HDMI: Analog in Mac Mini is so good that it’s better to keep audio analog and transfer it over a high quality cable to a good amplifier, rather than mess with digital which is very sensitive as to its processing in different devices. I could turn on AppleTV with home sharing and always use HDMI output from there, but the quality would degrade over what I can get from Decibel playing 24-bit FLACs.

And, you can get mini with HDMI out: http://fairerplatform.com/2011/10/refurbished-macbook-pro-869-mac-mini-469/

Imagine my horror and consternation when I could not read a large number of Excel files hundreds and hundred of pages of Word Documents. (I am working on several books.) Are you supposed to buy a NEW MS Office? Are you supposed to laboriously transfer megabytes of data to Text edit or “Pages?”

When I complained that there was no rosetta and I could not print using my Epson 3800 or Designjet z3100, I was told, basically that I “should have known” because it (no Rosetta) was “widely” publicized! I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of Word documents and Excel files. Am I suppose to spend hundreds for new software?

Strangely, these omissions were not mentioned on the Lion site.

As an avid Mac Person since 1987 I have to say that I really felt betrayed. I may just go over to the “dark” (MS) side! (just kidding…)

Suffice it to say I am deeply disappointed. Things are working quite well and if I have to get another machine I hope I will be able to use the migration tool. (I plan to make a long trip and want to use a small laptop to for journaling and photography.)

But my major question is: If I buy a new mac for my research lab tomorrow – can I install SL on it? Because if not, a new Mac is USELESS to us for our current software needs – and this is software that we only purchased 1 year ago!

External storage is dirt cheap, if you don’t already have an external hard-drive laying around you could buy a Terrabyte drive for peanuts and install Snow Leopard or Lion on that and keep running it for AS LONG AS YOU WANT.

This website seems to host a bunch of whingers and I’m almost sad I bothered to read so many of the comments and to reply!

You are perfectly right, we shouldn’t upgrade. But about the whining: People have a right to express their thoughts about the new OS upgrade. A discussion shouldn’t be reserved for the newly born-again Apple fanboys (the “iCrowd”), but also for the long time mac users that thought differently even in the dark ages of the 90s. To me it seems like Apple is trying to sell their Macs to the iPad/iPod/iPhone users and in the process ignoring their long time users. The new Final Cut Pro X is another part of the same trend.

Apple is giving their old time users the finger with dropping Rosetta and FrontRow. Of course, they want to move on from old PPC code, but they should allow people some time to adjust. Rosetta and FrontRow could have been an optional install in Lion, like Rosetta was in Snow Leopard. Taking away functionality doesn’t really make sense. FrontRow is basically the AppleTV interface, so not including it or updating is probably a way of not making people aware that they don’t really need the Apple TV to view their movies on a TV screen.

What Apple add are some “new” gestures from the iDevices, an improved and renamed Exposé & Spaces, a Bonjour filesharing for Finder (AirDrop), they reintroduce the old (Mac System 6) MultiFinder “whole screen apps” idea from the late 80s that was dropped in system 7 and downgrade the Finder to greyscale. And they add the old AtEase “app launcher” that wasn’t a sucsess on the Mac in the early 90s. (Allthough it makes sense on the iDevices.) It’s an incremental downgrade from Snow Leopard.

And, who’s throwing tantrums?

But note the use of the future tense there. “Will” take the place of. Even though little Steve Jobs would rather it not be the case, the cold fact is that there is still a lot of Flash content out on the Web, and a lot of it is not going away any time soon. Moreover, HTML5 is no panacea, and is not evenly supported by browsers or Web sites.

It might be … someday … but it ain’t there yet, and it won’t be for some time to come.

Also, I just looked and found you CANNOT download Java for Mac. Sun (now Oracle) does not provide it, and will not provide it.

It would not have harmed Lion if Apple had kept Flash, Java, and even Rosetta. They just cut those things off because the childish Steve Jobs dislikes them and has thrown tantrums over their existence. That, unfortunately for Apple, is not a valid reason not to have included them.

I still have my old sunflower Mac. I guess I’ll get it out of mothballs and fire it up for that old stuff. It had to stop updating with Tiger, but all those old programs will still run on it.