As certified Apple OS X Developers, we had access to Lion betas long before it was available to the public. When I first installed it, I was amazed by how cool, and fast it was.

Soon, I noticed issues with Mail not working correctly, and Microsoft Office barely worked at all. I kept running into issues, so after just a few hours, I reverted back to Snow Leopard.

Then another beta came out. And another. And another, and so on. I gave it another shot, this time with my home machine. The fourth beta was stable enough to use in daily life, although I found some problems with Final Cut. Still, it worked pretty good.

Pretty soon the GM (Gold Master) was released and shortly after that, the official version. I installed it over Beta 4 (which, if you recall, had to be installed over Snow Leopard). Pretty soon I started noticing weird things:

• The trash always seemed to have file in it.
• The trash was very slow to empty, in fact it would some times freeze.
• The system seemed sluggish – and it shouldn’t with 12 cores and 16GB of RAM, with the OS running on a fast 200GB SSD drive.
• Certain apps, like Photoshop, seemed to leak memory because the longer I had them open, the less RAM was available.
• The hard drive was filling up very quickly with memory cache, and in fact some times I would come back a day later to find warnings that my drive was nearly full even though I hadn’t done anything on the computer. Eventually I figured out this was because of the memory leak.