How do I update my software from OS X 10.6.8 to lion?

Lion or Mountain Lion?

What year is your Macbook and how much RAM and Hard Drive space do you have?

Do you also meet the system requirements? See below:

OS X Lion system requirements

To use Lion, make sure your computer has the following:

• An Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor
• Mac OS X v10.6.6 or later to install via the Mac App Store (v10.6.8 recommended); you can install without Mac OS X v10.6 by using an OS X Lion USB Thumb Drive, available on the Apple Online Store
• 7 GB of available disk space
• 2 GB of RAM

If your Mac does not meet these requirements, you will need to upgrade your Mac before installing Lion.

OS X Mountain Lion system requirements

To install Mountain Lion, you need one of these Macs:

• iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook (Late 2008 Aluminum, or Early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or newer)
• Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

Your Mac needs:

• OS X v10.6.8 or OS X Lion already installed
• 2 GB or more of memory
• 8 GB or more of available space

Once you are at 10.6.8 Lion is still available from Apple. You will have to call Apple Customer Care 1-800-692-7753 or 1-800-676-2775. to purchase it. Then within 3 days you will get an email with a code which you can use to download Lion from the App Store. The price is $19.99.

You must have at least a Late 2006 model 2,1 MacBook. Lion will require at least 2gb of RAM but really needs 4gb to run smoothly.

As for third party programs see this list for compatibility with 10.7 http://roaringapps.com/apps:table

Also Lion doesn't run any Power PC programs. To see if you have any Power PC programs go to the Apple in the upper left corner and select About This Mac, then click on More Info. When System Profiler comes up select Applications under Software. Then look under Kind to see if any of your applications are listed as Power PC. Universal and Intel will run under Lion.

Before Mac switched to Intel processors in 2006 they used Power PC processors from 1994 to 2005. Power PC 601 through 604, G3, G4 and G5. Applications written for the Power PC processors need the application called Rosetta to run on Intel processors. This was part of the Operating System in 10.4 and 10.5 but was an optional install in 10.6. With 10.7 Lion Apple dropped all support for Power PC applications.