I love my Macbook. It's user interface is intuitive, it allows me to be significantly more productive than I ever was on my PC, and it talks with all of my other gadgets much better than clunky Microsoft programs. That said, I'm worried. My Macbook now runs on the MAC OS X Snow Leopard, which is a satisfyingly fast and intuitive operating system, but Apple's new OS X Lion (10.7) released and may change all of that. Apple's mission with its new Lion operating system was to rethink the appearance and mobility of their user interface, downsizing the interface to better emphasize content.  Unfortunately their downsizing and retooling has made for some potentially frustrating changes to navigation.

     To begin with, the scroll bars that have become a cyber-cultural staple of all windows navigation (Mac or PC) are gone. Not completely gone, they're there, but now they're contextual. What that means is that the cursor needs to be over the area where the scroll bar to appear, and even then it's a mere 4 or 5 pixels across. Good luck grabbing it. This is made even further frustrating should one want to resize the window. Remember the cluster of pixel "grip lines" in the bottom right corner? Those have been made contextual as well, by changing the cursor shape to a double-axis arrow when the cursor has move to either one of the four sides or four corners (no longer are we limited to a single corner for resizing). That said, the windows do not have borders, which creates an infuriatingly small contextual box in order to find a resize area. Furthermore, the content inside the window is very close (ever overlapping) with this contextual resize area. The result is clicking on content might result in simply resizing the window and visa-versa.  Even the window widgets in the top-left corner, the red, yellow, green buttons, are slightly smaller and less shadowed.

    Evidently in developing Lion, Apple decided that everyone would have 28 in. screens on their laptops and that it would be a simple thing to find 3-pixel-wide contextual areas to resize, scroll, and "grab" windows. I expect that after Lion rolls out en masse it will be fairly easy to find the new Mac OS users at the coffee-shops and Apple stores; they'll be the ones hunched over their computers, squinting into their screens, ever-so-gently feathering their track pads and mousers as they position their cursors in just the right place to select their content. Perhaps this is what Apple meant by emphasizing content over interface...by the time you're able to do what you want you through the interface celebrate having opened the content. (Chicken-dance in the internet cafe?) It probably won't be as bad as all that, but those people that rely on fluidly moving through their Mac's storage may find their productivity slightly slowed as they attempt to navigate more carefully through the interface.

     In a big picture sense, Apple has toned down some of the harsh borders, adopting their trademark soft-sky blue tone to each window and tool, and animating everything; and in Lion I do mean everything. Even new windows open as an animation, appearing as a small dot on the desktop and quickly ballooning to their full size every time. They've kept much of the Snow Leopard animations as well, like the water rippled effect when dropping new apps onto the desktop, or cloud-burst when removing apps from the dock.

     Ultimately I feel that both Apple and Microsoft have attempted to develop too much with their present operating systems; where Microsoft (after a botched Vista attempt) has created ever-clunker interfaces and programs, Apple has tried to create to intuitive an interface that may actually slow down the average user on the average-sized screen. Read the voluminous review by John Siracusa at ArsTechnica