What is it?
Any change disturbs a routine. Apple has had a big disturbance planned for some time now and it’s now almost time for its public release. It’s another major upgrade for Mac OS X. They’ve bumped the version number to 10.7 and they’re calling it Lion.

Let’s get features out of the way:

• In Lion, you never have to save a file. Versions maintains file history for when you want to revert to a previous version in a beautiful interface that looks like Time Machine.
• Reverse inertial scrolling - it feels almost natural but only after you get used to it. You can change the direction in System Preferences - an option that’s included only to avoid criticism its absence might have brought.
  Also new are the auto-hide scroll bars first introduced on the iPhone. They probably did this for the scrolling to feel more familiar.
• Mission Control finally merges Exposé and Spaces to one screen conserving space without screen clutter.
• Launchpad looks like an iOS home screen, stays in view and docked if needed.
• New Photo Booth - new effects(few employ some very neat face detection) + full screen view.
• The new Mail brings a double split-view appearance with some of the iPad’s Mail.app experience sprinkled on top.
• Really nice fullscreen views for many apps, Y! in iChat, FaceTime, AirDrop, system wide autocorrect as you type are nice little additions too.
• Internal changes - new APIs, OpenGL 3.2, additional support for OpenCL, etc.

Who is it for?
There are generally two major(vocal) camps of users that talks about any release - people who praise it for being a solid upgrade and those who will most definitely switch but continue complaining about it being no better than a comparable Windows Service Pack update. I’d say both these seemingly opposite views are only masked to look different when they’re really the same - Lion does seem as much a service pack as every previous release of OS X I’ve used has and it does also appear to be a solid release.

There is also the third camp that stays silent before, through and after the upgrade - they are not as affected by our biased opinions and they upgrade to use what they find necessary when they see fit. This is also the camp Apple seems to make Mac OS X incrementally better for, because they accept changes that do not make them too uncomfortable.

Where do you score a copy?
You’ll be able to get a copy on the App Store through Snow Leopard, or when you buy your next Mac. If you talk about new features, it’s got a lot of things that users of iOS devices will feel right at home using. Most of it is probably not as jaw dropping as Apple would like you to see. If Apple called it revolutionary, they know how to market their operating system well. But at $30 a pop, it isn’t all that bad.

I’m not even talking about how much more useful it has become, because a lot of others might want to say some very nice things soon.