Apple Unleashes Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

Apple has unleashed their new Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" operating system to the world today via the Mac OS X App Store.

Apple is no longer spinning CD/DVDs but using the Mac App Store is the only way to obtain this new Apple operating system for Intel hardware owners. The cost for the digital download is $29.99 USD.

New to Mac OS X 10.7 is support for multi-touch gestures, full-screen applications, a new Mission Control view, full integration with the Mac App Store, a new launcher called Launchpad, improved suspend-and-resume support, a new Mail application, a new feature called AirDrop for locally sharing files via wireless but without using WiFi, and much more. The Mac OS X Lion Server has also seen its share of improvements.

Today's official release of Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" is being mentioned on Phoronix as also a notice that our final benchmarks of this new Apple OS will be coming in a matter of days. Soon as the official release is done downloading, there's three systems that will be used (two Mac Minis and a Mac Book Pro; it's all the Apple hardware that's available) for a fresh round of automated tests via the Phoronix Test Suite. Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad and 3.4-Lillesand already offer full support for Mac OS X Lion to benchmark.

We have already delivered some early benchmarks of Mac OS X 10.7. Look for more in the coming days.