I have leopard and want to upgrade to lion. I have a macbook about 3 years old and wonder if I should just get a new macbook pro ($$$) instead. Is it worth the headache to upgrade to snow leopard and then lion? How does lion perform on an intel core duo 2

I have Lion installed on a Mini with a C2D processor. The same Mini has Snow Leopard on another partition and there is no noticeable difference in operational speed between the two OS's. But compared to my new MBPro 17" with a 2.83GHz i7, the Mini running Lion is noticeably slower. So if you can afford anew MBPro, then I would get it because you will probably be unhappy with the performance of Lion on the older MBPro. The other benefit of getting a new MBPro with Lion is that if you have any Power PC applications currently on the old MBPro, which will not operate in Lion, then you still have the ability to use them. Many users got stung by upgrading to Lion, only to find they could no longer use the older PPC applications.

cas55 wrote:

How does lion perform on an intel core 2 duo processor?

I ran just fine on my 2007 MacBook.

Last year's MBA's are Core2Duo. Runs fine.

Yes, worth a $60 upgrade

My 4.1 macbook runs well. My restart time increased from 45 seconds to 65 seconds. But once lion is opened programs are opening and running faster. For example I use handbrake alot and when i was on snow leopard i could encode at an average rate of 35 to 40 frames per second. Under lion it is encoding at 45 to 55 frames per second.