The Lion has been released. On Wednesday, Apple began selling its newest operating system, Mac OS X Lion. The company said the newest incarnation of Mac OS X -- the eighth major release -- has more than 250 new features.
Those new features include multi-touch gestures, support for full-screen apps across the system, an overview of all activity through Mission Control, a new home base for apps called Launchpad, and a newly designed Mail.
Resume, Auto Save, AirDrop
Other features include Resume, which restores apps to their previous state after a user restarts the machine 
or quits and relaunches an app. Auto Save automatically saves documents, and Versions automatically records document history, giving the user access to previous versions. With AirDrop, nearby Macs are automatically set up for peer-to-peer connectivity and file transfers.
Lion is available as an upgrade from Mac OS X 10.6.6 Snow Leopard for $29.99, and it occupies about 4GB. It requires an Intel -based Mac with a Core 2 Duo, i3, i5, i7 or Xeon processor, and 2GB of RAM.
Apple is also releasing a new MacBook Air in 11- and 13-inch models, with the newest Core i5 and i7 dual-core processors that double the speed of the previous generation. The new Air also has a backlit keyboard, a glass multi-touch trackpad, and the new high-speed Thunderbolt I/O technology.
Thunderbolt allows connections to high-performance peripherals, including displays, through a single cable. Adapters allow connections to FireWire and gigabit Ethernet peripherals.
'A Major Advance'
Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, said that, even though he doesn't consider himself a "Mac person," the MacBook Air has become his "favorite computer on the market." In fact, he said, the MacBook Air is becoming so popular that Apple is beginning to remove other MacBooks in its product lineup, such as the $999 model with plastic casing.
He described Lion as "a major advance" in Apple's operating system, in large part because of the changes in the interface and support for gestural interaction. Lion, Greengart added, "removes the idea of having a lot of windows pile up on the screen," and he said the interface changes are "for the better."
There has been a fair amount of discussion as to whether tablet interfaces are influencing traditional computers. Greengart said Lion "does not feel overtly tablet-like to me," although he noted that the upcoming Windows 8 has more of a tablet flavor.
In addition to Lion and the MacBook Air, Apple is releasing the first display with Thunderbolt I/O technology. The new 27-inch display is designed specifically for Mac notebooks, comes in an aluminum-and-glass enclosure, and has ports for a FaceTime camera, audio, gigabit Ethernet, FireWire 800, and USB 2.0. The company also released an updated Mac Mini with new Intel core processors, new discrete graphics, Thunderbolt and Lion.
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