Manish Singh

Lets look at some of the reasons why you should upgrade to Mac OSX Lion.

Price: Considering it only costs $29.95 USD, its a big plus point if you want to try the new OS.

Encryption: Lion offers full hard disk encryption through File Vault 2. If your laptop contains sensitive information you may want to consider upgrading.

Apple Softwares: Many apple softwares in Lion have gone through a major overhual. New interface, more features. For eg, if you use Apple Mail extensively, that may be a reason enough to upgrade.

Networking: The new Apple feature called Airdrop allows you to send and share files with other apple users nearby. If you use Apple in a small office/team setup, you can quit using third party apps for this feature.

Usability: With new multi-touch features, tablet OS like interface, Full screen viewing and other 250 such features, it will be a boost to productivity.

Now lets look at reasons for not upgrading

Its new. Yes Lion has been in public beta for sometime and whole upgrade works smoothly. But its still a new OS. As with anything new, there are unknowns. It may be wise to just wait for few weeks and let more user reviews be posted about Lion before taking the decision to upgrade.

Also if you use any specific application that is not yet compatible with Mac OS X Lion, you should consider waiting.

There are lot of new features in Lion like versions which help you maintain file versions. However, they change the way mac users save files. There is a learning and "getting used" curve involved which may cause frustration to some users. If you are one of those types, you may want to postpone the decision by few months until these issues are ironed out.

Performance wise there is no data to suggest that Lion is better or worse than Snow Leopard.

As for me, I will be upgrading to Lion in few weeks. The 250+ new features are worth the price!

Before you upgrade make sure to clone your hard disk, just in case you decide to switch back to Snow Leopard.