by dragging one onto another, and a swipe to move between them. Not everyone kept it — but it is still in macOS, and this archive's own front page is built on the idea.

Applications, as pages of icons

Features

What shipped.

Two hundred and fifty changes, a good half of them arriving from iOS.

Launchpad

Every app as a page of icons, with folders and swiping. Divisive on a desktop, but the clearest single statement of where Apple's attention had moved.

At launch

Mission Control

Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard and full-screen apps merged into one view. Simpler in principle; a good deal argued over in practice.

At launch

Full-screen apps

A proper system-level full screen with its own space and a swipe to reach it, rather than each app inventing its own.

At launch

AirDrop

Peer-to-peer file transfer between nearby Macs with no network setup at all. iOS would not get it for another two years.

At launch

Auto Save and Versions

Documents saved themselves continuously and kept a browsable history, presented in the same starfield Time Machine used.

At launch

FileVault 2

Full-disk XTS-AES-128 encryption of the whole volume, replacing Panther's encrypted-home-folder approach entirely.

At launch

Recovery HD

A hidden partition that could reinstall, repair or restore without any external media — the reason nobody keeps an install disc any more.

At launch

Mac App Store delivery

Lion was the first Mac OS sold only as a download. No box, no disc in the shop, £20.99 and about four gigabytes.

At launch

Rosetta removed

PowerPC applications stopped running altogether. For a lot of people this was the release that finally forced a decade-old application out of their workflow.

At launch

Direction of travel

The year the ideas started flowing the other way.

For twenty-five years the Mac had exported its ideas: windows, menus, the desktop metaphor, all of it went outward. Lion was the moment the traffic reversed and the iPad started sending things back — the icon grid, the full-screen app, scrolling that moved the content rather than the view.

Natural scrolling in particular caused genuine upset. Apple reversed the direction of two decades of muscle memory to match the touchscreen, made it the default, and left the switch in System Preferences for everyone who was not having it.

Desktop

Andromeda.

Lion's default was the Andromeda galaxy — a photograph, not an abstract, and the deepest the desktop had ever gone into space.

System Preferences › Desktop & Screen Saver

AndromedaA galaxy, face on

There was only ever one. A system-wide Dark Mode did not arrive until Mojave in 2018, so this page's light and dark appearances are ours, not Apple's — the switch in the corner still works, but the desktop of the day looked like this and only this.

Lineage

Where it sits.

Apple named ten releases after big cats before moving to California in 2013.

macOS 10.6 · 2009

Snow Leopard

Almost no new features, on purpose. Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, half the disk space.

macOS 10.7 · 2011

Lion

The iPad's ideas arriving on the Mac, delivered through the Mac App Store.

macOS 10.8 · 2012

Mountain Lion

iCloud everywhere, Notification Centre, Messages — and the year "Mac" left the name.

Compatibility

Machines that could run it.

Lion needed a 64-bit Core 2 Duo or better, which retired the first generation of Intel Macs built on the 32-bit Core Duo.

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo, i3, i5, i7 or Xeon
Memory: 2 GB
Disk space: 4 GB
Requires: Snow Leopard 10.6.6+
Delivery: Mac App Store download